On Being a Man...

originally published 12/26/11

It is an old truism you'll never see something in someone else that you can't or haven't seen in yourself.  It's a bit of an unsettling thing, a bit of a frightening thing, to fully realize this but still, it is the truth.  What we see in others is mostly the things we see in ourselves.  For the modern world even more than the world of yesterday this has become the jaws of a trap holding far to many in confusion, and in confusion vulnerable to falling into the ways of sin and wickedness if not outright evil.  Why you ask?  How could that statement carry truth?  The answer winds a bit over the terrain of a life, curves a bit around the hills and through the valleys, but there is road that leads from here to there.


The road of life is a divided highway, we all know that.  There is the female half, and there is the male half.  They both originate from the same place, they both lead to the same destination.  For the most part they run alongside each other, crossing the same bridges, through the same tunnels, the travellers see the same weather of the world on their journey.  But they are not the same road in fact for each has it's own potholes and washboards, each is subject to different laws, each is patrolled by different officers of those laws.  A moments thought will show this to be true, it is rather obvious as a matter of fact, and like many obvious things it tends to be ignored and discarded as a thing of importance.  Funny, isn't it? How the more obvious something is the more likely it is to never really be thought about?  There is one fact so obvious about this road of life we're all on that I've never even heard it mentioned for what it is, not in these sophisticated modern times.

What is this most obvious of facts, the one so obvious it never gets mentioned?  No matter what direction the parallel roads might be running at the moment when a man or a woman looks across the median at the other road they are always looking in opposite directions!  I will assert to you this lost fact is in fact a huge portion of the modern world's problems

Think about that.  Think about how that difference in the direction of our gaze impacts the accumulated sum of our experiences, think about how that influences the shape and the structure of our thoughts.  It is all but impossible for one to look at the other in the same moment  and see the same image for both background and foreground will be different, lit from a different side of the frame, the focus set in an entirely different perspective of the terrain being traversed!  If we look back over the road where we've been, look back into the past we can share a very common view, the further back we look the more accute the angle of incidence, the further back the more the images consolidates into one view showing both roads, and yet that is not really the view we saw in those moments for that view is looking back, not side to side.  Geometry does not lie, and it is a most geometrical relationship. The closer the view comes to the moment by moment now  of our life the greater the differences we'll see when we look one to the other.

The differences between the genders are a fact of life, they will not change.  Male and female are born to different roles in life, different expectations, different needs.  It is an arrogance of the modern, an arrogance of technology and society to proceed as if this fact can be negated by rearranging the conventions and traditions which govern the median between the genders.  It is one of humanities larger errors on a par with might makes right or the idea that war can make peace.  This error, this arrogance, has had greivious consequences on our world for millennia, this idea that a man can be defined in terms native to woman, or a woman defined in terms native to a man, for those terms are derived from perspectives diametrically opposite in their origins!

The road of life begins in the same place, the mating of a woman to her man, it leads to the same destination unknown to both genders.  In that the roads travel in the same direction there are of course a great many common goals, common desires, common needs.  But those commonalities do not extend into the self definition each must carry to navigate the journey, for the differences between the roads defines both form and substance of those things which determine which road is ours.

Therefore I say this as my first statement on the subject of being a man: my brothers, we cannot define ourselves in terms of woman, it will not work; my sisters, you cannot define yourself in terms drawn from the world of men for the same reasons, and to both I say that median between our respective roads, that narrow strip of land which is the domain of Eros, the home of the erotic where all new life begins should not be littered with the trash and debris of our past errors trying to use definitions drawn from the other!

*to be continued*