Masculine performances communicate robust interrelations of power and inequality in contemporary Cairo, especially in the violent body politics of the post-2011 context. These performances, highly gendered, are rarely just everyday social behaviour but also political acts relevant to, inter alia, class dynamics, generational aspects, and varied interpretations. Drawing on ethnographic research in lower-income, popular quarters of Greater Cairo, namely Boulaq al-Dakroor and Imbaba, and informed by feminist traditions and theories of practice, this paper explores how men, young and old, navigate their own experiences within perceived social constraints. In particular, the paper will speak to three kinds of practices: the performative, the protective, and the normative. In other words, I examine not only speech acts (telling of stories) but also compare these to varied practices and survey how this figures into a sense of what a ‘man’ ought to be. How do men vary their stories to different company, and for what purpose? How do they reflect on the contrast of their performances in public versus in private? These categories are not mutually exclusive but instead inform each other in various ways. While many of the stories are embellished slightly depending on the audience, the stories are often told time and time again, each with varied masculine attributes. The production and reproduction of these moments should not escape the structural realities out of which they arise. The retreat of the state into a surveillance mode in these quarters (Ismail 2006) has left many issues of collective and neighbourhood security to the inhabitants of these quarters. While it is wholly relevant to look at the systems of social control, it is also of great concern to look at the resultant behaviours that arise as a consequence of state practice. The project builds on the work of Farha Ghannam and her examination of men and masculinities to contextualise a broader array of everyday politics and relationship to power, the state, the family and community. In particular, I interrogate the tension between emergent and hegemonic masculinities to examine resistance to traditional and generational stereotypes.