What Does it Mean, to 'Be a Man'?

Let's start this post with a simple story.

I worked with a guy once who could have given Graham Norton a run for his money, maybe even Julian Clary a run for his money, in terms of exaggerated campness for the sole benefit of ensuring that no one, for a split second ever made the mistake of thinking he liked to sleep with women.

Nice guy. Funny guy.

But one day, I lost patience with the act.

Crushed: Did you watch the England game last night?
Julian Emulator: Crushed, I'm gay.
Crushed: I didn't ask that. I know that. I asked you about a game of football. Where you like to put your penis is not related to your enjoyment of a game of football.

And it isn't. It's gay people responding to an outmoded linkage between sex, sexuality and gender. Gay people are NOT men trapped in women's bodies. People who feel themselves to have a different gender to their bodily sex, are not homosexual. The idea that gay men are NOT masculine but feminine, is a ludicrous stereotype- a blast from the past- which the gay community could do with dropping, such as this idea that being gay and liking football are somehow mutually exclusive.

The fact is, campness is an act. It is an act developed over the ages when being gay was socially unacceptable, for like minded people to find eachother. But it IS an act. And one that a number of straight men have learned to mimic very well, for their own purposes. I should know. I'm one of them. I roll it out when it needs rolling out, so well, that I can fool most gay men into thinking I'm one of their own. And often, in social situations, it pays off. It's non threatening and if not done too ridiculously, it puts the majority of people at ease very quickly.

And it's no less real- or no more fake- than when most gay men do it. The fact is, it's a proven way of behaving that's disarming. Men behaving in a non threatening way to members of both sexes. THAT'S the secret behind the social success of gay men- and the straight men who learn to practise that way of acting, when it suits.

Quite obviously, it's put back in it's box when I stride into The Star...

I've heard it said that ALL sexuality is a social construct. I agree. But that doesn't prove that any one sexuality has been invented. What it proves is that the boxes we've created are just that, boxes.

My own view is that we still live in the shadow of sexual taboo. I don't see anything wrong with being gay, and I'll go further than that.
I've never slept with a member of the same sex, nor ever really considered it. But I'm more than willing to bet that that is largely down to believing it to be fundamentally unnatural for all my early years. I think most people in fact, are bisexual to some degree, and in most cases it's just we have a definite preference. I think most of us heterosexual males have been conditioned to be 100% heterosexual males, when perhaps, if sexual taboo hadn't still had a residue as we grew up, we'd be 70%, 80%, or 90%, inclined towards heterosexuality.

I don't think the REAL gender differences have anything to do with sexual preferences.

Men and women ARE different.
But how?

Well, as I often say in RL 'Bottom line is, they'll never p*ss standing up'.
By which I mean, of course there are programming differences. Often not the ones men believe, but there are differences in our programming.

And I think women are ACTUALLY more aware of what those differences REALLY are, than men are.
Not that feminism hasn't created it's own myths. I'm not quite convinced, for example that women are better communicators. And I think that statements such as 'All men are rapists and murderers' are profoundly unhelpful.

But how helpful are traditional ideas of masculinity? How often do any of things that make people say 'Be a man', have anything to do with masculinity?
Does physical strength and endurance make you a man?

I mean, I could come down on the side of ability to consume six pints and still be sober enough to answer comments on this blog as proof of being a man- because it suits me to do so, and there are men who would say that being able to drink a lot, makes you a man.
But it's a total non-sequiter, really.

So what IS being a man?

Truly?



I have a Lesbian friend who often comments that in spite of some of my girly ways, the way I think is very male. Note she doesn't say MASCULINE. Male.

Perhaps her own sexuality enables her more than other women to recognise EXACTLY those qualitative differences which separate the male psyche from the female.

But I think I know what they are as well.

I'm going to say something now which could potentially destroy my pro-feminist credentials, so I'm first going to state that I think that since Women HAVE been allowed a role to play in scientific advance, many have made HUGE contributions. Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Lise Meitner stand out. But the point is, what type of contribution. The women of twentieth century science made advances by meticulous methodology, by pinning down details and persisting.

It is always said that one of the great things about human progress has been Man's ability to spot patterns. Making conceptual connections between seemingly unrelated facts, searching for order in seeming chaos.

The great breakthroughs. Einstein's mental leap of trying to combine laws of energy, with laws of matter.
And that, will always be a male trait.

That's how men think. Men think in terms of spatial relationships and patterns. Women observe details. That's the difference.
Highly strung males exhibit OCD by obsessing over how things are aligned, women exhibit it by cleaning.

It's the age old stereotype that women can't read maps. Stereotype, but true. And from personal observation, I've noticed that women just do not have the same inbuilt sense of WHERE they are, geographically. Go to a town where you have never been before, they soon lose track of where they are SPATIALLY, in relation to the car. To get back, they'd have to retrace their steps, only they can't remember. You don't. You actually know that going down this street on the left SHOULD lead BACK to where the car is parked. And as you go along, you point out a building 'See? That's the back of the yellow building we passed earlier.'
And they say 'Is it?'

Because out on the savannah, Homo Erectus thought 'That's the back view I had of the rock I saw from the front when I went out hunting this morning'.

Territory, positions, strategy, patterns.

It's how the male mind works.

We have found so many more useful and amazing things to do with our hunting skills. And so too have women with their nurturing skills, their homebuilding skills, their community cohesion skills.

But the instincts of the male, remain those of the hunter, the predator.

It is the joy in bonding with people- male and female- for it's own sake, the compulsive need to belong to a pack, it is the roar of triumph when a goal is scored, the passionate hugging of your friends, it is the snarl as you turn round and face off another predator 'Get off my territory!', whether done with iron fist or velvet glove, it is the obsession with games of strategy, be they chess, backgammon, pool or football, it is doing the Telegraph Crossword, it is the compulsive desire to put everything into ordered tables in clear positions, League tables, Periodic tables, classification systems, the desire to see something through.

To the exclusion sometimes, of the details.

Isn't that what women mean when they say 'Typical man'?

Testosterone and Adrenalin.

I think we all see Feminism the wrong way.
Feminism HAS been about empowering women, yes.

Because we recognised our previous conceptions of what made men and women what they are, was wrong.

Men gripe about Feminism, thinking that women now have the upper hand.
Yes, they do. But not in the way men think.

Women are coming to terms with who they are, not as men want them to be, but as they really are. Human beings, with intelligent minds, healthy sex drives, needs and desires.

And men just sit back and throw their rattles out of the pram at having LOST their power over women.
Gender relations will regain some sanity when men repeat the same exercise themselves. When they seek to learn what MEN are and come to terms with it. Not as the gender invested by God with the mastery, but as one of the two sexes into which humanity is divided, two sexes which on their own are a nightmare, but together make this species what it is.



Masculism- if we choose to use such a word- should be about finding a way to recognise and celebrate the positives in being male, the things which men should justifiably celebrate- so BOTH sexes can move forward together in equal partnership.

Then maybe we can just get on with the business of loving eachother.