On any given day, the sculpted faces of men known for their athleticism or physical prowess smile, stare, or sulk handsomely at us from our magazine pages, television screens, and computer monitors. Men recognized publicly for their empathic or aesthetic sensibilities are fewer in number. Fewest of all, however, are guys in the public eye who 
are featured for their compelling physicality and aesthetic sensibilities at the same time.
Michael Madsen, an actor perhaps best known for portraying the blood-soaked villain in Kill Bill Volume 2, steps up nicely, though. Interviewed in Men’s Health, this father of five boys and author of two books of poetry had this to say about balancing the “tough” and the “tender” in his life:
“My mother gave me culture. She encouraged me to be a sculptor and to read. And from my dad I got, “Ya gotta be the toughest son of a gun on the street.” So I had this bizarre duality. I encourage my boys to do stuff in the arts, but I’m also a big advocate of not taking any sh—. I have a heavy bag [at my house in Montana], and every morning the boys go three 3-minute rounds on the heavy bag with the gloves.”
For too many guys, though, these two ideals—tough and tender—are treated as if magnets of the same pole, forever estranged by their mutually repulsing forces. Men can be one or the other, but never both. Think of the anxiety surrounding guys getting married or becoming fathers, and all that’s made of having over-the-top bachelor parties and last hurrahs. It’s as if men are preparing to leave behind the richest and most emblematic experiences of malehood.
But where exactly is this conflict between tough and tender? Maybe nowhere, really. Maybe it’s just an artifact of how we think about men and who they are and how they think and feel—a self-fulfilling prophecy with disabling consequences.
I’ve known mothers to worry about how they were going to raise their sons lovingly while also preparing them to succeed in a rough-and-tumble male culture. Here again we run headlong into this same supposed conflict—being brought up with devotion and affection (the tender) and being taught the skills believed necessary to succeed in a competitive and often unforgiving, aggressive culture.
Loving children fiercely and boundlessly will not make boys soft. It will make them secure. And if boys need anything to make it in this world, it is security. I once knew of a father who would make his infant crawl across the room to get to his bottle. He believed that he was helping his young son to be prepared for what he described as a “tough world out there.” It’s reminiscent of the northern Pakistani Pakhtun proverb cited by David D. Gilmore in his book Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity: “The eye of the dove is lovely, my son, but the sky is made for the hawk. So cover your dovelike eyes and grow claws.”
There are places in the world and in our neighborhoods that require high levels of vigilance, a cool exterior, and an ability to hurt or even kill somebody in order to defend your own life or the lives of loved ones. But what happens outside the home is different from what can be allowed to happen inside a home; boys whose caretakers withhold what they instinctively seek and need become angry, resentful men. Yes, they can fight, but they may not be able to easily love.