The Cult of the Rugged Man

Monday, September 7, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! It’s no secret that America likes its cowboys. These mythical men who go off to lonely places where they interact only with a few other people, several working dogs, and whatever livestock are under their care. We romanticize their solitude, longing ourselves for those rare moments of silence in our noise-driven lives. Around them we’ve constructed ideals rooted less in reality than in our perception of how we too might achieve what they have. It’s the same tendency humans have to look at the aging edifices of factories and warehouses and momentarily imagine ourselves going off to work in those same buildings. Many of us wouldn’t last a single shift in those conditions.

These images and the impossibility of their fruition are multiplied on a day like today, Labor Day. Today is meant to celebrate the common worker, the people who literally built and continue to build our world. Yet, some of those workers continue to work today, exempted by loopholes, promises with management, or wholesale discounting (puns intended) of their rights by companies who know their workers either won’t know the difference or are too scared to complain. Into this scene we drop the ideal of the masculine man. The tough, rugged provider who works with his hands and earns a wage by the sweat of his brow. The kind of men and the kind of work that each generation claims the next several generations know nothing about. “Those darn kids,” the complaint begins, “they don’t know the first thing about hard work.”

I confess that I’m a prime target for such a complaint. While life was hardly handed to me on a silver platter, I’ve never worked a single day outside. My first job working at the campus bookstore at Sewanee was in an air-conditioned building. With the exception of yearly college move-ins when I worked in higher education and tabling for Pride Month now with LOVEboldly, I know nothing about the rugged ideal of masculinity, save being attracted to it.

Yet, the closer one looks at the cult of the rugged man, the more one sees cracks in its tanned, blistered façade. The bulk of what we celebrate as the ideal of rugged American manhood is divorced from the people and ways in which people actually work and live. Those possessing the requisite imagination can create a romantic picture out of any situation. But as with any romantic portrayal, there are obvious tensions with reality. For the myth of the rugged man, it was never built to honor work in any form. It was about borrowing the visual authority of work, its calluses, its sweat, its association with toughness and self-sufficiency, while stripping out everything that makes that labor hard: the low wages, the lack of choice, the exhaustion that isn’t captured in black-and-white. And then there are the workers themselves: disproportionately poor, disproportionately immigrants, and disproportionately people the cultists of the “rugged man” are all too ready to toss aside.

Growing up in Southeastern Ohio, every fall and winter hunters would descend upon our woods. Many came for the sport which they knew and enjoyed. Some hunted their own woods for the food that sustained their families through the winter. A small number came from Ohio’s larger cities where, if they shot their rifles at all, they did so under the controlled conditions of gun ranges. When they arrived in Guernsey, Noble, Monroe, Athens, and other counties near my home they came prepared for a weekend of exhibiting their “rugged” masculinity by “bagging a deer.” They often experienced more time in the local emergency room or police station having shot each other, shot themselves, or recklessly fired near homes and families with no regard for others’ lives.

Once again patriarchy enforces its standards on men to be “rugged” when they’re not. The same forces which have dressed in football jerseys or power suits, donned orange and camouflage, picked up a gun, and didn’t stop to consider the problems.

Where has an image of “rugged” masculinity distracted you from the actual people or actual labor that image was built on?

Let us pray: God who worked with your own hands and called that work good, forgive us for turning labor into a costume and workers into a hollow ideal. Open our eyes to the people whose sweat and exhaustion so rarely make it into the photos we celebrate. Teach us to honor the calluses themselves and not just their aesthetic. Grant us the humility to know the difference between looking rugged and doing the work. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

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