BY: Noah Regan
We live in a time when gender is trivialized and is often ambiguous. Men are becoming feminine, and women are becoming masculine. Eventually the human race will resemble Rosie O’Donnel and Ryan Seacrest. Sure, there are extremely machismo men that ride Harley Davidson Wide Glides and sport tribal tattoos beneath their Ed hardy shirts, but that’s just a sad case of over-compensation.
Men that do that don’t come off as real men, but rather parodies of men. Burt Reynold, Paul Newman and Evel Kneivel didn’t have to go to such lengths to prove their manliness. They simply were men.
But what makes a man? I don’t feel like a man per say. Rather, I feel like a thirty-year-old boy. There is no great challenge, initiation, or even obstacle course to confirm your maturity. There is no definitive confirmation that tells you that you have crossed from boyhood into manhood.
Sure, if you’re Jewish they claim that after reading from the Torah at your Bar Mitzvah you become a man. But, it’s obvious that a scraggly Jewish lad speaking in Hebrew while yearning for the day he cups his first boob is hardly a man.
“You’re sure there isn’t a version for Kindle?”
What makes a man? Is it sexual conquest? That seems like a reasonable standard, but hardly covers victims of molestation, and on top of that, after the humiliating experience that every man has after his “first time”, they hardly feel like a man. Instead of the expected brimming of bravado, it’s usually a curt apology followed by, “Next time I’ll be sure to last through an entire Cold Play song.
Does it matter how many roads a man must walk down before you call him a man? I dunno. I don’t follow metaphors. Metaphors are the inscrutable hitchhiker on the literary highway—the cunning smile of an artful dodger—the blighted sunset behind somber storm clouds.
Does one enter manhood through the burden of responsibility? Does a boy become a man when he has a mortgage and little mouths to feed? If that’s the case I’d sooner live in perpetual boyhood. Like a balding Peter Pan, I’d rather be a thirty-year-old child.
Does age determine becoming a man? I don’t like to follow this belief. I feel that one must earn it, not simply fall into the position by not dying.
Does growing facial hair make you a man? Perhaps, though I don’t think it’s fair if you’re a person like me who has a genetic disadvantage. I believe I have a little too much Irish blood in me. It causes my facial hair to grow at purely my jaw line, lip and nowhere else. I’ve sported a Van Dyke for the past four years or so, but even what I have is shady at best. One could describe my poor excuse for a mustache as the pejoratively named “molestache”. But, I prefer the term “half-ass-stache”.
"People tell me that I look like Michael Bolton…’s pedophile twin brother."
Does having a prowess when it comes to handy work make you a man?
I sure hope not. Those of us that aren’t overly familiar with what happens under a car hood have faced a certain apprehension when it comes to giving a woman a jump-start. I’ve been in this situation in the past. A decade ago, a female friend had a dead battery and looked to the first carbon-based life form that produced testosterone for help. Sure, I felt a slight validation of my manhood because she came to me, but in the back of my mind I wondered, “Do I hook the cables to the dead battery first, or the live battery? Will I blow up her car if I do it improperly?”
We as men are supposed to have a certain know-how when it comes to the functions of anything that runs on fuel, electricity, or is water pressured. This is an embarrassing story that perfectly exhibits my ineptitude when it comes to all things manly. Years ago I was helping a girl that I was dating clear the fallen branches off her rental property. The girl, her roommate, her roommate’s boyfriend, and I sawed branches and cleared debris from her front lawn. At one point the aluminum ladder we were using slid from a tree branch onto a thick, mysterious wire that hung above our heads. I continually walked past it, subtly glancing at the ladder resting fully against the black wire while refusing to get anywhere near it. I couldn’t help but notice that the roommate’s boyfriend was keeping his distance from it as well. At a certain point, the gal I was seeing appropriately asked if it was a power line that the ladder was resting against. I assuredly told her that it was the cable line, and her roommate’s boyfriend fully backed-up my assertion.
Was I certain that it was the cable line? No. I’d say that I was about 70% sure that it was, but I couldn’t tell her that because I didn’t want her to discover that I didn’t know something that should be intrinsic in a man’s mind.
What followed was the poor girl that once found me attractive, gripping the aluminum ladder that rested against that ominous, black wire, while me and this dude cowardly stood on the sidelines glancing through our peripherals—wondering if she was going to get electrocuted.
I’ll be the first to say that it wasn’t my proudest moment as a man.
I may never feel fully like a man in my life, but when I think about it, women never wrack their brains wondering if they are a girl or a woman, so perhaps I’ll take a page out of their book.
