How do we define the question, "What makes a man?" and why are we compelled to define the term at all? Modern perceptions of masculinity, despite the sense of naturalness and constancy with which we view them, are in fact the idealized cultural products of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this pathbreaking history of manhood and masculinity, Angus McLaren convincingly defends this assertion, and cogently examines how society selected, delineated, and maintained an accepted traditional model of the heterosexual male.

The gender debate is heated and ongoing, but this is the first book to examine how our preferred vision of masculinity was developed historically by default - through establishing definitions of deviance. In this elegant work of uncommon authority and insight, Angus McLaren successfully challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about the origin of gender and compels us to reassess our ideas about sexual boundaries and the essential limits of the masculine.