On Being a Man... Part Three

The last time I visited this subject I was using the analogy of rebuilding a machine, a rebuild on the engine of manhood. If memory serves I closed with the idea that man was going to have to overhaul himself optimized for the world he’s built if both he and that world are to survive.  Not a hard idea, not really, it’s just common sense.  But common sense isn’t really all that common, it takes a good amount of thinking sometimes, and this is one of those times. 

If you’ll agree the world today demands a different set of skills, a different  repertoire of strengths than the worlds of yesteryear then defining the nature of what is truly needed now is step the first.  Not such an easy question, and to even begin to answer it the first thing needed is an understanding of what actually constitutes a masculine thing as differing from a feminine one as differing from things where gender is more of an illusion of influence than of any real consequence in the first place.  That is going to take a while, but you got to start somewhere.

In about the middle of the last installment I said concerning the state of manhood future “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 probably best if I actually define just what that means for those who don’t play with internal combustion engines.  It’s a needed understanding that makes a good point to segue away from a mechanical analogy into psychological and philosophical terms.

The cam, technically the camshaft and associated valve-train, are what opens and closes the valves that let fuel and air into the combustion chamber above the piston, let the spent exhaust gases out.  The important thing to understand is that the exact timing of opening and closing those valves, how far they’re opened and how long they’re held open is the single most important thing in  determining just how much of an engines total power potential you’re asking it to deliver for you.  For as simple as the concept appears from the outside it’s actually a very subtle thing deep in the realms of fluid dynamics and the physics of combustion.  The folks at the car company have been working on this one for going on a century to understand how to optimize this function for any given purpose, if in a century humanity can understand how to optimize the function this mechanical example was set to analogize we’ll be doing great.

This function is the headwaters of the difference between Grandpa’s ultimately loyal little horse that has quietly fetched the groceries for twenty years and still has a decade of endurance left and his Grandson’s favorite toy that will explode with a primal scream off the starting line and vanish over the horizon in a startlingly short time, his high maintenance garage sweetheart that’s always needing something.   Both machines are powered by the same sort of engine, same size, same company, the difference is how much of the power potential is available on demand.  The comparison is easy to see: for Grandpa’s needs the toy car is spending waaaay to much of it’s potential for the job he would ask of it, with all the associated loss of endurance and civility and fuel economy.  From Grandpa’s perspective his Grandson is driving a cantankerous over cammed over carbed contraption that’s likely to get him killed if he isn’t careful, she’s not a forgiving mistress (Grandpa knows this first hand... he was there when the first real four barrel carburetors hit the market ;-)

When you use the concept of available power potential versus sustainable endurance as a lens to examine gender issues a lot of things start to come in out of the fog, several very important things start to resolve enough detail to start making sense, it starts to make sense why Gaia built two genders in the first place.  Bottom line is the load demand on the genders is actually quite different, Gaia built two different variations to accommodate the differences in the pursuit of HER ambitions in the matter.  To borrow a bit from the Chrysler family of cars? She built Human GTY and Human GTX (with a grin and a beep-beep to the Roadrunner’s Daytona descendents, even though the “GT” refers to “Gene-Type” rather than “Grand-Touring”) to efficiently deal with those differences.

For all of recorded history, for all the time that the engine of manhood labored to tame the planet the load on him was all but constant, and high.  Life was brutal hard labor to take a livelihood from the land.  By analogy manhood past was most akin to the engines you find in the big pickup trucks that truly work the land, those that labor day in and day out habitually matched against loads that by rights should be handled by a machine several sizes larger. For pretty much all of history the engine of manhood operated between 90 and 110% of its’ full potential.  Not quite as hot as the grandson’s toy car that is either goofing off (most of the time) or running at 120% of maximum (for very short bursts), but close, dangerously close.  Things don’t tend to last to long at those loadings. 

Please take careful note of the wording here because in so many ways this is one of the most critical of understandings involving the nature of our species. Mankind was built to deliver maximum power for as long as possible while Womankind was built for maximum endurance with the highest output practical.  The differences in the two states is a major, major player in defining the differences between the two halves of the species.  Let me say it again: men are built for sustained high output while women are built for high endurance sustained.

Ok, I can feel the heat of angry eyes all the way to here.  But I have to stand on what I’ve said.  Yes dear woman, the load demand of pregnancy and labor is utterly beyond your man, for him a totally destructive overload likely somewhere in the 150% range.  But every support system in your body was in fact oversized (relative to your stature) to allow you to tolerate that overloading for specific periods of time, which is why I say you were built for endurance, and which is why the average loading on a woman (compared to her maximum output that by (evolutionary) design is matched against a known degree of overload balanced against finite reserves) normally runs somewhere in the 80 to 95% ranges day to day.  Only when she’s with child does the percentage loading on a woman’s life run in the same ranges as the man runs day to day, only in the very last stages of pregnancy and delivery does she hit her peak output which is in fact above his, and even with the depth of reserves built into her the majority can’t sustain such loading in continuous operation.  Women who try and gestate babies back to back (and simultaneously nurture the earlier offspring) for any significant percentage of their lives usually die even younger than the men, often leaving behind offspring not yet fully mature. 

That’s the scenario as it presents, at least in the physical.  The question of course is how do these facts of the physical impact on the structures of psychology, and through psychology into the realms of the social?  How should these understandings influence what we as men should build into the Manhood of the future?  Just how do we want this thing to run?

Long odds say shortly I’m gonna be ass deep in alligators with both sides mad at me, but I wrote myself into this swamp, I really don’t have much choice at this point but to wade in and wade on.  Here goes my best offering (one giant IMO) on the first thing we as men need to build into Manhood future put forward for the world to use as a range mark from which to triangulate the mapping of reality into a deliberate vision of the future.  I’m going to close this chapter of this thought with the following assertion and wait to see what develops.

One fact presents itself from the mechanics of the matter that to my thought is an unchanged foundation function of humanity, and that is that Woman is by the most primal elements of her heritage an entity destined for cyclic surge loading.  Only Woman is equipped to gestate the next generation of the race, no part of this burden can be apportioned to any man no matter how willing he might be to attempt the challenge.  For this reason above all others I find it an ultimately self defeating work of self deception for any male to align himself as a feminist with the intent of using such an affiliation as a foundation for his masculinity.  It is fully beyond him to actually know the life of a woman, and without that personal knowledge the best he will achieve is an accommodated status more akin to being her devoted child than her equally loving and devoted mate who is actually able to support her in the places where she needs support the most, the places where her child cannot offer support.

The successes of Manhood past have softened the environment for both genders, but has not and really cannot soften the ultimate load demand of being a woman.  It therefore follows that to be a man is not to be a woman with testicles.  To be a man is to establish in yourself a region of absolute personal stability that you be able observe your woman from the standpoint of understanding the extremes of the cyclic nature of her life and as an act of deliberate will set your own presence in her life as a true and accurate phase matched counterbalance for her that she might have a fully trusted point of stability from which to regulate the (psychological) stresses inherent to the perpetually changing output potentials of her biology which she really cannot bring stable in her life to be free of.  

It is a thing the hotrodders all know, to return to that earlier analogy: you don’t break ‘em winding ‘em up, they break as the momentum of acceleration comes into conflict with the forces of deceleration. They break trying to wind back down before that momentum is expended.  The current facts of reality give ever more evidence of how desperately she needs that counterbalance lest the cyclic nature of her existence cause her to oscillate out of control until the momentums of the reversals exceeds the static strengths of her inner construction.  If you doubt this statement just look at the gender specific statistics of the mental health profession.

So my brothers I say to you the first thing I plan to change during this rebuild on the engine of Manhood, now while I have the chance, is to install a Jake Brake (google for definition) I can make available to the women of my world, because the way I see it we’re both going to need it the deeper into the future we get.  The environment of our lives may be marshmallow soft compared to times past, but the ultimate load demand of creating and nurturing more life has not and really cannot change, that is a fixed value that will become nothing but a more severe contrast the easier technology and society makes the remainder of our lives.  The degree of acceleration needed to meet that demand has already shown itself to be destructive in a psychological/social/ethical sense in far to many cases, particularly for the male, a jake brake is what is called for to counterbalance the bolt-on NO₂ system and ignition upgrades equally needed by the male (the girls don’t get a choice in the matter) to produce that acceleration in the first place.  These... are deep changes, but desperately needed. 

Could the women folk install a jake brake as a part of their rebuilding of Womanhood future?  Yes, but not until society has been redefined concerning several primal structures to fully accommodate the changes she’d need to make to make it happen.  Since the function is obviously ever more needed NOW for the time being it’s quicker for the menfolk to take on that role on behalf of both genders as partial balance to the women folk carrying the burden of gestation for both.  How does the analogy translate into the man woman interface?  That gentle reader will take us deep into the erotic, deep into realms of sexuality as a function of psychological survival rather than the survival of the species, but that is a subject for another chapter.