Men's Liberation

I’m not a very “masculine” man, I guess. I like flowers, and I wear purple. I sip lattes and my hair is longer than average. I have a trace of a British accent, which makes me sound prissy. I do lift weights at the gym most days, but it certainly hasn’t turned me into the Hulk. When I’m sad, I cry, and when I am delighted, I laugh. I am tender toward animals. Does it add up to being “unmanly”?

If you substitute for black coffee, I fulfill just about all of this criteria.

Based on my limited understanding of what masculinity is supposed to be, he beats me at it.

So he admits to not understanding masculinity, not engaging with it, then stating that it is pointless. Methinks he is threatened by masculinity and thus he tries to claim it is unnecessary or automatically and necessarily harmful on its face. The "essence" of the sexes — masculinity and feminity — have been commercialized, commodified, pulled out by the roots and dipped in a disinfectant solution. I can see this in how every reference to his understanding is hinged on pop stars and movie figures.

What is masculinity? It's a hard term to define because the basic sense of it is so general. How do you describe sight? How do you describe feeling confident? It's not exactly easy to define the sweeping, largest-scale aspects of our lives. I think that masculinity is not set in stone but there are some general, atavistic elements of it that are mostly universal to all men who have those traits, borne necessarily of living in a dangerous world and needing to protect kith and kin:

• Disagreeableness (sometimes decisions must be made without a discussion, life or death, etc)
• Lowered inhibition (willingness to go out and take risks for higher gain)
• Ability to withstand troublesome situations/pain (one only needs to look to the conditions that construction and other trades workers endure, traditionally masculine jobs)

Women historically often encapsulated the reversal or mirror of many of these traits:

• Agreeableness (physically smaller and weaker women tend to be safer in numbers and when working together)
• Higher inhibition (risk taking = higher chance of death = less chance children survive or are born)
• More apt to improving on a rough environment instead of just dealing with it (healthier, happier home, etc)

It isn't to say that I don't believe that these traits cross over between the sexes, of course they do, and someone can embody many of these traits and be masculine or feminine.

But people have an essence about them. The reader himself states that he considers himself to be more feminine. I think that it is healthy and normal to recognize one's essence in this manner, and to strive to live in comport with their basic feeling of self. I lived a very feminized life for years and was unhappy with myself. Upon taking on some more masculine traits, I found strength and austerity that I lacked before.