Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote, "Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up, they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, because they're abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by the humane sense of proportion.” This tendency is often associated with hypermasculinity, or calcified standards of manhood. So, boys often look to the heroic men of their surrounding culture to infer what’s expected of them.

While idealized criteria in themselves aren’t necessarily harmful, the fixation on them can be. Perfectionism is the belief that to be considered something, one has to be its best representative, meeting all of the available criteria. So, for example, to be smart, a student may believe they need to have a perfect grade point average. The underlying feeling is: If you aren’t the best, then you’re the worst. Therefore, a boy may erroneously come to believe that a man embodies not only specific values but every possible manifestation of them, always. He may think, “If I’m courageous, then I should be able to stand up for myself, stand up for others, know how to fight, know how to argue, and dominate in every way possible.” Here, the core value of courage is wrapped up in all-or-nothing thinking, where one limitation casts doubt on........

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