I and others say masculinity is under attack. The response is usually about the worse of men. We’re told it’s being redefined also as jot to bully or harass women. What is meant by harassing women is so loosely defined as to be saying hello to a woman. Real harassment is more likely to be ignored as it’s much easier to bully men who are trying to be good believing that they are faulty in some way. Those who really are doing real harassment and don’t care will ignore this but let’s look at what men and masculinity truly are.
If we talk about women getting off the Titanic it’s dismissed in some way or ignored. Yet that is what masculinity is all about. If we talk about men storming the beaches on D-Day there’ll be a false claim that men start wars and women don’t want them. The men are tasked with defending the family, the women and children, and have successfully done that for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there are 8 billion of us on the planet. Somebody’s doing something right. I would say both men and women. You could say it’s too many but these are problems of success not of failure. When humanity started there were maybe a few hundred people and it could have ended there but it didn’t. During that time men have sacrificed themselves for the family. Men have often done the back breaking work, when back breaking was not a figure of speech. Men have died and been injured often while women and children are safe.
One example is travelogues. Many TV series show travelling around another country often by train. Often they’ll come to a bridge or a tunnel and the commentary will mention some number of men died building it. Never a number of women. Men remain in the difficult and dangerous jobs. Is this some kind of weird fetish of men? I think not.
Was there a vote cast a long time ago in the human race to see who would defend against the sabre tooth tiger or hunt the hairy mammoth and did the men say “Me, Me, Me. I want it to be torn apart by the sabre tooth tiger”. No, of course not. You really think men are that stupid? Perhaps you do but I disagree.
Men, like the males of most species, have to appeal to the females, women, and to do that they have to stand out. The goal is not to be eaten by the tiger but to defeat it. If the man does that then he’s appealing to the women. He can’t say to her. Why don’t you do it? You can be sure that any man who said that did not find favour with women and is had no children and his genes don’t appear in the human genome today. The goal is to fight or at least defend against the tiger and survive. Not surviving, being eaten, is a negative outcome but if you survive you get the prize. You procreate. You have children.
So the men that exist today are often bold, adventurous and brave. Some are bold in self serving ways but most are bold in a way that serves women and those men have children. So men are at least the offspring of the ones who won against the tiger and that meant the human race survived.
Hard to think that they’re all bad. They’re not. Men are good.
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