My choices rested on many years of socialization, as much as they unfolded against a background of economic precarity. Were there not buses?
Yes, with other people, who LOOOVE guys who carry furniture onto the bus.
Could I not have asked a friend with a car to help me?
Maybe young you was less of a dipshit and didn't make his problems someone else's? Presumably those friends with cars have something better they could be doing with their lives while he was perfectly capable of carrying the desk home.
Who purchases a Riverside Chaucer and a copy of the Go-Betweens’ 16 Lovers Lane before he gets around to pillows?
There is literally no substitute for a book. The prior paragraph demonstrates there are substitutes for pillows.
I would never have put myself through all of that if I hadn’t spent my life believing that it was my job to be, precisely, a man.
It is. That's what growing up is. You stop being a child and start owning your shit and thinking about other people.
As real as I know male privilege to be—and if I forget it for a moment, I have the newspapers to remind me—it is surreal to find maleness, an aspect of my life that I associate mainly with chosen discomfort, equated now, by so many people, with bovine self-complacency. A woman coworker, explaining the different ways men and women move through the world, says to me, “As a man, you never think about how much space you take up.”
A woman in your workplace is not in a kitchen and probably too far from the children to have anything worth listening to. As in this point, that women never think twice about being a pain in the ass to other people. My personal favorite is when they extend your wait time because they don't have their shit together, and instead of finishing their transaction with all due haste, they take time to turn around and giggle in a self-deprecating manner at you, like that does anything to fix the situation. My responses, depending on the situation are one of three.
1. Just look at her with no facial expression, not breaking eye contact or making a facial expression, while you imagine she is just now looking at the open Ark of the Covenant.
2. Making a monosyllabic laugh noise with no facial expression, to be sure she knows you are just humoring her and find nothing remotely humorous about the situation.
3. Point directly at her and laugh, loudly enough that everyone capable of seeing you turns to look.
I nod, because I agree with the point she intends to make, but the wording of the statement is so literally false—I have fretted about the physical space I occupy for most of my clumsy, in-the-way, yo-yo dieting life—that I am still thinking about this trivial exchange hours later. “Men don’t have to think about how they look,” says another coworker, also a woman, and I nod again. Then I realize, days later, that the reason the statement is still bugging me is that I am literally never not sore from the gym, because I am so concerned with looking a certain way.
Fag.
A Perverse Avoidance of Comfort
WTF does this even mean?
“What is it like to be a cis-gendered, heterosexual man?” a friend, a trans man, asks on Facebook. “What is it like to feel at home in your body?” The only answer I can come up with is that I never feel at home in my body. I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe.
You deserve to have fruity liberals asking you rhetorical and demeaning questions predicated on assumptions they have no grounds to make. I go to the gym because it makes me stronger and my life more comfortable. I eat whatever I want. I wear good clothes to show respect on important occasions and I wear comfortable clothes otherwise, as long as they cover the important parts, and I don't buy clothes all the time, not out of some pointless pretension to asceticism, but because the money I don't spend on superfluous clothing can be spent on something else instead. Remember the books and pillows?
Examples are easy enough to list. I ran cross-country for all four years of high school. I wasn’t good at it, I didn’t get along with my teammates, and I found almost every moment of every race or practice excruciating. (I was still a fundamentalist Baptist at that point and wondered, during races, whether the literal Hell that awaited the unsaved might feel like this.) Yet I never thought of quitting. I had found the little niche where I could contribute my little tithe of unnecessary pain to the universe, and this, I somehow understood, could give me some sort of purchase on manhood that I was too small and uncoordinated to get by winning fights. I still remember the aggrieved scorn with which my cross-country teammates and I responded to the guy who did quit, after two years, for the perfectly sane and healthy reason that he preferred watching cartoons.
Did you like how you felt knowing that they did not feel that way about you? That's what you were going for, and that's what you got.
For years, as an adult, I was obsessed with learning to box. (An anarchist friend of mine was going to teach me, until he left town for vague but important-sounding reasons, as one’s anarchist friends are prone to do.) For a while I gardened, and when my wife and I first moved to Ann Arbor, I’d spend hours working in the yard, always finding the costliest, least productive, most epic way of doing everything.
WHY? Frugality and efficiency are the prime masculine virtues I've always had inculcated in me. Also, not making an "epic" spectacle of yourself is up there too.
I tried to remove a tree stump with my hands, a saw, and a shovel.
That's how you remove tree stumps.
I cleaned the gutters with a ladder so short that I pulled a shoulder muscle reaching overhead to dig out the muck.
If the ladder is too short, put in on something else, or climb onto the roof.
I’d purchased that ladder, too, at a nearby Salvation Army, and had walked home carrying it on my head like a canoe.
Under your arm probably would not work. Why didn't you measure the height first?
I mowed the lawn with a series of Nixon-era push reel mowers I’d rolled home from the same place. I enjoyed none of these activities. I did them out of fear of what would happen if I didn’t become, or continue to be, the kind of person who did them.
One does not talk about this imperative, or scrutinize it.
Because it exposes one as a moron or lunatic.
“The subject is irritating,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir of womanhood, but The Second Sex is more interesting than any book about masculinity.2 Manhood resists straightforward discussion even as men stand accused—correctly, insofar as any accusation directed at such a broad target cannot fail to hit—of sucking the air from every other conversation.
And passive-aggressive demands for agreement by asserting that someone takes up too much space is the art of keeping conversations going, I suppose?
We do have plenty of talk about masculinity, but talk is all it is, aimless and nonconsecutive, never the sense of anything developing. Sophisticated opinion rarely gets beyond the elementary observation that masculinity is a social construct, or a set of many such constructs.3 As for unsophisticated opinion, it is a dank cellar most impressively represented by the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, who bangs the table for logic and reason while basing much of his thought on the ideas of a discredited occultist. Peterson’s reliance on the work of Carl Jung is revealing: If you want to defend traditional masculinity as a kind of slaying-dragons-for-its-own-sake, but you can’t offer a rational analysis of why this behavior is necessary, or why it is good, or why you need a penis to do it, the archetype theory offers you a pretentious and grandiose way of saying “It is what it is.” It dignifies tautology.
Except what little I hear of Peterson saying before his accent so offends the ear I have to switch to something else, actually makes sense. A cringing, image-conscious, mechanically incompetent self-hating male listing his absurd wastes of time as evidence of some sort of gender-based affliction does not come close.
Beneath Peterson, deeper in the cellar, are the vitamin-hawking conspiracy theorists, rape apologists, and Nazis of YouTube, whose pronouncements on masculinity eerily combine the commonsensical with the obscene: one video to tell you how to tie a Windsor knot, another to tell you how to beat a restraining order. But they finally impugn themselves. If you need a YouTube video to help you be a man, then in some essential sense simply being one is already off the table.
There is huge difference between being a man and lacking previous opportunities to learn skills traditionally associated with the performance of masculinity. Knowing or not knowing how to tie a necktie has nothing to do with manhood, and everything to do with the imperative to learn as a boy. An actual man should embrace the opportunity to learn a useful skill.
What is this thing we’re trying to be? I resist writing about masculinity just as I resist taking aspirin for the headache that has plagued me, on and off, all this week.
Just have perform your marital duty already and stop making excuses. And there are good reasons not to become overly dependent on pain reliving medicine (like my sister-in-law's ibuprofen-caused kidney issues). Judging by this article so far, everyone around you is sick of your bad mood. Take the damn aspirin.
Even as I seek to undermine the social power that feminism has shown me I have—even as I apologize for interrupting,
Why did you interrupt in the first place? seek out the role of second fiddle,
I don't think the women of America need you let them win. I'm pretty sure they can take you straight up.
quiet my ego—my masculinity, in exactly the same moment, tells me I ought not to be babying it by paying attention to it at all. What do I think it is, anyway—some girl?
----
Ready for a Fight
When I try to nail down what masculinity is
I am male. Masculine is what I am. Ta-da!
—what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism,
Those two things are kind of mutually exclusive.
this showboating asceticism and loud silence—I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect. By “protect” I don’t mean the actual useful things a man (or anyone else) may do for other people—holding down a hated but necessary job, cleaning the toilet, doing the taxes if he happens to be good at it, even jumping in front of a bullet if he is quick enough off the mark. All functioning adults are “protective” of others in this sense, to the best of their ability.
No one is afraid of turning into a woman. "Be a man" refers to as opposed to a child. So, yes. Functioning adult is basically the definition of manhood. With a Y chromosome.
Rather, I mean precisely the activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough: that one must train and prepare for eventualities one has no reason to anticipate, must keep one’s dwelling and grooming spartan in case of emergencies,
How does that help in emergencies. One keeps things spartan for the same reason the actual fucking Spartans did - you don't need the extra stuff, it's a distraction from the important thing. The only emergency where being spartan helps is a disaster where you lose your dwelling, so there are fewer things to replace or list on your insurance claims.
must undertake defensive projects that have no connection to the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves. We’ve all known families in which the men putter away at Rube Goldberg schemes for “securing” the family’s financial or physical safety
I have not. I am not even sure how Rube Goldberg applies to a financial plan.
while the women actually carry everyone through every day, anticipating every emergency, meeting every contingency. We’ve all known families in which such a man so exhausts himself in this way that he constantly increases the burden he places on those same beleaguered women, whom he then blames, perhaps, for not being “supportive.”
Not the slightest clue what you are talking about. Anyone whining about his woman not being supportive has already lost the plot. YOUR job is to be supportive.
And we’ve all noticed the way many men seem constantly on patrol, whether or not there’s anything to patrol against.
MAYBE THAT'S WHY THEY DON'T GET RAPED!!! Rape has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, right? So we should be targeted for rape all the time. Maybe it's our patrols that are keeping us safe?
In Self-Made Man (2006), her memoir about cross-dressing as a man for a year, Norah Vincent immediately notices the way men don’t meet each other’s eyes: how we pointedly refuse to look at each other. “There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze.… It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect. For them, to look away was to decline a challenge, to adhere to a code of behavior that kept the peace among human males in certain spheres just as surely as it kept the peace and the pecking order among male animals.”
She's over-complicating it, but she gets the essence of male behavior better than this author does. You just don't do it, because it's creepy. Because people don't like it and it's not nice.
4 To put it simply: Every social encounter between men is potentially a fistfight. You learn this in elementary school and never forget it. No wonder, as we age, that we ignore each other, let our friendships wither, cancel plans.
The former has nothing to do with the latter. Friends are the exception, that's the whole point! Don't blame fear of fighting for being a shit friend.
No wonder there are recurring expressions of concern about a “male bonding crisis.”
By whom? Your feminist friends who are completely marginalized by our old boy support network that smoothly moves to block their advance, like a well-oiled machine?
(Why spend your precious leisure hours among possible enemies?)And no wonder many of us have failed to see grabby men as a serious social problem for women, when an American boyhood consists of little else but unorganized combat drills, unwanted invasions of personal territory. It’s all grabs, punches, towel flicks, fake homoerotic aggression, threats of unspecified but grim—and, as one ages—increasingly sexualized violence. One night in my teenage years, as I was clocking out of my shift at McDonald’s, a guy flicked my balls, decisively and painfully. We weren’t on bad terms. It was a greeting.
And the failure of modern society is in teaching boys that you treat ladies differently. Not to mention of women to understand that it's through behavior like this that we learn to trust you. Or ladylike behavior. If you don't like fun, how is anyone supposed to get a baseline on your comfort zone? If we don't know that about you, how can we relax or be frank & open in your presence?
Protect and Serve
That's cops. Of every sex. Not men.
The proponents of traditional masculinity scorn many failings in modern men—our failure to do enough manual labor, hold back tears, grip things, stand up straight with our shoulders back,
That last one is for your general health. There is no "enough" manual labor, there is whatever is needed for the work to be done. It's insecure freaks who perform cargo cult masculinity - thinking that by aping the forms, they can create the reality without the substance - who worry about "enough."
As for tears, my female cousins, after asking me why I was not crying (because it was not an appropriate venue in which to cry) on one occasion a couple of years ago, decided they were going to call me "Chandler" after a character on "Friends" who does not cry, paragon of ultra-masculine stereotypes that he is.
and any number of other failings.5 But most of all, they lament our failure to embrace this protective role, which further suggests its centrality to the whole construct. Political theorist and pundit Harvey Mansfield gives us a summation that is, by the low standards of our cultural conversation on masculinity, relatively straightforward: “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him. He makes an issue of some matter, engages his honor, and takes charge of the situation either as a routine or in an emergency.… The willingness to take on risk is the primary protection enveloping all other ways of providing for someone.”6
Are we circling back around to being a damn grownup again?
The merit of taking on risk seems self-evident, of course—it sounds, again, like mere adulthood, or mere goodness. Yet culture whispers to us that a too-narrow concern with securing a future for one’s family or one’s lover can go badly wrong.
That's not culture, that's a bunch of self-proclaimed artists who secretly resent their fathers for being unimpressed by their dreams of a job where you wear makeup.
We have the two Godfather films (the only ones that exist), in which Michael Corleone is led, with nightmarish inevitability, to murder his brother—the brother most in need of protection—and destroy his marriage, precisely because he “loves family.”
The entire theme of the Godfather is hypocrisy. Every time someone says the iconic "nothing personal/just business" mantra, there is blowback. The Godfather is only successful when he throws that aside and tells everyone that he will take it very personally and not forgive anyone present if anything happens to his son.
We have the television series Breaking Bad, which takes the Godfather films’ insight a step further. Intended as a show about a schoolteacher who becomes a meth dealer,
Was it not?
it turned, under the pressure of Bryan Cranston’s attempt to make the main character psychologically believable, the story of a man who relishes the role of drug kingpin.
It was in the title. The first episode has him overcome sexual impotence from killing a couple of criminals. It was there from the beginning.
“I did it for me. I was good at it,” he tells his wife, then leaves.
Because he's dying and she wants him to leave. It was a deathbed confession, not whatever seems to be implied here.
There is, in fact, a multigenerational family of such stories, its lineage running from Othello to He Knew He Was Right to Dom Casmurro to Black Mirror to, God help us, the current season of the Archie Comics–derived series Riverdale, in which men destroy their households in order to save them.
This is semantic bullshit. Othello "destroyed" his marriage because he thought it was already lost, not to save it but to recover it. Breaking Bad and The Godfather are not about guys doing the ultimate act of manhood, they are about cowardly little bitches. Walter White only acts out when he believes he has become immune to consequences. Michael Corleone acts out of sentiment, rather than responsibility, taking the easy way out, which gets him snared to where he thinks he has an obligation to act on his ego.
It works itself out in those men who have lived mutely at the center of a stage for so long, providing, or pretending to provide, or believing they provide, for a family that falls apart, or that fails to materialize in the first place, whereupon they pick up a gun and bring the curtain down on the whole play. How can they protect you properly if you won’t let them tell you what to do?
Who are these freaks? They don't exist outside the minds of screenwriters, consciously looking to subvert masculinity because it reassures them of their own worth. To the extent this behavior is true, women are not one bit different.
For the anthropologist Peter McAllister, meanwhile, the rot set in considerably earlier than Machiavelli. In his 2009 book regrettably titled Manthropology, he cites studies of bone density suggesting that average Bronze Age men were so much fitter and fleeter than even today’s Olympic athletes that the physical condition of currently living men can be quantified as “the worst…in history.”11 Oddly enough, McAllister reserves his jocularly scolding tone for men only, though his own findings regarding Bronze Age women—also stronger, or at least thicker in the wrists and arms, than today’s humans, both male and female—would seem to put a definitive end to the notion of men as the human race’s hired muscle.
Why? I would assume that cleaning a house and preparing food without the aid of electronic appliances built up strength as well as farming and construction and other labor we rely on motors to accomplish today.
What I find very telling is that this beta male goes straight to violence when speaking of physical strength.
One of the only things we know for sure about those dense-boned paleolithic supermen is that they used their enormous wrists to paint some of the most exquisitely observed art ever made.
A massively unoriginal observation, similarly made by GK Chesterton "The Everlasting Man", my primary desert island book.
This author is a massive sack of assumptions and self-pity and thinks debunking the former will cure the latter.
Guy Stuff and Women’s Work
I hate this little douche so much.
There are two senses, both far more meaningful than the Harvey Mansfields of the world can afford to realize, in which men actually are failing to protect the people around them. One, many of us commit violence against women and each other, and the rest of us stand accused, with more or less justice depending on our individual circumstances, of letting those guys get away with it. (Feminists sometimes seem to me to exaggerate the amount of power men have over each other. If you’ve marked yourself as the sort of man who objects to casual rape or wifebeating, the men likeliest to do those things tend not to invite you over—but most of us could do more than we do.) Two, we sit around too much. Nothing has informed my understanding of my own maleness—or my fears about what it might allow me to get away with—than chancing to look through the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift when I was in my twenties, and seeing clearly laid out the total combined hours of precious life the average woman loses to home and office. Judging by time use studies from the 1960s and ’70s, Hochschild concludes, “women worked roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men.”12 Reading this sentence made me feel tinier than losing a fistfight ever did. If these numbers were true, then even midcentury men, the so-called greatest generation and their younger brothers, already understood by that point to have attained a height of manly stoicism to which my generation could hardly aspire, were shirkers and slackers who had failed to stand between their own wives and life-destroying overwork. What had these men been doing the whole time, anyway? Shooting, perhaps; hunting deer; puttering with engines: “guy stuff,” in its commonly accepted sense—the useful arts done specifically in such a way as to be drained of immediate usefulness. A more recent study—albeit one commissioned by a grape juice company, so caveat lector—confirms that contemporary men are, in at least one sense, lazy snowflakes: We allow women with jobs outside the home to work an average ninety-eight hours a week.13 Even if you factor out women with whom no man is obligated to split chores—women who live with women, for example—that’s presumably a lot of work we men are not doing.
If this describes you, shape up. Otherwise, it's none of your business what domestic arrangements work for other people. Since we're running with stereotypes here, lets point out that a lot of what women call "work" outside their jobs is self-serving. It involves achieving a certain aesthetic sensibility to their environments or preparation of food to certain standards. That the author believes his minimalist behavior prior to his relationship with his wife is typical should explain that many men simply do not place as high a priority. There is a lot of work women do that is the equivalent of carrying your desk like a canoe or whatever, because they think they have some sort of ideal to live up to.
The other inescapable problem with the idea of Man as Protector, even more fundamental than its propensity toward hierarchical violence, or its empirical falseness, is this: Protectors always fail. Stare far enough down the corridors of time—as men do in the watches of the night, in the interstices of the day, while driving, praying, holding a baby—and all you’ll see are threats. Every car is a murder weapon, every bruise a malignancy. The world is the sort of place in which statistical probability reaches down like a giant and swats us and our loved ones away. You cannot be a protector any more than you can be a changeling or a fairy princess.
I know almost no men who did not contribute to this article who are actually concerned about taking sole responsibility for the protection of their kin and possessions. That is why they pay taxes for cops and wet their pants over the shadow of a terrorist attack and sign away their freedoms for the promise of security.
By this I don’t mean, of course, that we should give up. Men will not stop worrying about their wives, or their husbands, or their children, or their friends and coworkers and dogs, or about the little patches of civilization to which they may feel they’ve contributed. Nor will women, or the nonbinary
Largely because the nonbinary all fall into one of the two aforementioned categories, with bonus delusions.
(a category that I sometimes think includes most of us). Love itself commands us to do whatever we can. But there is nothing specifically masculine about this responsibility. (An enraged mom is a proverbial terror.) It also imposes on men a burden that would drive anyone insane; it ties impossibility to our very identity. Despite what’s been communicated in every action movie ever made, nobody is wily enough to stave off mortality in every instance. Do everything you can about the dangers that are clear and present, but anything beyond this is folly. Simply being a good person is hard enough without the additional burden of being a mythical creature.
What the hell myths are you reading? Traditionally, most myths and legends are about facing death straightforwardly and winning an existential victory. Traditional Catholicism is full of stories of heroes who died and very view who kicked ass. Horatius doesn't beat Lars Posena, he puts his life on the line until the ordinary people can do the unglamorous work that actually saves the city, then he cuts his losses and swims home. It was not winning that makes him great, it is his willingness to die, and that's why his enemies cheer when he survives the river. Traditional masculinity is not about glory and spectacle and showing off, it's about not complaining and doing your part.
Incongruous and Incompatible
But given an acceptance of mortality as the alternative, it is no wonder that old ideas of the masculine persist, in a kind of camp afterlife, transmitted largely via jokes we really mean and ironies that aren’t fully ironic. (Think of the way “beta male” has become a category we all half-believe in, even those of us who rightly reject the notion of “alpha males.”)14 Men know, in many cases, that “manhood” doesn’t have a fixed meaning,yet we still feel we have failed ourselves—or, if we take McAllister’s view, perhaps we have outlived ourselves.15 Clearly, we have failed women. (Again, these are accusations that are true perforce, because they are lobbed at such a statistically massive target; still, we see them confirmed all around us.) We react to this knowledge in various ways. Many of my male friends cannot disclose even a fairly serious personal problem to another man, even in a private conversation, without first offering up a short litany of the categories of human beings whose oppression is undoubtedly worse.
Absolutely no one I know has this problem.
It is as though they feel they must apologize for claiming the human prerogative to hurt—for admitting that they are people, and not flesh bags containing mostly privilege and water. Other men, especially white and cis men, long, or tell themselves they long, for the dignity of having something real to worry about. In Leonard Michaels’s The Men’s Club (1981), a group of men come together in an imitation of women’s consciousness-raising groups to tell their stories. (They end up having a food fight.) Since everybody—even heiresses and Habsburg princelings—has at least one real thing to worry about, such talk is fatuous, but it tells us how far these men have lost sight of themselves, their lives.
They are imaginary people! This is not true of real men! GK Chesterton also said, in addition to pointing out that we have no proof that cavemen are brutes or rapists or domestic violence perpetrators, only evidence that they liked painting animals, that a good books tells you something about the hero and a bad one tells you something about the author. I submit that "The Men's Club" says more about Leonard Michaels than it does about men living thirty seven years later.
Most of all, we feel like a bad joke. When we’re two or three drinks in, we’ll tell you that we feel like impostors—not merely in our jobs, but in our skins. I stand in front of my English 101 classes and explain what a thesis statement is;
Ohhhh. He's an English teacher who wants to impress his students, who hold no power over him, can do nothing to help him and will be replaced in his life a year from now. It all makes so much more sense now.
Sorry, buddy. You're fucked. You really are as useless as you think.
at no time do I cease picturing myself as some Ricky Gervais character, covered with flop sweat, flapping his flabby jaws in a travesty of expertise. I clear the dead branches in my backyard, thinking all the while of some Heideggerian peasant-in-the-Black-Forest archetype who would do this job better than I, his head clear, his feet never tripping, as mine repeatedly do, over the downspout. I run and work out a lot, feeling always like a shambling, pale parody of a man who runs and works out a lot. Why, from the top of a nasty gender hierarchy, should we feel so risible? Mass culture represents us badly, of course; one is never at a loss for depictions of men qua human beings in art and literature, but when it comes to men qua men, your choices are generally between stick figures, between Death Wish or Animal House, the Batman of Christian Bale or the Batman of Adam West.
We are a species whose recorded history alone goes back thousands of years and thesis-boy can only measure himself by childish entertainment of the last 50. Serious people cannot give less of a shit about their cultural portrayals.
But mass culture represents everybody badly, and it represents most people worse.
Perhaps the real answer has to do with the nature of what is funny. Chesterton wrote that humor consists in the perception of incongruity.
NO! You go read some actual Chesterton before you go cherry-picking quotes from a man whose understanding of these problems not only surpasses by transcends your own!
Evil things, as C.S. Lewis wrote, are always mere inches away from being laughable: “Only by being terrible do they avoid being comic.”17 (I have thought of these words often during the Trump administration.) We are lucky when wounded masculinity chooses only to make a farce of itself.
The Stupidest Thing I Ever Did
I feel so bad for you if it's worse than "Write this article"
As for my masculinity, it has never recovered from the defeat it was handed one night by my wife, the very person for whom I had been, I thought, patiently preparing it. We had had a conversation about chivalry. I thought I could save the idea by retaining the bits of it that seemed to offer the least advantage to men and jettisoning the rest. In everyday circumstances, I insisted, men and women must be understood as interchangeable equals—no more pay gaps, no more devaluing of women’s work as such—but in the world of lurid, bad-movie scenarios, it had to be my job, as the man, to die for her. If we were on a sinking ship, she’d get the last seat on the lifeboat. (She hates sailing.) If we were attacked by terrorists, I would get myself killed stalling them, so she could run away. (Terrorist attacks are not frequent in Ann Arbor.) She laughed this off, but later grew thoughtful. She asked me, very earnestly, why should she want to live with the grief and shame of having failed to save my life? Why should she be automatically drafted for those forms of suffering? If her love for me meant the same thing to her that my love for her did to me, then even my watered-down, break-glass-in-emergencies chivalry was still an insult to that love. It was still, as she put it, “hierarchical bullshit.” I cannot quite accept the emotional consequences of this, but I know she is right.
In your case, she should live and you die, because it's not about her feelings, it's because the world is a better place with her in it than with you in it.
The fallacy was above when you thought you could pick and choose from a holistic system of human behavior, that your intellect sufficed to better the aggregate knowledge and experience of many generations who formulated that system.
Nevertheless, I still have moments when I start to wonder whether I should take up bowhunting, or woodchopping, or doomsday prep.
You do those things because they are fun, not to reach some imaginary standard.
My wife will, at these times, remind me of an incident, early in our relationship, in which I did act as her manly protector. We were walking back to that same tiny, pillowless Milwaukee room, when a teenage boy, part of a group of three passing in the other direction, yanked her purse out of her hand. They took off. I ran after them, into a dark alley, where, of course, one of them brandished a gun and relieved me of my wallet.
So much for "patrolling."
In other words, my wife reassures me of masculinity by reminding me of the stupidest thing I ever did. What purse, after all, is worth a human life, even mine? And what did I think I was going to do to these poor, drug-addled latchkey children anyway—over, again, a purse?
They're even worse for society than you are. Being a man does not allow for excuses for that kind of selfish degeneracy and victimization. They are actually stealing people's property while you flagellate yourself for sucking air out of a conversation. Let's just assume your need for emotional instruction and good examples was no more met than the materials needs of these muggers were being met. Find the same sort of compassion for yourself you invent for them, and get on with it. Also, a purse is not worth a human life, but a principle is worth all five of your lives. THAT is why you would kick the shit out of the little bastard if you managed to get your hands on him before you proved yourself the tactical inferior of a drug-addled child.
And, worst of all, what of the woman for whose sake I had undertaken the whole pointless exercise, whom I had left defenseless,
I REALLY don't see your absence as a net loss to her personal safety. unprotected and alone,
With her taste in men, I see no correlation between those two conditions in her case.
now too many yards away from where I stood, already cursing my blunder, tossing my wallet to the ground? How lucky, in that moment, to be nothing worse than a joke.
Listen to me good, buddy. You. Are. Not. A. Joke.
Jokes are funny.
Cannoli
"Sometimes unhinged, sometimes unfair, always entertaining"
- The Crownless
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Deus Vult!
"Sometimes unhinged, sometimes unfair, always entertaining"
- The Crownless
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Deus Vult!
What is a Man?
- 13/11/2018 03:38:59 AM
554 Views
Re: What is a Man?
- 13/11/2018 04:23:29 AM
312 Views
You don't get more New Jersey than Frank 
- 13/11/2018 04:28:16 AM
237 Views
- 13/11/2018 04:28:16 AM
237 Views
For you Mookie 
- 13/11/2018 04:31:07 AM
243 Views
- 13/11/2018 04:31:07 AM
243 Views
Re: What is a Man?
- 13/11/2018 06:47:43 AM
365 Views
So YOU'RE the one building Trump's wall?
- 13/11/2018 03:16:29 PM
264 Views
I'm 2nd Generation....and I didn't make it through that wall o' text either. *NM*
- 13/11/2018 05:29:17 PM
106 Views
as far as this article is concerned...
- 13/11/2018 03:30:01 PM
304 Views