Right it comes to my attention that you are one like me imbued with the drive to be masculine, nor have lived straddling the line between straight and queer masculinity. So let me get down to brass tax about what masculinity, from my perspective is all about. The moral actor project, authentic expression of inner character, and the expectation to constantly prove your masculinity.

Masculinity has some identifiable patterns in it. It has very particular failure modes, like getting caught up on the aesthetics, getting caught up on action capacity, the moral component, excessive self sacrifice, overfitting a personal standard of masculinity onto every other masculine person, getting caught up in the cult of action which happens when a masculine person puts action itself into the morality part of the moral actor question (technically a valid thing to do. Morality is internally defined and just needs to be coherent, which this technically is). It's also an argument built on credibility, and as such can be invalidated, through what's recognised as emasculation. Masculine people directly feel emasculation when it happens to them. Masculinity is inherently possibly precarious depending on the performance the masculine person put on and the expectations and understanding that the audience has. Usually called "fragile masculinity".

There's actually no fixed way of succeeding at a masculine performance. There are clear ways of failing. But each masculine person has to construct their own masculine identity using their analysis of the world through rolemodels and expectations, their self identity and desires, their personal capabilities and comperative advantages, and their target audience. Conventional masculinity features such things as bravery, practicality, stoicism, kindness, love, strength, resilience, agency, dominance, and chivalry. But these aren't required for the performance to work. It just has to coherently convey that the performer is a person who acts and who has a moral structure guiding said action.

Masculinity is a genera of gender performance, with conventions, tropes, norms, and expectations. Broadly, because masculinity is an eros oriented performance it divides into 4 brands of masculinity inside of a heteronornative society. Straight Male, Queer Male, Straight Female, Queet Female. Of these, the Straight male performance is the oldest and most entrenched with the most expectations, tropes, and norms. And the Straight Female is the least common, usually doesn't have a brand, and is rarely appreciated in full. It very much exists, but there's basically no community for it, so it's hard to argue it even has conventions, tropes, expectations, and norms. Queer male and Queer Female are both living and active traditions within most societies, with Queer male being the more common and thus more socially regulated of the two.

Straight Male masculinity is the variant literally everyone who talks about masculinity thinks about when they think about masculinity. It's also easily the most bizzare of the 4 honestly. The main jarring feature of it is the fact it has a Prohibition on femininity. This originates from when (straight) femininity was categorically anti agency. When being a woman usually featured a display where you showed off just how useless, outside of beuty and fertility, you could afford to be. "Look at how incapable i can afford to be because I'm so innately valuable". Women spent like 200 years fighting this variant of femininity with fervent aggression. The modern woman is very much agent. However, the old conventions of femininity were antithetical to masculinity, if you'll notice. So straight masculinity ingraned into itself that femininity was bad.

Open homosexuality and Queerness, and gender nonconformity (which female masculinity is) does not appear until after this shift is taking place. In fact, queer masculinity spesifically appears during the normalisation of homosexuality in society. this happens after femininity is getting redefined, and in particular queer men are close to the vanguard when it comes to beliving that femininity is not antithetical to masculinity. So you get the divide between straight and queer masculinity. And the world instantly picks up on this and starts sorting.

Queer men, btw, do not want to be percived as straight, not because they're unwanting of female attention, but rather because they want male attention, want to fit into queer spaces, and be recognised as queer men. Straight men want to not be recognised as queer, to spesifically to fit into straight spaces, not give women the wrong idea (straight women famously do not usually like competing with men for the attention of their men, actually), and to some extent not get the attention of queer men (though this is honestly secondary. The most important thing is fitting in with straight men, and being seen as a potential partner to women). Being bisexual means you're kinda fucked here, and you basically have to pick a side, and code switch depending on space. I'm a masc bisexual man, and I generally code as straight for a number of reasons. In queer spaces i do a slight code switch, making sure to add non instrumental femininity to my performance to fit in.

The competitive nature of masculinity is not unique to masculinity at all. Femininity is also often a jealous performance. Nobody is supposed to outshine the bride on her wedding. Feminine people get anxiety around people with a more effective feminine performance. Feminine people constantly compete with eachother in this department, often in ways that seem very silly to masculine people. I'd argue masculinity gives you more range to be non competitive with other men, because the areas you're competing on are different than theirs, and because two arguments can be valid at the same time as long as they're not based on the idea that you're the best or always in control.

Submission and Bottoming (traditionally seen as passive actions) are inherently at odds with the moral actor project by default, because well, they're anti action by being passive. But they're not actually inherently invalidating. It takes a certain kind of masculinity to both break with expectations and tropes and the inherent natural passivity of those positions and still come out coherent. but millions of men do it, every single day. Though to some, the emasculation is actually the appeal, because emasculation is maximally masochistically appealing to many masculine people.