Fueling with dangerous levels of testosterone, operating and misfiring without a certified manual, its only permit was initiated by the defective. Watch as this son of a bitch runs for a few minutes, leaking its foreign oil. It drags itself and shows up between the gaps. It leaks on other machines and into the next sector. While it may seem like there is no structure, the production takes pleasure in its function: generating unmarked hair, damaging muscle fibers, deepening its bass, and, of course, fucking. This once clumsy and unaware machine adapted into an excessive, self-absorbed, aggressive entity.

 

Destruction and despair are no longer just consequences; they are now the primary focus in our built environment. They are anticipated features of design. They are read in the distance like weather warnings, born from social and political constructs, cultural pressures, and the decay of material ritual. This text is not interested in resolving questions of masculinity. It focuses instead on the manifestation of men as static objects, exploited through images that resist movement, that withhold the possibility of becoming.

 

As long as I can remember, the expectations of being a man have been waiting for me. Not taught, but assumed. I was expected to carry myself in the traditional alpha male posture through nothing more than mimicry. I mirrored the men around me. The body became a site of compensation. Draped in oversized clothing, hiding not only shape but intention. Muted colors, dull patterns, all designed to distract attention, to reject ornament, to signal containment. To be unbathed was not neglect, but performance. To make a mess was not carelessness, but a cultural script. I learned that masculinity was not inherent. It was installed. I was manipulated, and not by a single hand. I was shaped by the physical space around me and the male objects that also inhabited it.

 

The air thickens when masculinity enters. Brutal. Phallic. Austere. Rooms adjust. Bodies contract then quickly expand. Some bow to this presence. Others resist with a soft touch and gentle gestures. Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but even the eye has been trained to see these drastic design composites as an extension of our language on masculinity.

 

The body, like architecture, is a system of codes. Shaped and standardized, built to conceal or project. Masculine architecture presents itself through different scales of dominance, angularity, and height. The skyscraper, the fortress, the phallus in concrete form. Its symbolism is not subtle. It celebrates rigidity, permanence, and control. It reinforces the mythology of power.

 

In contrast, feminine architecture has been dismissed or diminished because it favors what cannot be measured in meters: softness, curvature, integration, and openness. This architecture refuses the monolith. It bends. It adapts. It breathes with its surroundings. It does not conquer the spatial qualities and its objects. It coexists with it. This distinction is not neutral. It reflects a long-standing binary imposed on space and form, on body and identity.

 

Architecture has always had a gendered language. The masculine imperative to dominate is etched into blueprints, echoed in every violent act of forcing graphite onto a piece of paper, every glass tower built to stare down its neighbors. Yet this is not only a question of aesthetics. It is behavioral. These spaces teach us how to move, how to stand, how to act. They train boys to become men in the same way locker rooms do: through surveillance, silence, and shame.

 

Joel Sanders’ Stud: Architectures of Masculinity dismantles this system from within. It exposes how even the most inert surfaces are encoded with sexual politics. How the gym, the office, and the bachelor pad become stages for masculine identity. The design of these spaces rewards hardness and rejects fluidity. Furniture choices, materials, lighting, and even sound are all designed to reinforce the fantasy of control. This fantasy is not benign. It disables tenderness. It chokes vulnerability. It creates men who do not know how to sit in their own bodies unless they are performing ownership.

 

But what happens when the machine rejects the code? What happens when the body bends out of line, leaks outside its boundaries, or softens in protest?

 

What emerges is something incomplete, something honest, something in-process. An architecture of failure. A masculinity that does not know itself. This is not a glitch. It is a site of potential. Refusing the spaces for what they are supposed to be becomes an act of liberation. To reclaim mess, reclaim space, reclaim sexual identity, to reclaim architecture.

 

Masculinity is not about perfection, and it’s not about being binary. It is, however, about process and choreographing masculinity to be something new, unfinished, unshaped, and letting it die.