There are plenty of times in the modern world where it feels like having a Y-Chromosome is a hindrance. There are certainly a lot of times when it feels that by the simple happenstance of nature, I was born to carry the guilt of several thousands of years of ignorance and stupidity. That guilt, the one where I feel bad for having a penis, is re-enforced over and over again from both sides of the gender divide in multiple ways. Many of the women I know tend to automatically associate anything a man does with sexism based purely on the fact that he has a penis, whereas many of the male humans I interact with are continuously re-enforcing their own shortcomings as enlightened human beings.
I’m not even talking about the significant emotional trauma cases that make up a FPS multiplayer or the PVP battlegrounds on MMOs. Those are special places where we lock away douches to douche around together. If any anthropological research was to be done by an alien race of humanity using only those instances, they would assume that we all have serious mental and emotional problems. Of course, I have my own theory about how those activities turn us all into hyper dicks, and not in the way that would make an awesome sci-fi based adult film franchise.
That’s not really my point today. We all know it’s not okay to act like a semi-sentient anal discharge.
Masculinity has Been Treated Unhealthily
One of my favorite places on the internet is The Art of Manliness. It is one of the few places left that I can go to and find positive identifiers for masculinity. You see, too much of the world seems split in this equally misguided binary about manhood.
I’m well aware that it isn’t the entire world that is split into those two views, but lately, it has felt like everything is becoming more and more polarized into that line of thought, at least to me. It feels like there are two sides fighting a war, one side being the asshole male side and the other side being the men are assholes side. For me, it makes it feel more and more like I should be ashamed of my gender.
I think that’s what makes The Art of Manliness and other magazines and blogs of it’s type so important. There is a reminder that you can be a man and not be a douche. I think this lesson is one that is of utmost importance for people raising sons right now. The reason so many men are spending all of their time acting like buttfinks is because they don’t know how to act like men. It’s not entirely our fault. Manhood in general is something that is in a bit of an uproar right now. For the last few thousand years being a man meant acting a certain way, and in the last 50 years or so, we’ve been learning that some of what we thought was part of that was wrong.
In the last two decades, especially, a lot of what we knew about gender roles has been completely thrown out the window, and good riddance.
The world will be better for it, but there are growing pains.
I think that we, as men, need to seriously re-examine some things about how we are living, and remember not only that it’s okay to be masculine, but remember what it actually means to be a man. We need to learn that we can embody the spirit of manliness: confidence, strength, aggression, while remembering the lessons we’ve learned for the last 50 years. We need to learn to be strong without it affecting how we see strength in others.
We should remember that equality doesn’t mean conformance and unity, it means treating people fairly based on subjective measurements.
Men should not give up their masculinity any more than women should give up their femininity.
Unless of course it’s your individual choice.
I’m not here to judge, so power to what makes you happy.
I’m not saying I know what is best for every man, but I do think that we as men should start looking towards what we feel like we’ve lost. Maybe if we do, we can find a way to help out all those boys that are lashing out in anger at the people around them. It seems to me like a helluva lot better solution than just bitching about the problems.