On Being a Man... Part Two

*originally published 11/18/12*

In the first installment of this subject I closed with the idea a man can no more define himself in terms derived from the world of woman than a woman can define herself in terms from the world of men.  For a great many reasons it just doesn’t work.  Not a terribly complicated thought, and yet in the confusion plaguing both genders a terribly common error by both.  The unisex fiasco of the sixties attempting to homogenize the genders as a means of resolving gender conflicts only succeeded in further muddying the waters of evolution with socially inspired confusion. 

Probably the first and most critical issue for both genders to address is the work of stripping away the idea that men and women are the same kind of creature living in one of two kinds of body.  We are all human, the sum of our lives and loves is the human race, but when considered gender specific both the work modern science and the full wisdom of tradition say there are a great many more differences than just plumbing and the hydraulics of sex.  It’s a job that needs doing, and guys?  Courtesy of the feminists the girls are a ways further down that road than we are.

Well, there’s really nothing so new about that, in nature the girls mature a bit quicker than boys, they have to.  But in society as in nature if the boys lag to far behind the girls it begins to cause problems for both.  The world we’re living in is showing some very serious signs of that lag taken to an almost critical extreme.  It’s time and high time for the boys to set about defining for themselves what it is to be a man in the modern world.  There is a whole lot more to it than simply providing sperm and fighting the dragon of the day to assure the raw means of physical survival for the women and children as it was back in the day. Gaia knew what she was doing when she set up the genders to complement each other in meeting her demand they create new life to replace their own lives.  From the perspective of that ultimate demand of nature I’ll assert to you a great deal more than the fate of the boys is at stake.  In the long run so is the fate of the girls, and the society of humanity as a whole.

We men have fundamentally changed the nature of life on earth.  Dragon by dragon it's now at the point where there are really not that many naturally occurring dragons left to fight.  We've won.  Ours is the victorious army, our technology carried the day against mass starvation, disease, hostile weather.  The population of Planet Earth is the proof of our victory.  The machine of manhood past has done what it set out to do, for thousands of years it labored at those tasks.  It's due for an overhaul, a rebuild, now while the army stands down from the battles on Earth and prepares for campaigns on perhaps Mars.

For the moment I’m going to stay with the analogy of rebuilding a machine, the engine of manhood.  It’s a guy thing, and for the moment it’s workable.  Soon enough it will have to give way to other and more precise forms, but for now I’m going to stick with what’s comfortable.  Let’s face it guys, when you scrape off the grundge and grime, once the heads are off where you can see the innards it's pretty clear that manhood past has gone the distance, this puppy is wallowed.  There’s major machine shop work needed before we can even think about looking for new parts.  A man born into the later half of twentieth century inherited concepts of masculinity at best a three thousand year old hodge-podge patchwork of customs and traditions held in place by metaphorical bailing wire, duct tape and bubble gum.  Oh yea, did I mention that about the time most of us were born someone bypassed the oil filter and filled the crankcase full of banana peel and STP?  Bloody wonder it even tried to run.  But objectively that’s what we’ve got to work with.

First order of business is figuring out just how wallowed is wallowed?  Is there enough metal left to cut things back to round, or will this be a case of overbore and sleeve?  And dear lord, you can eyeball the stretch in that one rod, likely enough they're all toast. Would someone please throw a micrometer around the journals? Forty under and more flat spots than a grade school choir you say?  Screw it, we need to go ahead and take the time to have it plasma chromed and turned back ten over stock since we know this crank is straight, it would have self destructed well before Gettysburg if it wasn’t, and God only knows what we'll be asking of it next time.  A new cam and valve train is a given, seriously, the last one was hot technology back when Moses was the Pharaoh’s go to guy for laying brick but what do we need today?  To keep a family fed we don’t need to drag the whole damn wilderness around on brute torque anymore like we did before the industrial revolution, not on Earth anyhow, so just how do we want this thing to run? 

How do we want it to run.  Damn good question.  I don’t have an answer for that question. I’m not sure I even have the vocabulary to do a good job of asking that question.  If we don't want to end up with some over-cammed, over-carbed contraption reflecting an insecure juvenile ego we never took the time to outgrow it's a question that must be answered before much of anything else can happen.  Measured against the world as it is now what is really needed?

Bottom line is the whole point is children: not just conceiving them but nurturing them into a  maturity where they can repeat the process and build the generation to follow their own.  Mother nature doesn't waste effort, the example of evolution says she established two distinct genders for a reason.  She could have arranged things where everyone carries both gametes and both lovers conceive in the same encounter.  But that’s not how things are so I’m going to go with the assumption Gaia had a reason in mind.  It’s always a dicey operation trying to back engineer mother nature, but at this juncture that seems like the best option open.

A couple of facts just jump out right from the get go.  Fact the first: as men we are not equipped to actually build a baby.  We provide half the plans, but that's about as far as it goes if all you're talking about is the body a new life will inhabit.  The girls carry the load of building new bodies, they always have.  All of human history and most of nature spins around this fact.  Fact the second: every bit of manhood past was shaped by fact the first back when the human lived much, much closer to nature than they do today.  But fact the third is that the human no longer lives so very close to nature, we live in the environment manhood past created, and that only bears a superficial resemblance to nature. 

Guys, we built the world we live in today.  It is not the same world nature built for us.  The girls populated that world, generation after generation seeing to it there were more lives now than there had been before, but they didn't build the world of today.  We did.  If we're to remain men living in the world we've built, if the world we built is going to endure we'd damn well better step back and take a good hard look at what we've done, and what still needs doing. 

We're not the only ones who need to take that good hard look, the girls face the same challenge.  Quite a few of them have been kicking this thought around for give or take a century now.  Not all of them by any manner of means, but quite a few, those self aware enough to ask themselves what part woman should play in the ongoing saga of humanity.  They have their work cut out for them just like we do.

I'm going to close this chapter by saying to my brothers and sisters that we as a species need to more than understand the differences between the world that was and the world that now is, we need to integrate that understanding into the foundations of the psychology of our culture, the foundations of our sexual selves. I don't see how we have much choice, the job is done, the world is full.  I think we must do this on our own, by our own effort and our own rational choice.  I don't think we can ask mother nature, I have this sneaking hunch Gaia would just smile that wise woman good mother smile of hers and tell us to go ask our Father.