Journal prompt #2

So the prompt for toady is:    Manliness has been defined in different ways in different times. What does manliness mean to you?

So, to be honest, I’ve had a problem with the word manliness from the get go. It conjures hairy, sweaty chests, those olde-tymie Eugene Sandow era barbells and everything else straddling the Victorian-Edwardian eras.

To me, a more proper term should be adulthood. This is partially in recognition of the fact that there’s nothing exclusively manly about the activities and philosophies of the AoM blog. Granted, Brett and the majority of the blog’s readers have a traditional view of what it should mean to be a man, and a man’s role in society. The thing is, from a facile perspective, there’s absolutely nothing here exclusively under  the purview of men.

Having said that, I appreciate what he, and the larger AoM community are doing.

A few years after I started reading the blog, and some of its lessons were starting to sink in, I happened on an article that addressed the specific role of men in society. I don’t remember the exact article title, but it examined the question of why a blog like AoM existed in the first place. After all, our fathers and grandfathers didn’t have one right?

Turns out, our paternal forefathers did have a means of passing knowledge to the younger generation. Thing is, it was an appendage of an entire culture that no longer exists. It was the culture of buffalo lodges and booster clubs. There were specific rites of passage that we generally do not use anymore to pass the knowledge from one generation to the next, and this is one of the main reasons AoM exists. It’s a means of imparting the valuable lessons that we formerly said made a man a man.

I think society has transformed to the point that discussions of “manliness” have lost their cache. I’m curious if there is any lesson Brett would impart to a son that he would withhold from a daughter. That answer would truly reveal how manly he is.

So to me, manliness is being an adult and taking responsibilities for your own life and actions. We don’t, or shouldn’t exclude women from these duties or roles anymore, and I’m not sure the utility in retaining the term. Is someone who lays about the house playing video games all day unmanly, or being a child?