Real Men

Real Men was the first single from Night and Day, released in June 1982. Jackson described it as the age-old battle of the sexes, and told Billboard at the time that ordinary men felt their sense of masculinity had been threatened and the old stereotypes no longer meant anything. Many listeners also heard it as a song about New York's gay culture at the start of the 1980s. Jackson, who later wrote about his bisexuality in his memoir and in interviews, told BBC Radio 2 in 1998 that people still did not know what a real man was.

Musically it pairs his piano with Ed Roynesdal's violin and a slow, insistent rhythm. Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone heard string chamber music crossed with echoes of Phil Spector; Neil Tennant, then writing for Smash Hits, called it a tough, piano-backed ballad. It did not chart in America and reached only eighty-nine in Britain, but it was a top-ten hit in Australia and reached fifteen in the Netherlands.

The video and after

The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video, directed by Steve Barron, in which a boy befriends a girl, absorbs the macho heroes of the movies, questions his own sexuality and dies in a car crash after she turns him down. Tori Amos recorded the song for Strange Little Girls in 2001, her album of men's songs sung from women's points of view, and played it live more than twenty times. Jackson has sung it more than five hundred times, and still did on his 2026 tour.