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Not to brag, but I got married a few years ago.

The ceremony went about as well as I could have hoped. No hitches were visible to the guests, beyond the metaphorical one where we parroted the officiant. A nine-piece soul band ushered my wife and me into matrimony by playing Smokey Robinson in a desacralized church. There was bread pudding. 10/10, no notes. If I hold one negative feeling toward the whole process, it comes from the local jewelry store, where I was introduced, against my will, to the pitiful state of men’s wedding bands.

You’ll know you’ve reached the men’s section of a jewelry store when the cases get smaller and materials like obsidian, meteorite chunks and whiskey-barrel oak start to crowd out the gold, silver and diamonds. The typical band is too close to jewelry, the thinking goes, and jewelry is for girls. If declaring your love in front of friends and family makes you feel emasculated, you can easily buy back some butch by dropping a bit more on an intentionally ugly adornment sourced from the unsold products in Father’s Day gift guides.

Of course, gold looks good on everybody. And any person who thinks plain gold can’t look masculine has never seen James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos.” Their opinion on matters of style should be discarded. But lately, it seems like the United States is overflowing with these tasteless herbs. Guys who think there’s a price point to being a better man have infiltrated the highest levels of our government.

Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This walking whiskey stone lifts his speeches directly from presidents in Michael Bay movies. He thinks patriotism means wearing an American flag as the lining of your suit. He genuinely seems to believe that wars aren’t won through strategy and planning, but through sheer dumb strength and virility. To that end, he’s kicked off a program to pump American soldiers with testosterone. On Wednesday, he bragged about his plan for a “high-T Department of War,” grinning like an eight-year-old whose GI Joes had just won the Battle of the Living Room Floor.

I know I’m not the target audience for this hoo-rah schtick. When Dana White hops down off his booster seat to say that only true patriots drive Ram trucks, it’s clear the ad isn’t aimed at editors of progressive news outlets. I have hair past my shoulders. The suit I wore to the aforementioned wedding had hummingbirds embroidered on the back – a reference to a moment in my wife's memoir. My main form of transportation has two wheels. But I am still a man, and therefore feel I should have some say in what masculinity is. And, more importantly, what it isn’t.

It’s not something you can buy, that’s for sure. Testosterone shots and rings with tungsten inlays aren’t shortcuts to being a better man. As a recent Salon piece on Lionel Messi’s model masculinity put it, “real masculinity is proven in the work, in the results.”

Anyone looking for a shortcut from a shop or a syringe is lost.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

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