Men, and Laura Thatcher Ulrich's essay, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, discuss the typical standards for how men and women are expected to act and how both genders tend to veer from them. Gender identity is the physical and behavioral traits that are designated by a culture as masculine or feminine. Berry gives prime examples of how males are expected to act and how these standards are not exactly met. On the other hand, Ulrich talks about how women's expectations on how to act and how that rarely puts them in history. Male and female genders both are expected by their culture to act a certain way but most cannot uphold these expectations.
Throughout history, men have been molded to fit the macho manly man image American society thinks of when thinking of the perfect male figure. In this current time, the variety of different types of men has expanded greatly. Barry explains the stupid behavioral patterns and the masculine characteristics that are linked to being a manly man and how not all males can be expected to uphold these characteristics (915). This is showing that in this current generation there is more of a variety to how males should be and that in reality very few men actually are this way. They now are able to be what they choose to be and not what society thinks they should be. Barry talks about there being a in between of being the macho manly man and being quite the opposite. He refers to this in between as just being a "guy" (915). Being a guy signifies that as a male one does not have to choose one of the two extreme personalities of macho man or sensitive feminine man but rather have the best of both worlds. This indicates that each individual male has the choice of what characteristics from either one to choose and create his own individual definition of what he should be as a man. Men can now be who they want to be without worrying about what they are expected to be.