Tends to be about only appearing emotionally vulnerable when it is socially acceptable to do so & in a socially acceptable level of degrees (ie: on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being whiny bitch-man poet and 10 being Conan). The rest of the time it's about managing and overcoming obstacles.
In other words: It's a relative-based notion combining aspects of evolution & biology within our very specific offshoot of chimp-style mammal & what is culturally reasoned by the collective imagery of a majority consciousness (and yes involving the historical acts of manliness as a precedent for an abstract of man; he who lives in timeless example, is a cultural reasoning attempting to pin down it's implicit understanding of manliness).
We're a mythologising species, we like a narrative to follow and the narrative of power is the simplest and strongest. If, historically, one has attained great power through some means (hopefully by direct and forceful methods for the full mythology) then an elevation begins both in present and eventually in future recall of the past. Someone cannot just 'come about power' as if stumbling along a variable riverbed only to see gold upon tripping into it, we cannot handle base nature because we feel it undermines our mythology of power, so instead there are 'reasons'.
These explanations are not untrue for a given value, while also not being objectively satisfied. But if it works it works, just don't believe it right?
In any case, it parses down to: A man is one who overcomes directly. Contrast with woman who is defined (on the average) as physically weaker than man, she too is mythologised by one who overcomes, but overcomes indirectly. Because she cannot overcome directly except where 'directly' implies nuanced social influence, politics or the physical bettering of an under-average man.
But lets pause. Take a breather.
A vast simplification just happened. We're not so simple that we can
simply understand ourselves in this way. Subtlties matter, the pebble that starts the landslide matters.
It's also that everything we can't state directly (or to be precise: explicitly) that matters. Just because something works it doesn't mean it's ultimately useful or helpful.
People are people; fucking and killing and squabbling. But also builidng, perceiving beauty, comprehending, discovering and (yes) overcoming. Lets dispense with the word games and the identity parade, lets also dispense with the controlling method and the intimidation fueled by slippery slope fallacies.
A real man would be one who understands this and holds the implict and explicit in a vague balance of understanding, who doesn't play identity politics to escape that which is too hard and who also doesn't over-mythologise the past in order to claim ownership of an abstraction that never really was.
A real man overcomes....
