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Showing posts from November, 2008

Who is the manliest man of all?

Even if you have a friendly attitude toward men and manhood and have not been confused by bad feminism or the post-modern posing of "it's all a performance", it's pretty difficult to come up with one man who embodies manhood completely, or even best. Two thoughts on why. First, masculinity takes different shapes throughout the life-cycle. When a boy transitions to manhood, it is to young manhood, as is proper. But that has to ripen all through life and keep changing. There is a "fit" for manhood that suits a twenty-five year old but that no longer fits when he is sixty. So manhood is a naturally moving archetype. You might choose a man in his prime or at his peak as your model of The Manliest Man, but it would leave out way too much. Second, there is not just one kind of real man needed in nature. A soldier, a farmer, a laborer, an artist, an athlete, a brewery worker...My guess is that all real men have some basic things in common but the context in which t

What makes a man?

One of the ways I think about this questions is to think negatively. What do I mean by that? I try to think of what a man is not in order to reduce the space where clearer images of manhood can appear, images of what a man is. The big negatives: A man is not a woman. A man is not a boy. A man is not God. A man can have something of the feminine in him (and should), something of the boy in him (and should), something of the divine in him (and should)...but a man is not a woman, a boy or God. _______________________________