I ask because I do not know. Do you? Bonus points for sincere answers.

Below are responses from some friends I’ve already asked.

• I dunno, but all that hot fur makes you manly.
• The ability to express his feelings. I know, corny stock answer but what good is a man if he can't tell you ?
• It's not his physical manhood or if he can wield a chainsaw. A real man lives up to his obligations, whether he wants to or not.
• A 'Y' chromosome, accepting responsibility for his deeds, and protecting those weaker than he. That's a start...
• I vote for fur too.
• Confidence, compassion, honesty, humility, courage, independence, accountability.
• Team Fur!
• Being able to recognize your flaws and do something positive about them.
• Offering points for a sincere answer is kinda hot and furry in itself!
• It's like porn; I cant' define it, but I know it when I see it. There's one in that picture up there. Woof.
• The capability to be brutal but the choice to be kind; congratulating the winner and consoling the loser; fighting for his cause and acknowledging it when he's been wrong; realizing that a man defines himself and that another is not less manly for making different choices.

Behind the counter the clerk, with a grin, conveyed to the son that he knew he was too young to be here, but would not eject him. The son could smell it, warm and pungent, coming from the back room. Often he made it, covered his fingers in it, fed himself. He believed he was the only son in the world who did it. Covers on the racks tugged at him. Turning pages and smelling the back room got him hard. Nothing to do but watch him, that clerk. On the pages men were older, hairier, sweaty, a profoundly stereotypical representation of that which has so often been considered masculine. Mustache or beard and muscles dressed as cop, fireman, construction worker, biker on an old dusty Indian. What he lacked, distilled: strength, confidence, authority. What constitutes authority? He heard groans in the back room – hunger, acquiescence. Authority would be someone else feeding him. At the counter with his father’s credit card he bought magazines. The clerk sneered, slid them into a black plastic bag, Enjoy. On the freeway he drove home, gut sour with fear. Out the window was flatness, corn, condos, soy, fields fallow in weak moonlight. Home in his room behind the locked door he sat on the floor by his bed, looking, looking. They fucked on the motorcycle, in the cop car, sucked cock at the construction site and on the ranch, in a cement basement they cuffed him to a radiator and fed him at both ends. On their faces he saw want, want, want, want, muscles tight or teeth clenched or head thrown back or eyes half-closed, this was what pushed him (eyes half-closed) without warning and heart pounding, shoving him over the edge. Against simple physical tension – tautness in the crotch of jeans – he spurted. He had not been fed. Years from now a professor would read one of his stories and jot a comment, in the margin of the page, asking, At this point in the narrative has the topic of sex not become somewhat monotonous? How could he argue with her? She was not entirely incorrect. What should not have mattered, so long ago (there on the floor), mattered; that which should no longer matter (flung far from that moment on the floor), somehow mattered, still. At forty-four the son would meet men in their twenties who were already accustomed to themselves, were unashamed, admirably rational. They would flirt with him easily and often call him Daddy, because he was older, after all, wasn’t he? He saw it in their eyes, how they saw him. He wore authority. He was on the Indian, at the construction site, on the ranch in the bed of the pick-up truck, he was kneeling beside that rusted basement radiator, they thought, feeding someone. He was yet hungry. Does it not make him a fraud?