Live Your Life as a Man

PROLOGUE

Growing up as a kid I looked around me to try to find men I can identify with. I wanted to become a man and be what I was meant to be one day. But what was that? What does it mean to be a man? I kept hearing people say, “A real man does this or doesn’t do that” and it often left me confused. In my quest for manhood I would go on to do many things until finally it clicked…

CHAPTER 1

THE CRISIS

MEN DEFINED IN TERMS OF WOMEN

How often haven’t you heard that a real man is chivalrous. He opens doors and carries bags specifically for women and gives up his seat on the bus. I bet that many of you under the age of twenty can’t much identify with the generation I came from. In the 90’s men were rated according to how useful they are to women, children and society. Is that really the case? Is that what masculinity is about?

It was the early hours of the morning on April 15th, 1912 when the Titanic sank. There was not enough life boats for all the passengers onboard. I imagine that if I were in that situation I would not get on any of the lifeboats. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put the safety of myself ahead of others. I especially couldn’t put myself ahead of women and children. That’s not only how I feel, that’s how many of the men felt on the Titanic. Women gracefully accepted the right for them to survive over that of the men. Naturally, it was the right thing to do. Those are the laws of the sea. At that point no one would be talking about equality. The truth is in times of crisis men are canon fodder and have always been.

Men are defined in terms of women because women are more crucial for the survival of the species. Millions of years of evolution can’t be undone with the flip of a post modern switch. If the species depended on who survived on the Titanic it would be necessary for more women to survive than men. Technically one very happy man can impregnate hundreds of women, but one woman can only conceive of a certain limited number of children. Men die protecting women because by doing so they are protecting the human race. It’s purely instinct and heroic at the same time. It sound a bit bleak right?

There’s another side to masculinity in relation to how women are viewed. On the one hand instinctively men want to protect women, on the other hand men want to own them. Nature does not burden men with an innate responsibility without also giving them a reward. Men have also always laid claim to some women who owed them their loyalty. This ‘ownership’ as it were was also a survival instinct. Namely, women give birth to children and men have a sense of parental investment Men are not going to be as invested in children that are not biologically their’s. Instinctively, most men would demand exclusive right to

women they are sleeping with. It becomes a type of ownership of the woman’s sexuality. Men then go on to guard their mates against other ‘predator’ males who might also try to mate with their women.

So far, nothing about men has been defined in and of himself. That’s because it isn’t possible. You came into the world through a vagina and you practically run around most of your life trying to get into a vagina. There’s no getting away from it, so instead I call on all brothers to own it.

Men are defined in terms of women but also men helped to define women and how they behave. The fact is, that while many women would have survived the Titanic, they would go on to be some man’s woman. They would go on to be someone’s mother, someone’s sister, someone’s Aunt, someone’s daughter and someone’s wife. Human relations in general cannot be separated from gender relations. A man with lots of women is often seen as a legend. It was almost acceptable that Elvis Presley or Winston Churchill womanised. Some men boast that they’ve had hundreds of women and hundreds more women go on to sleep with them. Women who have lots of male partners are generally called sluts. They say a key that opens all locks is a master key, but a lock that can be opened by any key is called a broken lock.

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