UK artist Sir Grayson Perry with his custom Harley—a meditation on masculinity and vulnerability embodied in one person.

Reframing Masculinity Through Creativity

What happens when the very tools meant to build bridges—music, theater, literature, visual art—are seen not as lifelines, but as threats?

For many men shaped by a tradition rooted in stoicism, hierarchy, and moral certainties, creative expression doesn’t feel like sanctuary. It feels like judgment.

In a cultural moment marked by alienation, grievance, and suspicion, how might the arts still speak, especially when speaking too directly risks shutting the door?

Let’s begin with the roots of that suspicion.

Why Masculinity Feels Cornered

There’s a reason many men (especially those steeped in white Christian or conservative traditions) are wary of the arts.

Creative spaces are often seen as elite, subversive, or effeminate. Worse, they are viewed as arenas where men have already been judged and found guilty.

But that suspicion masks something deeper: grief, fear, longing. A sense of losing place, meaning, voice.

The Quiet Power of Indirect Art

And yet, art finds a way.

Music doesn’t have to explain itself to be understood. A photograph doesn’t need permission to be felt.

Even in spaces of tension, the arts can offer what argument never will: tenderness without weakness, mirrors without accusation.

Think of singer-songwriter and guitarist Bruce Springsteen’s weary fathers. Or country singer and songwriter Tyler Childers’ conflicted believers. Or filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” telling a cowboy’s story not with judgment but grace.

These works don’t confront. They witness.

How Artists Can Make Room

Here’s where creators and cultural organizations come in:

• Frame the question differently. Instead of dismantling identity, ask what parts of it are in pain. “What were you never allowed to feel?” goes further than “What’s wrong with you?”
• Build trust in unexpected places. Collaborate with veterans’ groups, rural libraries, church choirs. Don’t just bring the art to the people, listen for where art is already hiding in plain sight.
• Show contradiction, not resolution. Invite audiences to sit in discomfort. Offer echoes instead of answers.

The work isn’t easy. The arts can’t magically solve rage or rewrite identity. But they can carve out space … for grief, for complexity, for a new story about what strength might look like.

If you’re an artist, educator, or cultural worker, consider this your invitation: curate one exhibit, one song, one classroom moment that doesn’t ask men to smother their story but invites them to rewrite it.

Let’s build creative sanctuaries not to fix, but to witness. Because, sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is offer a mirror that doesn’t distort.

This piece builds on two earlier explorations of belonging through the arts: “Art, Identity, and the Search for Belonging“ “Belonging and Exclusion: How the Arts Shape Our Place in the World“ See also our June 23, 2025 blog post: “Erasing the Mirror: Masculinity, War and the Destruction of Meaning“