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Notes -
It's an established retort, analogous to saying that the manliest cocktails are the pink sweet ones because they prove that you have nothing to prove to anyone and drinking some pure vodka or whiskey is just insecure posing, or that driving a big truck/car is compensation for your dick size.
This is of course just counter-signaling, which is a form of signaling itself.
What they missed though is that the core manliness is not the lumberjack clothes and beard and whiskey and trucks and football stuff, but self-reliance, goal-oriented vision and ambition (knowing what you want), decision power and effectiveness (getting shit done), keeping one's word and honor (reliability and role in a community), standing up for one's dependents and friends, etc. etc. These can have some outward appearances but they aren't the core. It will still be countersignalled of course, because it looks even more secure and settled to say that you just don't even have to think about whether you are effective and ambitious, in fact you can self-deprecate and joke about how much you aren't, because in fact you know that everyone sees how successful you are in your life trajectory that you can even afford to downplay it.
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