It was raining when I met Jordan Castro at his office on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., so I opened my umbrella over us. As we walked to a nearby Chipotle, he shrank out from under it.
“Using an umbrella is not very masculine,” he told me.
This is exactly the kind of thing you might expect Castro, 32, to say. He is the author of the new novel Muscle Man, published earlier this month by Catapult, and he is obsessed with masculinity. Last year, Castro wrote a viral essay for Harper’s Magazine about weight lifting—an activity he does regularly and with great zeal—in which he wrote that strength is “seen cynically by many as the cousin of toxic masculinity.”
“Muscles,” he continued, are seen by writer types “as representative of low-status worldviews.”
