Manly men?

"The Glorification of the prizefighter and the workingman bespoke the ambivalence of middle-class men about their own gender status, for it suggested that they too, regarded such men as more manly than themselves-more physical, less civilized, less effeminate.  It also suggest that when middle-class gay men celebrated such working as paragons of masculinity, they only followed the lead of other men in their class."-pg 114

This passage struck me for two reasons because the idea of gender status and not being sure in one's own being a two way relationship.  It's very similar to the idea of "inversion" in my mind, but the main difference being that one is sure of their gender, but they're perceived as the wrong one or they were assigned the wrong one (transgendered?) as opposed to being unsure of their status within the gender. The other reason is for the idea of class status in relation to gender-middle class men seeing themselves as less manly than their working class counterparts, despite the fact that many working class men were the most likely to engage in more traditionally homosexual behavior.
It's such a huge contrast to how we now think, with the idea of adopting mannerisms that are true to one gender more than the other.  Women are told to "man up" and sometimes, we tell men that it's okay to cry. However, there are still many people that like to keep "manly" and "womanly" traits upon a binary scale.  Of course, people fall on different places between these two extremes.
Is there something to be said for this continued perception of what's masculine and what's feminine and our slow mixture of the two?  Is this a positive change for a better relationship between people of different races, genders and classes?  Personally, I feel like it's adding division where there is already a copious amount.  Maybe we should stop looking at the class binary and the sexuality binary and realize we're all on a sliding scale?