Testosterone Poisoning

PETA is gonna go bananas over this.

"Now with PREPOSTEROUS AMOUNTS OF TESTOSTERONE! PREPOSTERONE!"

— Powerthirst 2 mock-commercial

This trope is in play when a work or character is loaded with such absurd/extreme examples of "masculine" stereotypes that you pass into parody. It is, simply, badass made silly.

Works with testosterone poisoning are often intentional parodies; characters can contract it accidentally far more easily.

While the trope Rated M for Manly employs many motifs, it is first and foremost a celebratory trope played straight: Testosterone Poisoning is about works that parody manliness, or play it for laughs, by taking it to the extreme.

Some works which start out as Rated M for Manly can cross over into Testosterone Poisoning territory later; two fairly reliable indicators that it's got a case of Testosterone Poisoning are the presence of the phrase "Are you man enough for...", or something in a similar vein; and a direct statement that the product or work is "not for women".

The Darwin Awards website uses the term to describe people who died attempting to pull off absurdly masculine stunts — the sort of things that would end up on this trope page. It was even used in the title for one death where a man lopped his own head off with a chainsaw in an attempt to "prove" to his friend that he was tougher.

Compare with

• Rated M for Manly: where appeal to masculinity doesn't reach parody stages
• Memetic Badass: where the masculine aspects have reached memetic standards, whether or not they really exist.
• Awesomeness Is Volatile
• Impossible Genius, when it's a character's intelligence rather than their manliness that enables them to do absurd things.
• The Real Man: One of the tabletop gaming Player Archetypes; can be prone to this trope.

Not to be confused with the actual act of putting oneself in harm's way to prove one's manliness: that one is covered by Macho Masochism (although overlap is common).

The phrase was possibly coined by Alan Alda for a book on feminism, and popularized in 1984 by Dr. Helen Caldicott, a physician strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. In her book Missile Envy, she speculates that the arms race is partly fueled by this.

See also Macho Latino.

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Examples

Advertising

• The Miller Lite "Man Law" commercials.
• A Foster's Beer "How to speak Australian" commercial crosses into this territory (crossed with Land Down Under): It shows a rugged man in the outback wrap up a bunch of power tools, regular tools, etc. in a leather skin, tie it around a huge wrench, heft it onto his shoulder and walk badassly into the sunset. The word was "man purse." It's followed by a can of Foster's being dramatically slammed onto a table, with the voice announcing "Beer."
  • They're all like that. Giant man-eating shark: "Guppy." Can of Fosters: *Thoom!* "Beer."
  • Huge steak with a sprig of parsley on it: "Salad."
  • Headbutting a door in: "Locksmith."
  • Though they're not all positive. One commercial had a man attempting to twist his body so he could fit into an already-overloaded truck: "Yoga".
  • Being crushed under a massive rock and saying "Ouch" very quietly: "Crybaby."
  • Being chased by some ferocious predator? Tourist.
  • A man goes flying out a barroom door, followed by a woman, who is implied to have been the one to throw him: "No." In Australia, even the women are manly!
• He's hungry for danger, he can take the heat! Fully Loaded Man has balls of meat! And yes, that's a real ad. Made even manlier by the fact that it was filmed down river from a grade five rapid, on the Kawarau River, in Queenstown New Zealand.
• You've gotta work it hard to be a Solo Man.
  • It's a proud tradition that lives on today (skip to 1:30 if you want to avoid the buildup).
• This one for the Ford Courier
• Arrogant Bastard Ale is a beer all about aggression, and is definitely not for prissy, fizzy, yellow piss drinkers. Like you... unless you're a bastard enough to drink it. There used to be a comments section, and complaints weren't tolerated - because if you complained, then you aren't a bastard enough to drink this beer.
• Commercials for the Motorola Droid smartphone emphasize its amazingly manly design and function, particularly in comparison to the metrosexual-friendly iPhone and downright girly Palm Pre.
• Burger King: I am man, hear me ROAR!
• Jack Link's Eat Like An Alpha commercials.
• Have you been cheese nachos ? Well then...
• Spoof advert done by the Australian team The Chaser, hawking Sandy dunny paper. Made from two-ply sandpaper, with a strip of velcro for added traction. And Sandy with chilli oil...
  It's the roughest wipe in Australia!
• This Old Spice commercial.
  (Skiing off a jump) "I'm a Man." (Crashes through a tree, suddenly pumping a barbell one-handed on an exercise bench) But sometimes I like to smell like a different smelling man." (crashes into a house, walks out with a new outfit, a badass moustache, and a golf club) "Luckily, Old Spice makes a variety of different scents." (Drives a golf ball one-handed and proceeds to bite off a chunk of the golf club and eat it) "For men."
  • Old Spice commercials in general are this which is to be expected when you have spokesmen like Bruce Campbell.
  • The Man Your Man Could Smell Like., though that's littered with Mr. Fanservice.
  • Testosterone levels continue to rise with the new series of YouTube responses to people complimenting and asking questions of the Old Spice Man. Monocle Smile!
  • The commercials with Terry Crews.
  • "ODOR BLOCKER BODY WASH IS TOO POWERFUL TO LET THIS COMMERCIAL END!"
  • Have you ever actually read the copy on the back of a stick of Old Spice?
  CONTAINS ODOR-FIGHTING "ATOMIC ROBOTS" THAT "SHOOT LASERS" AT YOUR "STENCH MONSTERS" AND REPLACES THEM WITH FRESH, CLEAN, MASCULINE "SCENT ELVES."
• SEGATA SANSHIRO. Never has so much preposterone been contained inside an advertising mascot.
  • If you didn't play Sega Saturn he would throw you so hard you would explode on contact. Twice.
  • "He died for our sins." (said (In Japanese) in one commercial)
• Snickers ads featuring Mr. T. Get some nuts!
• Michelin brand deodorant features statements like "If your ratio of lighter fluid to charcoal is three to one, you might be a Michelin Man."
• Most Utilikilt mockumercials, combined with All Women Are Lustful. Real men wear kilts.
• This commercial for the high-performance version of the Skoda Fabia. Made of MEANER stuff!
• Energy drinks. Like are Venom: Death Adder, which claims to be "the cold-blooded venom of the Death Adder, delivered in a fruit punch strike," and the Monster coffee energy drinks, which are "coffee done the Monster way, straight up, with a take no prisoners attitude and the experience and know-how to back it up."
• Many extra hot sauces use this as their marketing pitch; they convey the dubious message that you need to be extremely manly to eat that stuff and come out okay. For example, Blair's Sauces and Snacks, whose slogan is "Don't fear death, fear the consequences," has a product line named Death Sauce. Some other extreme hot sauces by various vendors have names like Demon Ichor, Pyro Diablo, Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally, Mega Death, Magma, Vicious Viper, You Can't Handle This Hot Sauce, Rectal Rocket Fuel, Ass In Space ("Ass-tronomically Hot!"), etc.
• BEAR SEMEN: THE MANLIEST DRINK ON EARTH
• The commercials for Brut products. To name one example, the mere use of this product instantly impregnates a man's wife, fish, and dog.
• Doctor Pepper 10's wilderness ads show a manly pioneer being so manly, he can whistle and cause an eagle to dive into the lake and get him a Doctor Pepper, can make a bear paddle his canoe for him, and can carry a massive tree trunk under one arm. This was intentionally comedic. In another ad, the characters talk about how manly Doctor Pepper 10 is while escaping from a pastiche of 80's action movie bad guys. Though intended to be funny, it came off as sexist when the manly man said it wasn't a drink for women, as did the text at the end of the commercial.
• The Mammoth Supply Company, a division of New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra, markets its products as "real man food, man".
• The Voteman video was made to get young Danish people to vote at the European Parliament elections
• The ads for the Mexican beer Tecate, which celebrate stereotypical Mexican manliness tropes for kicks.
• Yorkie chocolate bars in Britain. Originally introduced to appeal to adult men who thought chocolate bars were for kids, their early advertising was based around tough truckers. In the early 2000s, they outright used "not for girls" as a tagline.

Anime & Manga

• Fullmetal Alchemist: This trope has been PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG FAMILY LINE FOR GENERATIONS! Perhaps frighteningly so, if you're set up on a date with an Armstrong gal since even the cute younger sister can effortlessly lift pianos with one hand.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo is about a muscular guy with a huge, reality-warping afro who fights with his nose hairs. Couldn't be any manlier than this.
• My Bride is a Mermaid:
  • There're enough Art Shift homages to Fist of the North Star as it is, but what takes the cake is when San pulls this off: sprouting a mustache and beard, eating a raw steak ("You shouldn't even mind eating this way if you are a man! A man should eat meat in the morning!"), telling the male lead and love rival to Stay in the Kitchen ("You women walk three steps behind us men!"), and so forth.
  • Lunar's father is... well... The Terminator.
  • San's father also qualifies, at least in appearance; He's a big, buff, Yakuza head, with giant scars all over his face.
• Kamen no Maid Guy has Kogarashi, the eponymous maid guy, who's so manly that his brain is USB compatible. If you can't communicate with a printer, you aren't a man.
• Naruto:
  • The Raikage, a mixture of the Kool-Aid Man, the Hulk, and a pro-wrestler poured into the mold of a giant ninja. The fact that he is frequently shirtless certainly doesn't hurt. Also his brother, Killer Bee, who not only fits all of the above but also appears to be a refugee from the Wu-Tang Clan. Killer Bee isn't his nickname, it's his actual name. The Raikage's is either Killer A or Killer E, depending on the translation.
  • Might Guy and Rock Lee.
• Elfman from Fairy Tail says anything awesome can only be attributed to being manly! Regardless of whether a person he's telling to be "Be a Man!" is male or female.
• Tomitake from Higurashi: When They Cry at times. To a milder extent, Keiichi, Ooishi and Irie.
• Macross Frontier: Ozma is not an adult, HE IS A MAN!
• Baki the Grappler. Pick a male character, any male character. If you use a dirty trick to slice off his hand, he might just smile, crack a joke, and then punch you in the face with the bone in his stump! That's fairly typical, and not even going near the territory of a monster like Yujiro. If the idea of permanent crippling injury gives you pause, then you have no business being in the ring with these fighters. Yujiro himself is a literal example since his testosterone levels are stated to be so high he considers everyone around him to be a woman (including a large bearded mountain climber) and will rape them both equally.
• The village leader from Haré+Guu is manly complete with manly chest hair...taken to the extreme◊
• One Piece:
  • In a World of Badass, Whitebeard is acknowledged as the single most badass man there is. And he's pretty old, to boot. It says something when a world-wide government that rules over one-hundred nations and has the firepower raze entire islands is utterly terrified of him. Plus, I mean, just look at him! Sadly, he proved Too Cool to Live, but even then he didn't fall!
  • Another example that isn't quite as strong, (we think), is Franky of the Straw Hat Pirates. He wears a speedo, he once led a mob, he looks like this,◊ he just recently fought a guy purely because of manliness, and so on and so forth.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, especially Kamina. Notably, masculinity as a source of Reality Warper powers is literally the crux of the entire plot.
• Black Lagoon tiptoes the line between this and Rated M for Manly. At times, stunts like Revy blowing up 6 pirate ships while jumping absurd distances come across as a parody of balls to the walls action films. Ironic when you consider that a large chunk of the badass manly action in this series is done by women.
• The Cytotoxic "Killer" T Cells of Cells at Work! CODE BLACK are this. They are easily three times as large as the rest of the cells in the body, resemble berserk gorillas when they go into an antigen killing rampage, and their commander sports an impressive beard.
• Cells at Work and Friends!: Most of the humor comes from Killer T's overly masculine outward behavior and the social awkwardness it's trying to mask. It's funny, but also a little sad — Killer T openly admits to himself that he took his drive to become a manly, merciless germ-killer so far that he can't make friends or openly pursue some of his hobbies, but he doesn't feel like he can show a softer side now.
• Kill la Kill: Ira Gamagoori is the strongest of the Elite Four and has a heavy case of Macho Masochism (going so far as having Combat Sadomasochist-themed powers) and Your Size May Vary (sometimes appearing so big that he may as well be a Kaiju).

Comic Books

• SAXTON HALE (in the trope's picture), whose company's motto is "We sell products and get in fights". He bears a suspicious resemblance to a poorly shaven bear, skydives through his office window for his morning commute, has a patch of chest hair in the shape of Australia, and claims that the breakfast steak is the most important steak of the day. See the comic for more manly info. He is also shirtless "for obvious reasons". In-universe, Australia is a hyper-advanced nation of macho man and women due to Australium having the ability to induce Testosterone Poisoning on people to the point that it makes women grow mustaches. It transformed the Engineer's grandfather from a soft-spoken scientist to a shirtless, rugged manly-man with a Carpet of Virility shaped like Texas. Saxton Hale, however, doesn't need Australium. He's just that manly naturally.
• For those that regard Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder as Stealth Parodies of his earlier works, they certainly fit here. His earlier work like Sin City played the excessive manliness straight. No stealth about Lance Blastoff's parody. He takes it out and slaps you round the face with it.
• There is an aside in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac where two of Jhonen's characters meet two exaggerations of '90s Anti-Hero comic characters, one of whom is an absurdly muscle-bound heap named "Schlong". His power would appear to reside entirely in his powers of teeth-gritting and flexing. In fact, when he is x-rayed, his skeleton appears as a spindly splayed doodle floating inside a mountain of meat. He needs to be supported by training wheels to keep from tipping over.
• In V for Vendetta, Alan Moore decided he needed an in-universe Schwarzenneger-like incarnation of the ideals of the Party: He is Macho!!! He is Aryan!!! He is what every woman wants!!! He is STORM SAXON!!! Needless to say, V enjoys its airings utterly, as fascistic camp treats.
• Lobo: Lobo, the Main Man, of course.
• The... erm... "protagonist" of the (in)famous Doom comic book. "WHO'S A MAN AND A HALF? I'M A MAN AND A HALF! A BERSERKER PACKIN' MAN AND A HALF!"
  • The Doom mod "Brutal Doom" is an attempt to bring that interpretation of Doom into the game proper, with over-the-top gore, monster finishing moves that let you literally "rip and tear" weakened foes asunder, and the ability to provoke monsters by flipping them off and swearing at them. However with the increased challenge that it adds over the basic game, it can unironically feel Rated M for Manly as well.
• The Astro City villain Karnazon is a massive, muscle-bound man, a Long-Haired Pretty Boy Walking Shirtless Scene with a Manly Chin. A Foil to the heroine Winged Victory, his goal is to defeat her and assert the inherent superiority of men over women.
  "Accept the inevitable, as a woman should, and surrender!"
• To quote Dirk Anger of Nextwave
  "Every day i smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whiskey and three bottles of wine with dinner.
  And dinner is meat. Raw meat.
  The cook serves me an entire animal and i fight and tear off what i want and eat it and have the rest buried.
  In New Jersey! For H.A.T.E!"

Fan Works

• In Alabaster: The Doomed Session (a Homestuck fancomic), Vamuin, the main character, is introduced as a concentration of strength, epicness and virility. His pseudonym is righteousPornstar and he's surrounded with phallic imagery. It gets extremely ridiculous, extremely quickly.
• The stand-off between alpha troll Detritus and an enraged adult male rhinoceros in Discworld fic Nature Studies is explicitly described as this by a nearby (female) zoologist, who stands back to watch the fight from a professional viewpoint.
  One was a creature which used sheer brute force and power to sweep away any inconvenient obstacles. The other was a very large pachyderm with a spike on its nose.
• The Manliest Story Ever Conceived lives up to its name, while at the same time being a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic.
• Deconstructed in The Dragon and the Butterfly. The Vikings are a Proud Warrior Race and their first instinct when it comes to solving problems is either toughing it out or Appeal to Force. The first part is put to the test when the absence of the Night Fury in her army had caused the Red Death to up the number of dragon raids, turning Berk from a ramshackle town into a certifiable shanty town, Stoick and Gobber too lost in their own heads with grief to be any help. Astrid manages to locate the nest after ignoring her killer instincts and uses Hiccup's dragon training notes. When Astrid manages to get Stoick, Gobber and the other teens to Hiccup's location at the Encanto, they try all try many variations on the "come with us, be real Viking or else" and all it does is make it harder and harder for them to bring Hiccup along to help them. It's after they learn to drop their hardened stoicism and appeal to his empathy does Hiccup finally agree to go back to help them.

Films — Animation

• Gaston, the villain of Beauty and the Beast. Whilst he is treated as genuinely handsome and charismatic, his level of masculinity does pass into parody at points. He eats five dozen eggs every morning, displays comical levels of misogyny, etc. "No one's slick as Gaston; no one's quick as Gaston; no one's neck's as incredibly thick as Gaston's!" And "every last inch of him is covered in hair."
• The lawn-mover that is "The TERRAFIRMINATOR" from Gnomeo & Juliet. "YOUR LAWN WILL BE AFRAID TO GROW! IT'S THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF GRASS DESTRUCTION!"
  Here's a list of Warnings and Side Effects of The TERRAFIMINATOR:
  • Terrafirminator will not inhibit grass from growing
  • Not recommended for residential use
  • Not recommended for commercial use either
  • Do not use vehicle while sleeping
  • Do not stick your fingers in tiller blades - duh
  • Not recommended for children under 3
  • Or 4
  • For external use only
  • After use, lawn may appear completely destroyed
  • do not be alarmed - this is perfectly normal
    Side effects of using the Terrafirminator may include:
  • Dry mouth
  • Heightened levels of testosterone
  • Nausea
  • Loss of hearing
  • Blurred vision
  • Ssslured speech
  • Voices telling you to burn things
  • Loss of bowel control
  • Persistent feelings of awesomeness
  • Tight hamstrings
  • Megalomania
  • In rare instances some people may explode when viewing the Terrafirminator
    Maker of the Terrafirminator will not be held responsible for damages, injury, infidelity caused by the use of this product.
• Mulan:
  • The "I'll make a man out of you" song definitely qualifies. It would probably qualify as an Affectionate Parody as well, given that the heroine of the story is a Sweet Polly Oliver.
    (Be a man!) You must be swift as a coursing river
    (Be a man!) With all the force of a great typhoon
    (Be a man!) With all the strength of a raging fire
    Mysterious as the dark side of the moooooooon!
  • Mulan's hilariously overdone attempts to act macho also qualify.
• El Macho from Despicable Me 2 is introduced with a montage of him pouring himself alcohol from a bottle with "Poisonous" warning labels, adding rattlesnake venom (directly from a live snake), eating the glass WITH the drink, nailing the cash to the counter with said rattlesnake, punching out the door (and doorframe) of the bar, stopping an armored truck with his bare hands, then carrying it away, and eventually dying by jumping into an active volcano along with a shark and 250 pounds of dynamite. They Never Found the Body, just a pile of singed chest hair. What's even more ridiculous about his volcano-jumping death is that he actually manages to somehow SURVIVE. The scene might as well be a Trope Codifier for all who see it. Behold... EL MACHO!
• Earl Devereaux from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. So macho that the one time he allowed himself to cry, it gave a blueberry chest hair. The fact that he's been voiced by both Mr. T and Terry Crews didn't hurt.
• Ronal the Barbarian is chock-full of manly muscle-men, especially the barbarians who are said to have become so (allegedly) badass because their ancestors have bathed in their tribe-founder Kron's blood. And yet, they're easily overrun by Lord Volcazar and his troops — maybe because Volcazar is even "manlier" than them. Exceptions include Ronal and his entire party (the only one of them who's halfway badass is Zandra) as well as Volcazar's General.
• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part has Rex Dangervest, an exaggerated parody of many of the Action Hero roles played by his voice actor Chris Pratt. He has Perma-Stubble, his full name is technically "Radical Emmet Xtreme Machete Ninja Star Dangervest", he pilots a spaceship shaped like a fist whose crew includes trained raptors, and his Establishing Character Moment has him destroying an asteroid with his bare hands. He's an idealized version of the everyman protagonist Emmet, who he seeks to mold into somebody as cool and tough as he is so that Emmet can rescue his friends. He's actually the villain who wants to destroy everything out of spite, and represents Finn's desire in the real world to be cool and tough even at the expense of kindness, sensitivity, and his sister Bianca's feelings.

Films — Live-Action

• Idiocracy: Brawndo. Just in case you hadn't lost faith in humanity yet, Brawndo is now manufactured and sold.
• In Freaked, we have this commercial
• Captain Gordon of Godzilla: Final Wars is so macho, he faced down Godzilla personally, with a sword.
• The theme song to Orgazmo: "Now You're a MAN!"
• Ten Inch Hero mentions this by name, though it's used in reference not to extreme manliness, but rather disgusting male habits.
• Black Dynamite parodies the excessively masculine heroes of blaxploitation films. When introduced, Black Dynamite seems to be penetrating three women at the same time.
• The stetson-clad Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now — of the famous "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" speech — shoots beyond manly into the realms of the impossible. He leads a helicopter assault to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries so that he can go surfing.
• From Dusk Till Dawn: A confrontation between Harvey Keitel, Fred Williamson, the great Tom Savini, and George Clooney (!) against a room full of vampires. Featuring Danny Trejo and John Saxon. And Tom Savini sports a COCK-GUN!
• ¡Three Amigos! pokes fun at all the machismo, especially in the Bad Guy Bar "Where did you get that pretty little gun?" (with disastrous results for the "manly" bar patrons) and Ned's duel with the German aviator (Jefe: "You wanna die with a MAAAAN's gun, not a little sissy gun like this.") In which Ned falls over trying to holster the MAAAAN's gun handed to him by Jefe. And gets knocked back a couple dozen feet from the recoil when he shoots the German.
• Commando has a confrontation between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Duke (a large imposing man) in a hotel room, which they initiate by shouting insults at each other such as "You scared? You should be, because this Green Beret's going to beat your ass!" followed by "I eat Green Beret's for breakfast, and right now I'm very hungry!", etc. Rae Dawn Chong (a small slim actress) as Cindy exhibits great intelligence and wisdom by cowering in the corner while these two behemoths demolish not only the room they are in, but several rooms around them. The trope is invoked by her comments while this is happening:
  Cindy: Can you believe this macho bull-shit?
  Cindy: They feed these guys too much red meat!
• Predator is automatically manly thanks to Arnie, but most of the rest of the cast are putting in the effort as well, particularly Jesse Ventura.
  Blain: Ain't got time to bleed.
• The Expendables is built around a host of 80s, 90s and modern action stars doing manly things. This could as well be called "Testosterone Poisoning: The Movie".
• The intended point of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. A lot of people missed the memo.
• Shoot 'Em Up. Shooting tons of bad guys is just plain manly. So is having steamy hot sex with Monica Bellucci. Doing them both at the same time, however...
• In Lost in Space, Don West blows up the derelict ship they find, not wanting to leave "an enemy a base." John Robinson wanted to keep it to study, causing them to argue about military vs scientific aspects of the mission and who is in charge. Maureen warns them that if they don't stop "hosing the deck down with testosterone," she'd relieve both of them on medical reasons and take over the mission herself.
• Deconstructed in Mad Max: Fury Road. Immortan Joe puts a heavy emphasis on hyper-masculinity in the running of his empire and the cult he's built around himself. This is shown to be harmful to everyone, men and women alike. Women are treated essentially like livestock, valued only for their looks and fertility. Barring that, they are kept either out of the Citadel or used as milk farms. The men strong enough are brainwashed into a psychotic Martyrdom Culture obsessed with cars and battle, willing to kill themselves "historically" in service to their Glorious Leader in the hopes that they will be resurrected in the Warrior Heaven of Valhalla. In the end, the only ones who benefit from this mindset are Immortan Joe himself and his fellow warlords.
• In Barbie (2023), once Beach Ken starts spreading ideas of the patriarchy and men having power, Barbieland's imbalance of power shifts from Barbies and other women to Kens and other men, the dream houses of Barbie's cul de sac becoming the Kens' Mojo Dojo Casa Houses, full of frat broish Kens, mini fridges and horse-themed decor, with the Barbies becoming arm-candy serving the Kens brewski beers and acting as brainless beauties for the Kens to boost their own ego. The patriarchy is compared more to a virus, specifically a foreign antibody that Barbieland's matriarchy was not built to expect or defend against. Beach Ken, however, finds himself still unsatisfied with this, since his problem was his relationship with Barbie rather than his lack of power, and he finds himself loathing the patriarchy by the time the Barbies manage to undo it.

Literature

• The Retrosexual Manual is all about this.
• Dave Barry:
  • "Complete Guide to Guys".
    Stimulus: Human mortality.
    Response (Female): Religious faith.
    Response (Male): The pyramids.
    Response (Guy): Bungee-jumping.
  • In another column, he mocks the ultra-manly trend in commercials by citing one where the MEN see a barge going out of control down a stream, and immediately get to work bringing it in with big hairy ropes, whereas a guy like a humor columnist would be secure enough to say "Don't worry, it's probably insured."
• The Alphabet of Manliness. "The Calendar of Manliness."
• The Manly Handbook, by David Everitt and Harold Schechter.
• In the early '70s the National Lampoon did a dead-on parody of mid-century men's adventure magazines called "Real Balls", at the same time taking digs at "Silent Majority" conservatism with stories of infiltrating "beatnik hootenannies", fighting lewd sex-education teachers, and combating the "Krazed Kent State Kamikaze Kids".
• Bruce Fernstein's Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. Most of the articles and pictures in this book originally appeared in Playboy, that's how manly it is.
• The book "Men are better than women" by Dick Masterson, is a satirical take on toxic masculinity and misogyny. And it's hilarious.
• Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (and its film adaptation) is a massive deconstruction of hyper-masculinity in pop culture. It is depicted as being propagated mostly by men with an inferiority complex who believe that they can't measure up to society's expectations of a "real man", so they retreat into fantasies of being a tough guy that, at the end of the day, they still got from the institutions of the consumer culture that they claim to rail against. Far from badasses, they become mindless drones who are easily suckered in by Tyler Durden. It's most pronounced with Bob, a former bodybuilder whose quest to achieve the masculine ideal led to steroid abuse, testicular cancer, and literal emasculation, and the Narrator, who created Tyler as an idealized version of himself after snapping in frustration with the drudgery of his middle-class consumerist lifestyle.

Live-Action TV

• The Trope Namer is the Babylon 5 episode "A Voice in the Wilderness", in which something is discovered on the supposedly abandoned planet below the station. After a bunch of aliens show up and give the protagonists a ten-hour give-it-to-us-or-else ultimatum, the captain of the visiting heavy cruiser Hyperion threatens them with a NINE-hour leave-the-system-or-else ultimatum.
  Ivanova: Worst case of testosterone poisoning I've ever seen.
• Game of Thrones: Lord Jon Umber, known as the Greatjon's, masculinity is portrayed as over the top. Most notable is when he's Fingore'd by young King Robb Stark's direwolf Grey Wind, where he immediately pledges support for Robb despite disagreeing with him earlier.
• MythBusters sums it up in two words: sulfur hexafluoride. Adam can inhale it and sound like Satan:
  Adam: And my voice gets really low, although somehow I'm still funny. It's scientific! HAHAHAHAHA!
• Home Improvement. URR URR URR! MORE POWER! The uber-macho Tim is utterly incompetent seven times out of ten. He plays it up even more for his Show Within a Show.
• The Australian reality show Double The Fist.
• The Man Show: It's right there in the name. Including such things as multiple scenes of girls bouncing slo-mo on trampolines with skimpy clothes and the set was an ultimate man-cave with exotic dancers. Parodied with a fake advertisement for an assisted suicide service called "Die Like A Man", that provided such ways to go out "with your boots on" as having sex with a hot woman, jumping from a plane with no parachute, getting in fights with professional heavyweight boxers (and getting pummeled to death by them), being attacked by alligators, being run over by ostriches, being killed by a mob hitman, and the like.
• Manswers revolves around answering the questions of male viewers: naturally, almost all of them involve cars, animal attacks, beer, or boobs in some way.
• Sledge Hammer!:
• Lord Flashheart, the manly swashbuckler from Blackadder II and his descendant, Squadron Commander Lord Flashheart from Blackadder Goes Forth.
  "She's got a tongue like an electric eel, and she likes the taste of a MAN'S tonsils!"
• The entire network of Spike TV runs on this trope.
  • The show 1000 Ways to Die, incidentally ran on SpikeTV, references the Darwin Awards origin of this trope, for example, using an electrically stimulated cow heart as a masturbation aid.
    • A different story on the show actually subverts the trope. In the story "Suck Her Punch'd", the central character is a boxer who's aware of the dangers of the trope; thus, to calm himself down after training, he's a Wholesome Crossdresser. Then someone tries to mug the "harmless woman" and takes a fatal punch to the trachea.
  • Another show of SpikeTV's is Blue Mountain State, which essentially deconstructs this trope.
  • Peter watches SpikeTV on Family Guy.
• Gene Hunt from Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (2008). "She wants me. Poor bitch." Becomes Harsher in Hindsight if you've seen the finale: Gene is really an eternal 19-year-old kid in the body of a man, whose persona — the larger-than-life Clint Eastwood/John Wayne type, the Sheriff in an old western — he created after being shot in the head. His "life" is a construct because even though he's living chronologically, he won't age. As Keats lampshades, it explains a lot about Gene's insecurity and misogyny around women.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy to Angel and Riley in "The Yoko Factor":
  Buffy: Okay, stop it! That is enough. I see one more display of testosterone poisoning, and I will personally put you both in the hospital.
• Farscape: May not have been referenced, but you can bet Aeryn was thinking this when John and Crais were arguing over who should be in control:
  Aeryn: Talyn, you've seen them both naked. Perhaps you can tell us who's got the biggest.
• The Soup's introduction for the "GAY SHOWS" segment.
• An episode of Scrubs had Turk acting much more aggressive than usual, such as wrestling for use of the breakroom TV. Turns out, he was overcompensating over the recent loss of a testicle.
• The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret has Thunder Muscle, which is the same idea as Powerthirst.
• Sketch character Johnny Xtreme from X-Play. "TO THE MAX!!!"
  "IT'LL PUNCH YOUR BALLS OFF!!!!!"
• A calendar by Mulder's desk in The X-Files seems to invoke this. Consisting of women in swimsuits posing with giant tools.
• Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation.
• Conan O'Brien: In episodes of Noches De Pasion Con Senor O'Brien, Conando defeats all his enemies with a defenestrating throw.
  Conando: Si! Conando!
• The Travel Channel has a show titled The Manliest Restaurant In America. Every single line the narrator says is dripping with this trope.
• Top Gear has Clarkson use a V8 Engine powered blender to make a "Manly V8 Smoothie". Ingredients: beef (with bones in it), peppers, Bovril, Tabasco, and (for extra bite) a brick. Woe to poor May and Hammond, who actually try and drink it.
  Clarkson: That will put testes on your chest, that will.
  Hammond: [in pain] It's put hairs on my eyeballs!!
• The "Many Names of Dave Ryder" gag from the MST3K's skewering of the Space Opera schlockfest Space Mutiny runs on this trope.
• The early 2000s New Zealand comedy variety show Back of the Y Masterpiece Television was loaded full of this.
• Gen V: Jordan wants to embrace their gender, which is both female and male. However, they clearly struggle with some internalized toxic masculinity. They seem to think that being seen as a man will make others take them more seriously (which probably isn't wrong — Brink certainly treats them more seriously when they're in male form). Marie even calls them out for this in Episode 7, telling them they should stop "turning into a dude whenever you wanna make a point to us."

Music

• The metal band Austrian Death Machine based on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Made ironic in that it's a side project of Tim Lambesis of As I Lay Dying, a band that is similar musically but very much not this trope lyrically.
• The Man Land, a song by metal band Between the Buried and Me.
• Amounts of testosterone-fuelled Narm and Ho Yay in Manowar are so egregious, there's a band called Nanowar devoted to parodying them.
  • Manowar themselves might count, depending on which side of the camp "Do they take themselves seriously or not?" one belongs to.
• "Men" by Martin Mull and Steve Martin
  'Cause men can sweat and men can stink and no one seems to care-o,
  We'll throw the dishes in the sink and clog the drain with hair-o
• "Road Hogs" by Stone Sour is a long, satirical look at the Great Southern All-American Bad Ass Biker image with Corey Taylor doing his best Zakk Wylde impression. It includes such lines as "On the highway, I am thick as shit / It's just the seat is really killin' my 'roids", "June bugs on my face / Skeeters in my teeth / [extended coughing/spitting]" and a chorus consisting mainly of "Oh Yeah!" and "Hell Yeah!" shouted in a macho "Yea-uh!" style.
• Sabaton are a Swedish Power Metal band whose songs are mostly about the history of warfare and sung by a large and muscular baritone. While overall quite intelligent and varying in weight, they certainly get into the trope in some of their heaviest songs and when they take the War Is Glorious tone.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's "CNR", a tribute to Charles Nelson Reilly (as if he was Chuck Norris).^note The joke is, for those who still don't know who Charles Nelson Reilly was, was that Charles Nelson Reilly was a very effete, Camp Gay comedian who was most popular in The '70s.
  Charles Nelson Reilly won the Tour de France with
  Two flat tires and a missin' chain
  He trained a rattlesnake to do his laundry
  I'm telling you the man was insane
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone assign this status to Briann Boitano of all people, in their song "What Would Brian Boitano Do". The lyrics of the song chronicle his exploits, which include fighting grizzly bears in the Alps, beating up Kublai Khan, time-traveling, breathing fire, rescuing princesses and wolfing down unpalatably spicy chicken wings.
• "Big Man with a Gun" by Nine Inch Nails is intended as a parody of the macho posturing and misogyny in Gangsta Rap amongst other things. Unfortunately this went straight over the heads of many listeners and Reznor was accused of many of the things he was parodying.
• Two Trucks by Lemon Demon plays this to an absurd degree, where the sight of two trucks having passionate sex is apparently so manly (and American) that it causes any grown man who sees it to start weeping and involuntarily flexing their muscles, while fireworks and eagles appear in the sky.
• Normaal's "Vulgaris Magistralis", moreso when covered by Heidevolk. With lyrics such as "I cook my food on an active volcano" and "I ride on a mammoth" (and a mastodon on Sundays).
• This is one of Pantera's biggest sources of both appeal and criticism. Most of their output with Phil Anselmo on vocals is either this trope, Anvilicious attacks on people involved in government, church or the music industry, or self-loathing Angst.
• Motörhead's music has enough Testosterone to Poison the entire country of England.
• Deconstructed in Oingo Boingo's "Tough as Nails". The protagonist, "Mr. Macho", constantly daydreams about being a ladykilling action hero as an escape from his depressing life.
• Soundgarden, defined by Mark Prindle as "the most macho band of the Seattle grunge revolution" were particularly famous for putting their own cerebral spin on this trope, defining the popular grunge aesthetic in the process. As it would turn out, a few of their songs took a satirical stance—the most well-known example being "Big Dumb Sex".
• Explained by Lil'Jon to be the point of "Turn Down for What". While looking like two college students going wild in their apartment, one of them, a man, appears to be smashing a number of things against his groin, and shouting into a phone so hard it makes someone on the other end abruptly die.

Newspaper Comics

• The Far Side: One strip depicts a doctor saying to his patient, "Your tests all came back OK, although your testosterone levels are a tad high." The guy is a hulk who looks like a half-shaven gorilla.

Pro Wrestling

• Get a load of these lyrics. Would you believe that they came from "Exotic" Adrian Street?
  I can tear a telephone directory in two
  Bending iron bars is something else that I can do
  I always pick my teeth with the nearest billiard cue
  So imagine what I could do to you...
• In the '90s, the WWF had Steven Regal: A Real Man's Man! His debut was preceded with vignettes showing him doing MANLY things like chopping down trees, shaving with a hatchet and squeezing orange juice with his bare hands, while a very excited British man gave a running commentary about just how manly he was!
• SeXXXy Eddie proved in CZW that he was so manly he could down his opponents with his penis. Similarly Krotch of All American Wrestling has a slingshot move that can only be described as "flying dick to the face".
  • Their deathmatches. As covered by Vice Magazine, the whole thing is a controversial, gory sideshow where everybody bleeds. Highlights include wrestlers smashing each other with long lightbulbs, being thrown off of scaffolds to the unpadded ground, and the "Home Run Derby" match, where a wrestler gets a large nut stuck in their head.
• Ring of Honor former champion and WWE star Daniel Bryan loves to use this, as seen in the Daniel Bryan Manliness Meter, and many of his ROH promos:
  "I'm getting sick and tired of all these people giving me crap about what color my skin is. Yeah, I'm pale — what's the big deal?... It doesn't matter what color my skin is, because I'm the best wrestler in the world! I beat Homicide, I beat everybody that Ring of Honor has put in front of me! And d'you know what? THAT is what makes me a MAN! And do you know what's unmanly? All these idiots talking about my skin color, going and sitting in front of a bunch of fluorescent lights with goggles and a Speedo!"

And then he became the mentor for "Mantastic" Derrick Batemann, who, in Bryan's words, is "manly, so manly, OH SO manly!"

• Dramatic Dream Team mainstay Danshiko Dino is one of the most extreme exoticos. His tactics rob all but the hardest men of their masculinity unless they are also gay or bi. Until Joey Ryan, who proved so manly he overpowered Dino with nothing but his penis when Dino attacked it. There's a reason that Joey's the King of Dong Style, after all. Not only is his finisher a counterattack where he flip-tosses someone to the floor using nothing but his manhood, but he possesses so much manliness that he came back from the dead; showing up at 2018's All In to exact revenge on Hangman Page.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Orks are an all-"male" species who live for fighting and winning. An ork is essentially a pile of big green muscles pressed into a humanoid shape, with a lantern jaw fixed with a lot of teeth at one end. Their entire culture is geared towards optimizing them towards warfare, and when they're not fighting, their hobbies include: a sort of prizefighting, looting, arson, demolition, making progressively larger and more insane weapons and warmachines, and really fast vehicles, and all-around being "Orky." They were initially an army heavily influenced by rioting football hooligans, but the insanity quickly spun off into a culture of its own.
  • Space Marines are a fit unto themselves. Being an all-male force of bio-engineered, transhuman Super Soldiers, they fit in to the trope perfectly, though they seem to have been given a rather dry personality archetype. Most of them are 8-foot-tall mountains of muscle and extra/modified organs that make them incredibly hard to kill. They can guzzle or breathe poison without much issue, spit poison, eat their way out of a cage, or eat brain tissue to get information. And that's before being equipped with power armor, chainswords, and rifles that shoot .75 calibre exploding rounds at full auto. When inducted into a chapter, a neophyte's daily life becomes four hours of sleep sandwiched between constant drilling, exercise, tactical and strategic education, and gear maintenance, and that's when they're not actively fighting for days on end.
  • Most Space Marines fit into this trope by being perfect soldiers, and then you have the Space Wolves. They're not just super-soldiers, but heroic space Vikings who love drinking, good-natured fighting, and boasting. Most Marines personify the professional soldier, and Space Wolves are bombastic warriors bordering on the extravagant. They even have a special cavalry formation of their own numbers riding giant wolves bigger than horses. They also eat truckloads of meat and guzzle gallons of ale (that's made with jet fuel), and are the only known chapter that retains their sexuality (as opposed to going asexual) after a completed transition to a full Astartes.
  • In Necromunda, the entire culture and appearance of House Goliath is based around the concepts of aggression, strength, toughness and massive muscles, something the other Houses ridicule them for.
• HoL has Frank, the Were-Guy, who's so manly every full moon he can only turn into something even more manly.

Theater

• David Alden's production of Francesco Cavalli's baroque opera Ercole Amante ("Hercules in love") had the eponymous hero take on his mythical-badass persona by putting on a rubber muscle suit onstage. The result fell somewhere between a life-size action figure, Hulk Hogan and Conan the Barbarian◊. On eight-inch platform boots.
• In Eurydice, Hades takes pride in his chiseled figure and physical strength and comically boasts that Orpheus, with his long fingers and weak frame, can't measure up.

Video Games

• Borderlands 2:
  • TORGUE: guns are about EXPLOSIONS and MACHISMO and ENGINES and EXPLOSIONS and LOUD NOISES and EXPLOSIONS. You know what sucks? SUBTLETY. You know what’s awesome? NOTSUBTLETY. And also EXPLOSIONS. TORGUE! Bastard Guns for Bastard People!
  • And then there's Mr. Torgue himself, a Randy Savage lookalike who is essentially the Saxton Hale of the setting. Despite his image however, he's actually a fairly nice guy who believes that there's nothing more badass than chivalry. His definition of manliness develops over time, but he remains this trope nonetheless. His full name, Mr. Torgue High-Five Flexington, just further shows his preposterous manliness.
  • If you wonder where he got it from, it turns out that Mr. Torgue's grandmother has it just as bad. By her own account, she has suplexed a creature called "Blowhole the Apocalypse", and she looks disturbingly like her muscle-bound grandson.
  • Speaking of Torgue, what about the locale of his ultimate tournament of awesome? Otherwise known as: "The Badass Crater Of BADASSITUDE!!!"
  • Krieg the Psycho sums himself up in one sentence:
    Krieg: MY PECS HAVE PECS!
  • Piston, the Big Bad of the same DLC that introduced Mr. Torgue, continually taunts you with proclamations of his own manliness and badassitude, such as deriding you for "only" having two pecs, while he has thirteen. That's right, not only does he have more than two, he has an odd number of them. Although, since he does have cybernetic enhancements, such a thing might be possible. He's also a coward and a cheater who's all talk, so he's probably just making it up.
• Moe Mortelli from Daughter for Dessert is a little too big on physical violence, and behaves more than a little inappropriately toward any attractive woman.
• Dwarf Fortress, more specifically adventurer mode. While it is not necessarily so, due to Good Bad Bugs, you can do absurdly manly and awesome stuff like wrestling bears to the ground while naked and covered with blood, strangling them with your bare hands, and then use the corpse as a bludgeon to kill more bears. Or even throw dead bears at other bears and KILL them with it!
  • Why stop with bears? Do the same with dragons or rocs or other giant creatures!
  • Healing potions are for pansies! You're bleeding heavily due to that bear encounter? Wait it off!
  • Legendary Wrestlers in earlier versions of the game were able to punch the horse out from under a charging knight or pick up and fling goblins all the way across the map into the side of a mountain, where they'd hit so hard you could see the exploded remains of their bodies littering the valley below.
• Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar. It's exactly what it says on the tin.
• Team Fortress 2. Out of the four women in the game, two are guns, one is a sadistic voice-in-the-sky, and one only appears in supplementary canon. Particularly full of preposterone:
  • You can't mention Team Fortress 2 in testosterone poisoning without also mentioning SAXTON HAAAALE! (also mentioned in the comic book entry and portrayed in the trope image) Particularly, the Vs. Saxton Hale Game Mod - where one player plays as Hale himself and not only has incredible amounts of health, but also capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound, one-hit KOs the opposing characters, and has a stun yell so manly it not only stuns other players, but sentries as well.
  • The Sniper (and his parents) become notable for being the only Australians in the entire TF2 'verse who don't have this trope, due to the 'verse's resident Unobtainium. It is later revealed that Sniper is actually a New Zealander rather than an Australian.
  • The aforementioned substance is Australium, and being near it gives people literal testosterone poisoning. It lowers their level of Common sense, while at the same time, making them stronger, smarter, hairier, and making them develop a taste for Beer.
• This constitutes a fair portion of Joachim's character in Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Given that Ho Yay is another substantial portion (he is a professional wrestler), hilarity ensues.
• MadWorld's announcers are constantly talking about manliness, when not making hilariously terrible puns about the ruthless slaughter Jack is committing.
• Brucie Kibbutz from Grand Theft Auto IV — he's a Jerk Jock who roid rages constantly and is always doing "manly" activities. This mostly stems from him being a "fat loser" as a child, and constantly being bullied by his older brother Mori. It's gotten even worse in Grand Theft Auto V and Online, where he's now hawking energy supplements made from bull shark testicles, and ends up playing a major role in the Diamond Casino and Resort expansion, where he becomes Tao Cheng's personal trainer and causes him to start roid raging out of control.
• This guide to the Defense of the Ancients incarnation of King Leoric, the Skeleton King who is the manliest hero in DotA that does not have testicles.
• Punch-Out!!: This is how Super Macho Man stereotypically portrays the United States, especially in the Wii game where he combines his muscular physique and macho imagery with boorish-flavored Eagleland and Surfer Dude traits. Little Mac, who is also from the USA, doesn't care about any of that and simply beats the crap out of him.
• Tales of Vesperia: "Gaze upon my physique, and be awed! MANLY MUSK!"
• Muscle March. You need LOTS of testosterone to play a game featuring spandex-clad bodybuilders pursuing a protein-shake thief running through walls ACROSS TIME AND SPACE!
• Kirby, of all franchises, has several examples^note  We all know American Kirby Is Hardcore:
  • Dashing Super Guy from the American commercial for Kirby's Dream Land.
  • In a minigame from Kirby Super Star you can have Kirby punch a planet in half. Real men don't just wear pink, real men ARE pink!
  • Kirby Star Allies has the corrupted King Dedede grow a pair of gigantic, muscular arms that are bigger than his entire body and a ripped physique. It went viral.
• Dudebro 2, the Defictionalization of a NeoGAF meme, is intended as a parody of video games that fall under this trope. The voice of Duke Nukem is even cast as the lead!
• Final Fantasy X: You can seriously consider Jecht's portrayal to be tongue-in-cheek. Every scene seems to emphasise his incredible physique and gruff voice. He uses a giant anchor-esque sword as a weapon. Dissidia only catalysed it.
• Bulletstorm runs on this. The initial cast are horrifyingly detestable hyper-macho Jerkasses... and most of them die horribly despite it — only the main character and the one character from the starting set who wasn't like that actually survive past the first half-hour. The over-the-top macho nonsense and parodically intense violence only continue from there.
• The First Funky Fighter lets you play as an uber-manly man (ala Kenshiro!) fighting crocodiles and sharks with bare fists and ultra-violence to save a feminine woman.
• The Adventure Core from Portal 2. Played for (extra) laughs because it's a small round robot.
• Bang Shishigami, from BlazBlue, is "the man who fights for LOVE AND JUSTICE!" who thinks he's a shonen hero and thinks that everyone is either his young apprentice or a villain. One of his super moves is a literal Theme Music Power-Up, where an over-the-top metal song chronicles his manliness.
• Katawa Shoujo:
  • Kenji isn't particularly masculine-looking. It's his brain that's been poisoned. Manly picnic, anyone?
  • Also Shizune's dad Jigoro. Never mind the beard, he carries a FREAKING KATANA everywhere, even ON SCHOOL GROUNDS! It's a pity he and Kenji never meet, and he's a jerk.
• Reinhardt from Overwatch of course: "JOIN ME IN GLORY!" or "We shall prove ourselves in glorious combat!"
• The Massif Bros. in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team fall squarely under this trope. They're obsessed with weight lifting and muscle building to the point of parody, compare everyone to beef and various other types of meat and do such over the top stuff as trying to break a rock ten times bigger than they are with a jump punch and jumping off a cliff to progress during their mountain climbing tour. And happen to be Large Ham Husky Russkies who shout every sentence they speak.
  • Mt. Pajamaja, where the Massif Bros serve as tour guides, is full of statues commemorating various "legendary" bodybuilders in this vein.
• The Touhou Project fandom brings us "Mannosuke", a super-muscular and manly form of Rinnosuke Morichika, as demonstrated here and here.
• Broforce revels in this, picking up pastiches of action movie characters across the decades and pitting them against terrorists on terrain that breaks and collapses with virtually every pull of the trigger.
• Cole's legendary hunter of a father in Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2011 is like some kind of caricature of rugged outdoorsy manliness, with his huge Santa Claus beard and intimidating facial scars, never showing affection for his kids outside of constant chastising, belittling his wife with her shopping malls and tofu, and when Cole shoots his first elk, he immediately has him cut out its heart and eat it.
• Sven the Rogueknight in Dota 2, he is here to pump you up!. If he lets out a War Cry, you get pumped up to run faster and withstand more attacks. And when he activates God's Strength, he gets pumped up, dealing a crap ton of extra damages in every of his attacks. And if he's carrying an Aghanim's Scepter while doing so, you also get pumped up to whack the enemies harder by just merely standing near Sven.
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a gleeful homage to corny 80s action flicks, is exactly as over-the-top as you'd expect a game called "Blood Dragon" to be, with the protagonist, a One-Man Army cyborg of incredible proportions, constantly firing off So Bad, It's Good one-liners.
• Ultra Beast Buzzwole in Pokémon Sun and Moon is a ''massively'' muscular bug/fighting Pokemon◊ whose Top-Heavy Guy build only serves to show off just how buff it is. It constantly flexes its arms in its idle stance and shows off its muscular body, even in the middle of battle. Not even other fighting type Pokemon (which have various fighter designs like bodybuilder and sumo wrestler) do this. Furthermore, in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon you get to visit its home dimension, a place so manly even the trees are flexing.

Web Animation

• The Batmetal series. It's Batman singing Death Metal...Exactly What It Says on the Tin plus more. Features such ridiculous displays of manliness such as Batman beating people up with his scrotum. Really, just watch it, it has to be seen to be believed.
• Lobo (Webseries) features the titular character who is a biker who smokes, drinks, swears, and shows off his muscles, to comedic effect.
• The titular duo in Starbarians are bounty hunters drawn into the profession with the allure of meat, money and sex. They are even in a ship that is shaped like a tyrannosaurus rex with tits. In Episode 2 alone, Killgar was eating an entire plate of roasted meats while simultaneously having sex with a scantily-clad servant girl, and later on checked the food storage and complained that they are running out of meat, when it appeared to still be stocked full of various roasted meats. Hogstrong is the more reserved and sensible of the two, even to the point of calling out Killgar when push comes to shove, but nonetheless is still engaged in violence and glory even if they're offered no reward, unlike Killgar who refuses anything that doesn't guarantee payment, and is willing to betray Hogstrong to get said payment.
• Zero Punctuation:
  • Yahtzee, in his Bound in Blood: Call of Juarez video, gives us the Ben Croshaw "Hats" Scale of Manliness, whereby a man's manliness is judged by the size of his hat. Thus, to continue the example, Ray and Thomas both have large hats, so they can "eat danger and shit bullets", while Wee-um does not possess a hat at all, reducing him to eating Weetabix and shitting healthily.
  • He also uses masculinity as one of the justifications for why he doesn't play Real-Time Strategy games or JRPGs, stating after his review of The World Ends with You that he now must play an FPS or else his body will absorb his testicles.
    "Fucking hell! Did anyone just see that!? I am squirting machismo out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!"

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
  • Has a character who constantly talked in body-building clichés. And was so muscular that his six-pack could deflect bullets and he'd developed an organic jetpack.
  • Gordito, while not generally an example, 'grew a mustache through sheer force of will'. At twelve.
  • Speaking of mustaches, Dan revealing his mustache 'convinced an entire ninja clan to follow him'.
  • Also, Doc himself on occasion:
    Doc, while flicking off a main street with both hands: "Oh, forget it. You know what? It is at you now. I JUST SURFED A ROBO DRACULA FROM THE MOON SO Y'ALLS CAN JUST TAKE IT!"
• Girly:
  • "I DRIVE TRUCKS AND EAT STEAKS MADE OF TRUCKS!"
  • Also, a self-parody entitled '''MANLY'''.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, one of the honorable mentions in the Escapist's webcomics contest, is built around parodying macho video game character culture.
  • It's got an enforced example in Tank: he was literally engineered, wired, and pumped with aggro juice by the military to see how aggressive and dysfunctional they could make a Super-Soldier before he causes more harm to his team than his enemies. His army family managed to jailbreak the chassis so the military couldn't flip the switch to make him a berserker without warning, but it still leaves him with serious hangups and there are times where he cranks up the aggro juice and takes his insecurities out on his ex-boyfriend Commander Badass.
• Homestuck:
  • Equius Zahhak loves being STRONG, is constantly impeded from doing normal things by his sheer strength, wears a muscle-exposing tanktop, goes through the game of Sgrub completely unarmed, and has only one completely safe outlet for his aggression: beating the shit out of killer robots in cage matches.
  • The cover of the STRIFE! album. Just look at it.
• Hyperbole and a Half has Sueeve -- for MEN:
  The Shower Hammer!! Brutalize the dirt off! Hit yourself until the dead skin submits to you. Bleed the germs away!
  • XTREME MUSCLE PRODUCT!!!!
  I went from being of flab to being of pure muscle.
  I don't even have any organs."
• Manly Man, the manliest man alive. From NSFW Comix.
  In this day and age of political correctness (read: pussies), masculinity is a confusing and dangerous issue. Heterosexual men and boys of today find themselves in need of a role model who isn't a pussy, and that role model is the male chauvinist whom male chauvinist pigs wish they were: Manly Man. Manly Man once took on Chuck Norris and Maddox in a fight and won by staring at them until they turned gay and made out with each other, this distraction allowing Manly to punch them into orbit, where they still are to this day.
• Rock Manlyfist's title character is a master of Space Karate and 80's action Machismo incarnate. Having been in suspended animation since the '80s, he is awoken by the magic words "No Retreat No Surrender" and proceeds to cut a bloody swath through hordes of Ninjas, Neo-Vikings, North Koreans, Shaolin Satanists and anyone else foolish enough to oppose him. All to the music of Loverboy. Oh, and he also needs to have sex every 24 hours or his head will explode. It's one of the downsides of Space Karate.
• In Scary Go Round, after The Boy has sex for the first time, he converts a caravan into a boat overnight, in a very manly fashion. But he uses up all his manliness in the process, and subsequently just feels like "poking things listlessly with a stick."
• This Three Panel Soul strip manages to spoof this and Dr. Pepper 10 at the same time.
• In Two Guys and Guy:
  • Wayne tries to invoke Rated M for Manly with his new car, but instead comes off as if he's Compensating for Something.
  • Guy, in a rare female example, manages to rub her manliness in Wayne's face.
• When buying fireworks for the Fourth of July, Fox of Curtailed prefers to shop in the "Banned in Most States" section.
• Existential Comics: How Aristotle is portrayed. The author admits that it has very little to do with his philosophy, he just thinks its funny.
• El Goonish Shive: subverted. On two different occasions, characters who were transforming from female to male became suddenly aggressive, seemingly due to the transformation. In the first case, it later came to light that Tedd's outburst was due to him being emotionally manipulated by Magus to make him transform Elliot. In the second, Susan's assertiveness only seemed uncharacteristic to those who didn't know her very well; Sarah, who was more familiar with her, said it was just Susan being Susan, it's just that she usually keeps a tighter leash on herself in public.
• It happened literally once in Nodwick. Artax was brewing some potions when an explosion caused him to inhale a cloud of Storm Giant testosterone-laden steam. This caused him to decide that he, Yeagar, and Nodwick need to do some manly bonding by going camping with no equipment, which rapidly turned into a parody of The Blair Witch Project.
• For Schlock Mercenary, it actually qualifies under "Driving under the Influence" laws. Also:
  I'm glad I disabled the Testosterone Alarms. We'd all be deaf right now.

Web Original

• The hosts of Chapo Trap House make constant joking references to the ridiculously hypermasculine (and simultaneously insecure) attitudes that animate reactionaries, most notably alt-right men's rights activist Mike Cernovich, author of the self-help book The Gorilla Mindset.
• Cr1TiKaL commenting on a video of a man on an airplane filming himself take back the armrest from the sleeping man next to him.
  I want you to forget everything you know about men. You didn't know what a real man looked like, until right now. Now, you're looking at a real man. This is what evolution wanted the XY chromosomes to look like. This guy is the definition of masculinity, the epitome of testosterone. You think you're a man because your wiener can get up to six inches, FUCK YOU. This man's womb broom is six inches flaccid. You think you're a man because you have some hair on your scrotum? Fuck you, this man's scrotum is made out of hair. Probably looks like a fuckin' Kuriboh from Yu-Gi-Oh. This is a man. You are a boy. I thought I was a man, I now realize I'm a boy. You think you've seen men in movies or in real life, all you've seen are boys, toddlers, compared to this Adonis. This Greek god of a man.

• Spacebattles.com's Let's Play series has featured BLAST HARDCHEESE, name taken from MST3K. He has killed men simply by flexing his biceps until their heads explode.
• The website The Best Page In The Universe, as well as the accompanying book The Alphabet of Manliness. It also tore into a specific sub-genre of Testosterone Poisoning, X-TREME ADVERTISING.

• Chuck Norris Facts is all about this trope with playing up Chuck Norris as a Memetic Badass. And also heavily robbing from Bill Brasky.
• In Russia the city of Chelabinsk is supposed to be an entire town of Memetic Badasses.
• Badass of the Week. Everything on the list can fuck you up. Including Australia, this huge-ass beetle, the Hanta virus and Marie Curie.
• Much of the humour of Cracked.com. And specifically, Agents of Cracked: "GASP! The Chief?"
  • This article, titled "Horse Cock: A Life in 27 Inches". According to the author, he's speaking out against accusations against him, those accusations being that he doesn't have a 27-in. horse cock. He says normally he'd just whip it out, but he had 8 inches bitten off by a wolverine that came out of Ashlee Simpsons' vagina after some foreplay (because y'know, that's a thing that happens apparently) and then he went into a naked fight against an Iranian president using butterfly knives (because... because Iranian tradation(?)).
  • 10 Mustache Styles That Must Be Stopped has a "What You Think You'd Look Like vs. What You Actually Look Like" example. The descriptions of what you'd think you'd look like with it are played up as the most badass thing ever. Even the pencil-thin mustache has one about looking like an Agent Peacock Pretty Boy Sex God whom even guys want. But when you get to the descriptions of what they actually look like on you, well, ... that's a different story.
• "MEAT PUNCH!!!" from Much Music's "We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties." The "MEAT PUNCH!!!" is made out of "beef, chicken, pork, lamb, goat, goose, duck, beef, moose, horse, monkey, hotdog, and donkey." No, that was not a typo; there is a double dose of beef. It is said that only one bite will leave you full, it tastes like the zoo, and that you cannot be considered a man if you don't eat it. You can see it here.
• Mandles. The Man Candles. 1% Wax, 99% Testosterone! In manly scents like A1 Steaksauce, Urinal Deodorizer, and Chuck Norris Sweat!
• The MANLY MENS OC Tournament. Just take a look for yourself.
• Contrat d'Gars is the Québécois. You need to understand Quebec French vernacular to get half the jokes.

monster truck that walks like a man!"

• Advice Dog spinoff Courage Wolf who demands that you bite off more than you can chew... AND CHEW IT ANYWAY
• Old Spice's videoblog. Imagine the manliest thing in the universe, only in Morgan Freeman-esque voice.
• This piece of Not Safe for Work microfiction. Real men exercise 32 hours a day and still find time to get laid!
• A Brazilian Twitter, Clube do Macho ("Macho Club"). Common themes include anti-Feminism (divided into "Stay in the Kitchen" and "go to bed"), complaints that everything is done by queers and saying what a true man does instead, sexist jokes and/or comments (complete with terrible flirts, such as "I got a stick, you've got a hole, let's go home and play snooker!"), and showcasing hot girls.
• Despite being the Trope Namer for Rated M for Manly, the Counter-Strike: Extreme Gore Edition mock-commercial is clearly Played for Laughs.
• AFT Marine from Action Figure Therapy...so much. Some of his more carpet-chested quotes include:
  • "If I'm standin' on it, it's America!"
  • "Some people are saying we should register our guns...why? Because they're deadly weapons? In that case, I should register my coffee table too, because I'm a US Marine, and I can sure kill you with that too."
  • "When I was born, the first words out of my mouth were 'God bless America'...my second words were 'GO FUCK YOURSELF!'"
  • Any NUMBER of quotes involving his sexual escapades with women.
• Naturally, Mary Sue Problems has a Parody Stu example.
  Gary Stu Problem #56: You see this little scar under my eye? It's from this time I had my face mauled by a bear when I was five. And if you think that's bad, wait until you hear what happened to the bear!
• Epic Rap Battle of Manliness by Rhett & Link is exactly what it says. "I DIDN'T GO THROUGH PUBERTY; PUBERTY WENT THROUGH ME!"
• Animation Domination High-Def's Michael Bay's X series is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Michael Bay's take on the last series you expect to receive the Bay treatment.
  • The Evangelion sketch is essentially a parody of the fandom (and hatedom's) desire to see Shinji Ikari Grew a Spine and be more badass. So what do they do? Turn him from a wimp with somewhat justifiable angst (depending on who you ask anyway) to a jerk that oozes this.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head starts out as this...but later revert to their canon selves much to the dismay of Daria....except with rocket launchers.
• make up a guy: One guy has meat with every meal just because they think it's "manly."
• CollegeHumor makes fun of this at times.
  • In "Crippling levels of manliness", the spokesperson for a stereotypical "manly" whiskey realizes that this entire tough guy-persona is based entirely on his fear of how other people perceive him, and that it has prevented him from enjoying the finer things in life. At the end, he takes a sip of the "girly" cosmopolitan and decides to embrace Real Men Wear Pink.
  • "Adam Ruins Sitcoms", an episode of the spin-off Adam Ruins Everything, has a segment discussing how sitcoms tend to enforce toxic masculinity, the idea that men have to be aggressive, emotionless and treat women like inferiors.
  • "Male Friendships are just Bullying" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The so-called friendship between the guys in the office is almost entirely insults and violence, to the point where Zac is clearly in need of a hospital. Katie gets into the gang by spraying them with bleach.
• Denied in Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG:
  1336. Even if we are told to pick a manly name for the game, Genocidicles is a bit much.

Web Video

• 5 Second Films brings us GROWN MEN ARE TALKING!
• Atop the Fourth Wall: While reviewing Superman: At Earth's End, Linkara advised viewers to settle all arguments by screaming, "I AM A MAN!!!" and punching the offending person in the gut in imitation of a panel from the comic. This became subject to Memetic Mutation.
• On the Dream SMP, Schlatt is obsessed with working out and doesn't like being associated with "low-T, soy-boy betas" (his words, not ours). As a bonus, he is also known to be a user of anabolic steroids, and shows several psychological side effects of misusing them... in other words, he quite literally had testosterone poisoning.
• LoadingReadyRun brings us Man Cooking. And their episode about the channel known only as MEN and it's MANLY!
• Max0r's review of Doom Eternal plays this for laughs in is that it's the kind of game that's so manly he created a son through mitosis and has enough testosterone to transition someone all while using pictures of Astolfo.
• The first twenty or so episodes had The Nostalgia Critic (now a Sissy Villain who'll readily admit going for manicures) trying to embody all the worst traits of stereotypical masculinity. This died at the Sesame Street review.
  • Inverted by the T-Rex in his review of Jurassic Park (1993), who indulges in Estrogen Poisoning instead. Nostalgia Critic translates her roars with such captions as "Chuck Norris is my butt plug", "tanks are my crunch berries", and "my ovaries are chainsaws".
  • Played with in regards to Devil Boner. He's loud, extreme, overcompensatingly macho, wears leather and his hair is like electric shock... but he also wears guyliner, is a feminist ally and a good boyfriend, and is perfectly okay with trans/non-binary people.
• The Spoony Experiment: Spoony hypes up Reb Brown like this
  Warning: What follows is the manliest thing ever recorded on film. Your balls may drop off in shame at the mere knowledge that you will never in your entire life do something half as manly.

Western Animation

• In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Mustache", Gumball and Darwin eat their dad's muscle-growth supplements, which causes them to go through puberty at school. Anais also mistook the health food for cereal.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: A literal example happens when Rook is infected with Fistrick's pheromones, which causes him to start acting like a "bro". He works out constantly, eats lots of protein, uplifts his truck, and says "bro" constantly. He's still the same at the end of the episode, because it was determined that letting his system flush the toxins out is safer.
• Cow and Chicken had it in an episode Chicken, Flem, and Earl go after Sergeant Weenie Arms and follow his training. Among other things, they shave with smooth rocks and chop trees down with their faces. The following day, they wake up all buffed up... only for Sergeant Weenie Arms to take them to play dolls with Cow ("Real weenie marines aren't afraid to play with sissy dolls!").
• The Fairly OddParents!: Jorgen von Strangle. Originally, he was just a Drill Sergeant Nasty but has since been flanderized (like everyone else in the show) into an insanely over-the-top caricature of manliness who feels a psychological need to perform death-defying stunts that would kill a mere mortal every second of every day. He apparently doesn't sleep.
• Family Guy:
  • Joe Swanson sometimes swings into this but other times plays it straight. Incidentally another Patrick Warburton-voiced character (The Venture Bros.' Brock Samson) also gets used both ways.
  • Also spoofed in an episode where Peter flips the channel to Spike TV, which proved it's manliness with things men like by including the sounds of gunshots, a chainsaw revving loudly, speeding cars and a woman moaning suggestively.
• Gravity Falls:
  • The Manotaurs, a group of incredibly macho minotaurs that give Dipper some lessons in manliness.
    Manotaur: Not man enough? I have three Y chromosomes, six Adam's apples, pecs on my abs, and fists for nipples!
  • "Manly Dan" Corduroy, Wendy's lumberjack dad. If his name and occupation aren't convincing, just watch how he fishes.
• In Hazbin Hotel, Adam from the Garden of Eden serves as the Anthropomorphic Personification of this due to his status as the Original Man. As the progenitor of manliness itself, he has the personality of a sailor-mouthed, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll-loving Frat Bro with a penchant for violence.
  Adam: And it's like — "do you know who I am"? I'm fuckin' Adam! I'm the original dick! All dicks descend from me! [...] So, anyway, then we fucked, and it was awesome.
• The titular character from Johnny Bravo; despite his hyper-macho muscles, attitude and voice, he's a constantly ridiculed manchild and an Iron Butt Monkey who gets tossed around by every woman he talks to. Johnny acted as an Anti-Role Model and Deconstructed Character Archetype to guys like The Fonz, born in an age where terrible pick-up lines don't work anymore.
• Johnny Test invoked this trope in their episode “Johnny Testosterone”.
• Played with (with a touch of This Loser Is You) in Kim Possible. To wit: Ron discovers his bar mitzvah is unsigned, meaning he's not A Man. A special ring that turns him into a tower of muscles helps to compensate, though it's still Kim and Shego doing the ass-kicking.
• Korgoth of Barbaria is a parody of Thundarr the Barbarian, with all the sanity taken out and replaced with gore and a bit of parody sex.
• The Loud House: Lynn Loud Junior is a rare female example of this trope, being an excessively masculine character. It is a frequent recurrence that Lynn's aggressive behaviour and inclination towards the physical, her hyper-competitive drive, strong passion in hard-hitting sports, gross and unrefined tendencies and outgoing, in-your-face attitude are all things that get on the nerves of her siblings and friends. "One of the Boys" is essentially an episode about Lincoln dreaming of having 10 Lynn's for brothers and they're all stereotypical male ruffians. In one episode, Lynn even tells her sisters and brother to 'man-up' when issuing them with a pancake eating challenge, much to their dismay. Granted, beneath it all, she does have a nicer and softer, more caring side, and even the very rarely shown feminine trait, but it takes a lot for her to show any of this.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Self-help guru Iron Will is hilariously macho.
  • Same can be said for Bulk Biceps (whom the fans originally dubbed "Roid Rage" or - most popularly - Snowflake). Originally a gag pony from "Hurricane Fluttershy" with his enormous muscles and minuscule wings, he got another appearance in Season 3, then a more substantial role in Season 4's "Rainbow Falls". He's always kept his overeager demeanor, though.
    YEAH!!!
• Bluto on Popeye was pretty much this from his inception in Thimble Theater, but when Famous Studios took over the cartoons from the Fleischers, Bluto (once he joined the Navy) would be redesigned with a heavily chiseled physique, a more forceful approach to Olive and more brutal conflict with Popeye.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • The original series had exactly two episodes about sexism in its entire run. One was about Straw Feminism, and the other was about this trope. Once all the male superheroes of Earth have denied the Girls membership in their club (for the obvious reason why, see Edmund Spenser's theory in The Faerie Queene), a ridiculously muscularly-drawn alien shapeshifting dragster appears, who introduces himself as "Breaker of men! Taker of worlds! So step forth and bring thy manhood against mine own, and let us see who has the upper hand upon the measuring stick!"
  • Also... MAJOR MAN!!! (who is a fraud and a Dirty Coward).
  • The 2016 reboot has the villain Manboy, a burly lumberjack-type figure who is also The Napoleon.
• On The Red Green Show, Ranger Gord, who is slender and lanky, has a cartoon segment in which he is portrayed as having an astoundingly muscular physique, so much so that when he bends an arm or even a finger, there is a metallic squeaking sound.
• The Regular Show episode "Death Punchies".
• Rick and Morty hints at a show the main cast is fond of. The show looks like an A-Team pastiche that is this trope, with guns, beheadings, explosions, and more. Its title? Ball Fondlers. The image says it all.
• Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World delivered a Nerds Are Sexy Gay Aesop by having poor Rick be forced to drive the "Monsterbator", a comically oversized monster truck that runs on pure testosterone instead of gasoline.
• The Ripping Friends is made of this trope. Not only are the four superhero protagonists absurdly masculine, but so is their mother!
• The Simpsons: Shows up occasionally as part of Rainier Wolfcastle's shtick. Also, Duff Man.
• Sol Butcher from Sons of Butcher. Especially when he goes hunting.
• South Park: ALABAMA MAN!! HE'S QUICK, HE'S STRONG, HE'S ACTIVE!! HE CAN BOWL, HE CAN DRINK, HE CAN DRINK SOME MORE, ALABAMA MAN!!!
• Teen Titans Go! has the episode "Bro-Pocalypse" where the boys are trying to be the Ultimate Bros so they can stop the Ultimate Brofist from destroying the world with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom if it's left hanging. Unfortunately, they end up breaking their bones due to their own machoness, so the girls have to take their place and learn what it means to be a bro. They don't understand the phrase "A bro is no bro with no bro" throughout the episode until they realize together THEY are the ultimate bro and bump back the Ultimate Brofist.
• Wakfu: In the season 2 Brâkmarian Gobbowl arc, there is a magic potion which can turn nerdy guys (and females) into macho men. It doesn't just gender-bend the females drinking it; it turns them into tall, hunky, hairy, overly-muscular specimen of manliness.
• Yin Yang Yo!:
  • Villain the Manotaur had basically the same joke as Gravity Falls example above, plus the fact that as the only even half-human character on the show, he was also the only one with five-fingered hands.
  • Ultimoose too. Not only he strives to do everything as manly as possible, he also believes that things like books and smarts are too girly for a manly moose like him, hence why he isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.

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