The M word

Say the word “macho” out loud. Doesn’t it sound like a verbal arm curl? It has a very simple etymology, deriving from the Spanish for “male”, which goes some way towards explaining why the two concepts have tangled historically. Our present age is witnessing a proliferation of macho. It used to be confined to the silver screen: we could indulge our fantasy for confident men who Put Things Right in small, contained doses. They were appropriately cartoonish supermen, the run of lip-curling, gun-toting Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Snipeses who biffed and pow-ed and garrotted and cathartically stabbed their way through the problems of the world.

You wouldn’t have thought, would you, that all that symbolic swashbuckling would leach from the celluloid into the groundwater of real-world affairs. But, at present, a worrying number of important decisions are being made by a cast of swaggering macho men. Twenty years ago, people rightly made fun of British prime minister Tony Blair for copying the John Wayne mannerisms of his US counterpart. With hindsight, it seems that we ought to have intervened before they multiplied and crowded out every other way of being.

Whenever society threatens to wobble on its axis, someone pops up to remind us that we need strong men. This point of view is a faulty one. Nevertheless, we’re hard-coded by all those pack-animal social metaphors the world forces on us from an early age: the banal chest-beating stuff about men being leaders and warriors.

Our society is one that mythologises a certain brand of manliness. If you could personify it, it would be a cheery, square-jawed MMA fighter with dodgy politics and a braai stand built into the back of its raised bakkie. It would wear quasi-retro shirts and listen exclusively to obnoxious podcasts hosted by indistinguishably shouty men. It would — unnecessarily — jog bare-chested in the middle of the day while discussing its cortisol management loudly and protruding into your personal space. It would go to church and drink like a sailor and see little contradiction between these things.

There’s always a couple of Macho Men at every social gathering. They’re the ones standing around the fire, grunting about how much wood their wood guy dropped off the other day, and why kameeldoring is so much better than whatever is burning away quite competently in front of them. Or they’re the ones standing about with a bicep-straining grip on their beer, talking in surprisingly predictable ways about how they would know how to fix Joburg if they were mayor.

A solo Macho Man will automatically gravitate towards the centre of the social space, holding forth before long to an audience of seemingly captivated onlookers. Should you join this group, you will discover too late that what you thought was a vibrant discussion is actually a conversational black hole. Mr Macho is an expert in everything, including that thing you enjoy. Should you assert an opinion on something, Mr Macho is happy to assure you of your fundamental wrongness. Mr Macho specialises in the story with no story arc, the narrative with no natural end.

I try to avoid Mr Macho if at all possible. Recently, however, I found myself next to him at a friend’s housewarming. I approached the scene with the wariness experience has gifted me whenever I see a man talking at (not with) someone else. Some people do not recognise Mr Macho, and so end up ensnared in his social manspreading. The signs are easy to spot:  the wide-legged stance and big gestures, the pummelling Listen-To-Me vocal energy. True to my suspicions, words were spilling from this man about the benefits of his protein-only diet. The target of this stream of non-consciousness turned a pleadingly helpless smile on me. Mr Macho didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that she had given up trying to get a word in edgeways.

Instead, I felt him priming for combat in the way that some men do when another man approaches. He sized me up with a couple of questions meant to draw out my particular interests. I ventured, perhaps unwisely, that I like cars. What I mean by that is that I like the culture of driving, how cars fit into our social and historical world. What he heard was an opportunity to display what he stood for.

“What do you think of Jaguar going woke?” 

His question glinted on the grass between us like an open beartrap. I felt myself in danger: people who ask aggressive questions about wokeness are not psychologically capable of understanding the answer you give them. His excitement positively glowing, Mr Macho was gearing up for a jousting match. If you find yourself in this situation, do not respond to the provocation. It only encourages Mr Macho to waste your time.

“I don’t think about it,” I said. This short-circuited Mr Macho, who huffed and left to go and instruct someone’s husband on how a steak should be braaied. Machismo thrives on attention and, if you deny it that, it doesn’t know what to do with itself.

We shouldn’t have to live like this. It feels like the past two decades have been a tedious rebuttal of soft masculinity, a trend which was just someone noticing that some men liked skincare and nice shirts. Since then, Mr Macho and the many pale aspirants using their wealth to replicate machismo have done their best to make things wretched for us all. There’s no easy way to get away from the ones who’re busy denying real genocides or creating fake ones, but you can start by ignoring the next Macho Man you encounter — you’ll feel better in the morning.

From the June edition of Wanted, 2025