First, we have a fairly new addition to the pantheon of the estrogen-challenged, Toriko from the manga of the same name. At first glance, he looks like he may not be much more than your typical shonen action series body builder, but he’s much more than that. He’s a chef who hunts down the world’s most violent creatures. They might be creatures that annihilate armies and destroy cities, but that’s not what makes him awesome.

Nay, what makes him awesome is that in the first chapter of the manga. He uses a 6-story-long grasshopper as bait while fishing while simultaneously downing three bottles of hot sauce by slicing them in half with his hand. Next he smokes a broken branch of a tobacco tree by snapping his fingers to ignite a flame. Yet, as hard as it is to believe, there’s more. The man weighs over 200 kilos and takes a 15 kilo bowel movement. But it’s not all fun and games with Toriko. When he gets ready to open a can of whup-ass, he uses only two weapons, his fists that he named knife and fork.

The next man I bring to you is to educate all you younglings that have never seen Gundam. It goes without saying that Gundam is a must-see and that those who haven’t seen it are less of a man for it. For the few unenlightened, in the Gundam mythos there is a man named Char Aznable. When he’s not wearing his Zeon helmet of awesome, he’s wearing sunglasses, no matter what. While he may resemble an evil Johnny Bravo, he’s anything but.

Char’s resume includes dropping a giant space colony on Australia.  Since no one but Britannian prisoners live there, no one shed tears of sadness. Oh Char, may you forever go down in history as the murderer of countless kangaroos, wombats, and pigmies.

And last but certainly not least on our list is the feared practitioner of Hokuto no Ken (which is another fancy word for Kung Fu). Perhaps the only man to put Bruce Lee to shame, Kenshiro carves his own path of manliness. Literally. His method is simple: he pokes you. He pokes you until your insides explode, then he pokes you some more. Suddenly, the long car rides with your younger brother seem like a death trap, don’t they? So in addition to poking one’s opponents to death, Kenshiro makes 50 Cent look like a punk kid wanna-be. Of course I am referring to the seven bullet dents that appear on Kenshiro’s chest. It’s my belief that after reading a volume of Fist of the North Star, young Curtis James Jackson III talked his friends into shooting him nine times with a pellet gun, trying to show up the master of Kung Fu. So the recipe to make one Kenshiro is a whole cup of Bruce Lee, seven shots from a pellet gun, and a dash of poke.

As a reward for reading this all the way through, your manliness has increased two-fold. Truly these pinnacles of testosterone have ignited your fiery spirit, and moved you to become a better person that you already are. So now, I’m going to flare my nostrils, curl a ton in one hand, and kill people without any negative side effects. Just remember kids: steroids are wrong, and don’t make you manly. Poking does.