Misogyny: Not Manly
I’ve been checking in on Testumblrone because the übermacho schtick is hilarious. A friend of mine once won accolades in the Washington Post for his Ultra-Male Behavior by eating so few vegetables that he got scurvy. Another friend of mine built an elaborate tree fort on college property which you could only find through a secret map all to impress a girl. The same friend routinely employed a grappling hook to get to the top of buildings—just so he could say he did it. (And even saying he did it took balls because campus security did not look kindly at roofing.) One of my most masculine moments was having that same friend think I was doing something stupid and dangerous. So the self-consciously masculine can be fun and can be hilarious. You know those “professional driver on closed course” warnings or those “don’t try this at home”? They have invented an entire class of disclaimers for men. It’s not that they think it will stop men from doing stupid things, because nothing can do that. It’s just an effort to duck liability when somebody gets themself killed. Then there’s the Darwin awards. I’m going to guess most of those go to men trying to be manlier than the guy next to them. I haven’t counted, but, we know it’s probably true. Chicken is probably the ultimate male game. Winning is, at best, symbolic, but the consequences are potentially fatal. How could a half-mocking celebration of manliness be anything other than awesome?
It turns out that there’s a bit of confusion over what’s counts as manly. The posts were about 1/3 a celebration of all things masculine, 1/3 oggling the objectified female body, and 1/3 outright misogyny. The celebration of manliness was great. Great like a ninja with power-tools on a spaceship battling with a cyborg dinosaur, written by Hemmingway and illustrated by Norman Rockwell. The oggling and objectification weren’t exactly manly, but I can forgive the confusion. Things that are manly and things that men like often get lumped together in the same markets. There is really nothing manly about a half-naked girl. Some might think that looking at the half-naked girl is manly, but even that is too passive to past muster. The true man will use the girl as an excuse to embark on some ridiculous project to impress her. This will obviously not work—but the real point was the project not impressing the girl. Seriously, ladies, if a guy seriously wants you to like him, he’ll try listening to you. All the bluster is for the benefit of his male friends. (This brings up another topic. Jousting. That’s a sport for men. Trying to knock each other off galloping horses with sticks? Awesome! It’s a bit archaic, though. To modernize, I would suggest the same concept but with fighter jets instead of horses.)
Then there’s that third group. These posts (or portions of posts) amounted essentially to “get back in the kitchen and cook me something.” I know that most of the authors are joking or think they are joking with these posts. It’s not a particularly good or original joke—but no comic can be on 100% of the time, particularly if the comic sucks. I’ll let somebody else complain that such statements are offensive. My complaint is that such statements have no place in a community celebrating everything masculine. Who thinks this sort of garbage is manly? Did somebody decide that masculinity is defined as the opposite of feminism? Did people get the patriarchal and the masculine crossed somehow? The heart of manliness is about men competing with other men. If you have to assert your masculinity by beating up (physically or verbally) on women, you’re masculinity is in a sorry, sorry state. At the heart of “go iron my shirt” is “I have a bigger penis than a woman!” Congratulations! You’ve passed a basic biological threshold. It took the doctors a while to figure it out—but, sure enough, it’s a boy!
When done right (and what is more masculine than doing something right, particularly if that something is both spectacular and pointless?) there is no misogyny in masculinity. Domestic violence is about the the only sort of violence that isn’t masculine. We don’t respect the wife-beater. We don’t respect the adulterer. If opening that stuck jar is a masculine thing, it’s masculine because you are mighty not because somebody else is weak. And as somebody on Testumblrone pointed out, after you open that jar, the manly thing is to pretend that she loosened it for you. The whole boys are better than girls thing is, well, juvenile. What makes you manly? It’s not oppression, but personal greatness. It’s not about the presence of your Y-chromosome. It’s about its size.
