Sipping his tea and daintily eating a fig, sitting with one leg crossed over the other in the main lobby of the indulgent Lake Austin Spa and Resort, Joel Stein — Time Magazine columnist and author of the recently released bookMan Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity — does not appear very manly.

In fact, he admitted that this particular stop on his book tour, a wine and cheese book club chat for spa guests, was the "girliest" reading he had done. “Wait, I thought the chat was going to be upstairs, in the bird room?” Stein, who is no stranger to the spa grounds, having visited it twice before on previous trips to Austin, asked an employee. “There’s, like, wine and cheese... we can’t have that there? Is it like... low-fat cheese?”

The chat was located instead in the idyllic “kitchen” room of the resort, with lavish cheese plates, bottles of red and white wine and lovely bay windows that gave glimpses into the scenes of a Sunday afternoon on Lake Austin.

At one point, a particularly loud party boat roared by. “See,” Stein told the room of a dozen or so women — many of whom were sipping wine in their white massage robes — “whatever those guys are doing is manly.”

Despite his self-admitted girly-ness and self-deprecating nature that had the roomful of women in stitches (most of the time, that is — occasionally his New Yorker Jewish humor seemed a bit foreign among all the Southern drawls), Stein explained that he was at least 12 percent manlier than before he started his book.

The idea for Man Made began when Stein found out that he and his wife were having a son, and he became immediately worried about his abilities to fill the masculine role of fatherhood.

“I was even worse at being a boy than I am at being a man,” writes Stein. “I owned no matchbox cars, no dirt bikes, no nunchucks... I had an Easy-Bake oven, a glass animal collection, sticker albums, a stack of LPs of nothing but show tunes, and a love for making stained-glass window ornaments. I’m not equipped to raise a boy. I’m equipped to raise a disappointed contestant on Antiques Roadshow.”

And so to avoid being the kind of dad whose son “forgets to mention that dads were invited on the camping trip,” Stein decides to embark on a series of “manly” endeavors — from becoming a Boy Scout (a privilege denied to him as a child by his hippie mom) to turkey hunting to fighting UFC heavyweight champion Randy Couture. Stein also took on an Army boot camp challenge, which he half-jokingly explained on Saturday as “maybe no more so, maybe less so” physically demanding than the boot camp class offered at the spa gym.

He even made a video montage of his quest, set to his own theme song. Yes, his very own theme song. No, I'm not kidding.

Ultimately, Stein concludes with humor and self-reflection that being a man is about the sum of one's own experiences. And while he is still “fearful, lazy and soft,” he has at least transformed into “the kind of guy who will merely run in a circle to get away from a guy who wants to punch me in the face instead of running in a circle while screaming and crying and begging for him to go away.”

So what about his own son, Laszlo? Will he be a Boy Scout? Will he grow up with a sticker collection and an Easy-Bake oven?

“What kid wouldn’t want to bake?” Stein asked me when we talked before his presentation, marveling at the ingenious of an easy-bake oven. “In fact, I’m going to go home, get on eBay and order him one right away. I’ll just make him change the light bulbs himself.”

As an Austin enthusiast — Stein has visited the city plenty of times and at one point even considered moving here with his wife — and now an expert on manliness, I asked Stein to rate the manliness level of Austin dudes. While he admits that Austin is the least manly place in all of Texas (and probably its neighboring states), he sees Austin guys as the "perfect hybrid."

Stein explains that while Austinites may look a lot like Brooklyn hipsters, with their mustaches and the whole faux-lumberjack vibe, push a little bit further and they’ve got some real Texas credentials. “They can fix a house, they go camping... I would feel totally comfortable in Austin, and it would man me up.”

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Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity is available online and at BookPeople. Stein's book signing was part of a larger monthly series "For the Love of Books Club" at Lake Austin Spa, a wine and cheese book chat for spa residents featuring guest authors and lively discussions.