A Guy Called the Cops on Me, Insulted My Footwear, and Ruined My Weekend: An Essay on Gender
Sooooo, last Friday deadline, people. Let’s do it.
If you people keep clicking the links, I’ll keep posting until one of the nations I’ve mocked finally gets me. My money is on the French, but Belgium may surprise us all. Again. We’re looking at you, Leopold.
And, after I’ve spent a few weeks butting heads with another guy—and let me tell you, it’s been extremely manly—he brought the police to my home and then, in another confrontation, insulted my shoes. So, as you can all see, it’s very serious. Those poor shoes.
And see, this is the extraordinarily funny thing: I just used "manly" sarcastically, implying that something wasn’t up to standard. Specifically, that the insult wasn’t manly enough, right? But what exactly is manly? What’s performance? What’s virtue? What’s good, and what should be forgotten? Obviously, we don’t know.
I just wanted to tell the world that another guy insulted my shoes, and now here I am. I have to write a piece about masculinity. Great job, you idiot. Keep picking subjects that drive the readers away.
When we’re kids, this ideal gets hammered into us, this standard: manly. We’re supposed to love explosions, the smell of gasoline, and everything made of leather, those girly vegans be damned. We’re supposed to eat unhealthy food and drink beer, and God forbid you don’t make a reasonable amount of foam when you pee. And I hope you’re peeing standing up, or so help me!
And don’t even get me started on professions. If you’re a soldier, you’re fine. Firefighter? All good. Police officer? Kinda stripery, isn’t it? But what about guys who decide to be things like… teachers? Hairdressers? Nurses? Imagine a man choosing a profession where he gives care, nurtures people, and sees others when they’re vulnerable. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
When I started working on this piece, I asked my two closest friends whether I’m a guy with a lot of feminine traits, and apparently I’m not. I kinda wanted to be able to make that point, but it seems I’m this bubbling cauldron of masculinity and raw sexual energy that would give Arnold and Sylvester a run for their money, obviously. But beyond that, I actually love everything soft and squishy, chocolates, Grey’s Anatomy, and anything colorful, especially pink. And I care about a lot of things. A lot. Which is obviously very girly, right?
The need to prove that fact, being a man or not, may be the litmus test for a man in the year of our Lord of—for fuck’s sake, it’s too fucking late in history to be behaving like fucking cavemen! So, what? Are we putting a moratorium on masculinity and all things manly? Banning leather and bourbon forever? Nah, relax, you don’t need to stop drinking. Now breathe normally.
The thing about masculinity is that... it’s beautiful. Just like Shrek loves being an ogre, I love being a man. And I love even the clichés. I love whisky and bourbon, I love meat, I own both a classic car and a motorcycle, I am a little bit messy, love tools, and I love being big and strong. Hell, I love when I get into impromptu wrestling matches with my male friends, or when my trainer and I go all out those last 10 minutes of a session and we know we can’t really hurt each other too much because we’re matched in size and strength. Or picking up a girl you love in your arms like she’s just... a little flower and weighs nothing, and dancing with her in your arms? Or using your tools to make her life easier? Or just driving her around because you got a toy car as a boy just so you would always be willing to drive?
The worst things about masculinity are not directly part of it, you know?
And yes, yes, before anyone runs to comment, I know masculinity has some complicated facets. We’re competitive, we have a natural inclination toward violence, and we tend to be dominant. There’s a very short road from protective to possessive, and from protection to becoming the risk. We can get so good at being stoic that we become emotionally amputated. A little competitiveness can be healthy; too much can turn you into an anxious mess permanently measuring yourself against every other man in the room. And our sex drive can be... weird sometimes.
But the problem with what I call the male experience isn’t simply that we tend to butt heads like uncivilized rams when two men get close to the same woman. I’ve watched men I know do these ridiculous territorial displays in front of women, and I could say I’ve been immune to that of late, but I think I’d be lying. Otherwise, my friend probably wouldn’t have assigned me this subject. I suspect she wants me to do some internal reflection because my behavior has not exactly been exemplary lately. But I regret nothing.
If we were going to redesign masculinity, rewrite the rules for men, I think we would need to make two fundamental changes. The first would start ridiculously early. Tell boys, when they’re four years old or whatever: you’re an animal, and that’s fine. I don’t know what it feels like to be a woman, but I do know that my brain has been marinating in testosterone for something like twenty-three years, and from time to time the machinery gets a little difficult. We can be competitive, territorial, aggressive, horny, stupid creatures. I don’t know whether women can be described in exactly the same way. Probably sometimes. I genuinely don’t know. I sometimes think women, as a group, may simply be more civilized than us. There, I said it.
But maybe admitting that you’re an animal is healthier than pretending you aren’t one. If boys knew that wanting to butt heads like fucking goats occasionally doesn’t make them defective, maybe they could learn what to do with those impulses instead of either pretending they don’t exist or letting them run the entire show. Rivalry can even be fun. What is life without a little healthy rivalry? Or slightly unhealthy rivalry? Or, occasionally, extremely unhealthy rivalry that results in somebody insulting somebody else’s shoes?
The second change is much harder, because being animalistic is mostly just stupid. The thing we would actually have to fix if we wanted to fix masculinity is our relationship with emotion. Think about the shit young men are expected to metabolize while they’re still trying to figure out how the fucking world works. You can’t show the girl you like how much you like her, because apparently she’ll lose interest. You have to be perfectly nonchalant. Keep those emotions bottled up and under control, because if they escape and you actually confess how you feel, you’ll be rejected. Meanwhile, girls can tell their friends, "I love you, we’re going to be best friends forever," and nobody calls an emergency meeting about whether their femininity has survived the incident. Are we deliberately trying to create serial killers here?
And then there’s the other shit young men constantly hear: get a good job. Make money. Get the car. Get the credit card. Nothing gold; platinum or go home. You need these things so a woman will want you. Except these aren’t requirements women collectively published somewhere. There was no international congress of women where they drafted the minimum specifications for acceptable men. These are very often things men tell other men they need in order to qualify.
And we’re taught to hide pain. When I was very young, my baby sister—the miracle baby my parents had—died. I think that changed me in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. People came to our home and hugged my mother and cried with her, and I actually think that was a beautiful ritual. Some of the men hugged her tightly and cried with her too. Then they went to my poor father, who is every bit as emotional, maybe even more so, but much quieter about it, gave him a pat on the shoulder and told him, "You have to be strong for her."
Then they came to me. I was just discovering that apparently I was going to have a lifelong relationship with death, and I really dislike the sexual component of that relationship, because death fucked me with absolutely no love. It was a hate fucking. With zero lube and zero context, bang, zoom, your sister is dead. And they told me the same thing: "You have to be strong for your mother." The problem with me being me is that I thought that was stupid advice. So I spent a lot of time in bed with my mother crying for my baby sister. I could say we eventually got over it, but you never get over something like that, for fuck’s sake. You learn to live with it. The pain gets duller. It changes shape. But let’s not stay there too long.
Years later, I went through an absolutely brutal breakup, and everybody reacted as though I had just been released from prison. "Finally! Go out! Party! You’re a party animal! Get with a bunch of girls! Have fun! You’re free!" Ah yes, my engagement is over. Woo! Fuck that. Nobody seemed to understand how much I had loved that horrible monster. And yes, yes, you’ll say that if she was a monster, then I was better off without her. Sure. That doesn’t mean breathing stops hurting a little bit for a while. Knowing something was bad for you doesn’t magically abolish grief.
That’s part of the problem. Last Friday, I was talking with a couple of guys I consider brilliant, and they basically made the argument that romantic success and reproductive success can make or break your masculinity. And I found that genuinely offensive—not to women, but to men. So if I don’t have children, by that metric, I’m fucking worthless? Because I’m not. I don’t consider myself worthless. But an enormous number of men seem to derive their sense of value from being romantically successful and, eventually, reproductively successful.
And then you get someone like Andrew Tate, who takes the whole thing to its cartoonish endpoint: sex, women, reproduction, children, conquest, proof. And I find myself asking: why does he need a fucking little Andrew Tate? More importantly, why does society need more fucking Andrew Tates? What exactly do we gain if you have fourteen children, my man? Because I suspect the answer is nothing. Or that we downright lose, as a whole, so keep it in your pants. Please.
Somewhere along the way, we managed to convince men that their worth needs external certification. Money. Status. Women. Sex. Children. Other men looking at you and agreeing that, yes, congratulations, you have successfully completed the masculinity exam. And maybe that is the thing we actually need to get rid of—not masculinity, not whisky, not leather, not motorcycles, not wrestling your friends like fucking idiots, but the idea that being a man is something you have to keep proving. It is so fucking stupid it makes me want to scream. Instead of proving that you’re a man, fucking enjoy it! Whatever shape that takes in your mind, we should adopt the whole body positivity idea and be... masculinity positive... Dude likes shooting guns and throwing knives? I love that too, we can be friends. Dude likes to play with My Little Pony dolls and all the voices sound so fucking deep because dude just can’t do high notes? Count me in, my Rarity doll and I will come and play with you! Love chess? Let’s do it! Apnea? Fucking amazing! Paint our nails black, do corpse makeup, and go to an underground show of depressive black metal and drink really cheap vodka that tastes like bad decisions? No more than twice a month because I’m no longer a kid. Want me to hang out with you and your kids? Fuck yeah! Want me to hang out with you at a strip club? Not my scene, but I may tag along for a few minutes. Want to get the guys together and watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days? Fucking amazing!
Your soul is breaking because you had the best relationship of your whole life and you enjoyed it like nothing before, all 10 days of it, and now you’re depressed and want to mope around and tell me all the plans you made for your future together? I’m there!
Want to dress up as girls and hit the town for the sake of it? I would not recommend it because I’m not 20 anymore, but my dad bod could look great in a red dress. You know what? Let’s do it.
Why?
Because we’re fucking animals in the end! And we’re driven by instinct, and we have impulses, and we are individuals, and we are gonna die one day, so the same vibe, my only vibe: "Enjoy life in a safe and consensual way," also needs to apply to masculinity. We spend the first 15 years of the life of almost every kid teaching them that liking women is wrong or at least kinda gay, sex is shameful, strength is to be repressed, emotions are not to be felt, and then, when the machine snaps, people shake their heads and ask... "What could have been done differently?" Don’t know, you fucking idiots, maybe... don’t murder the little guy’s soul before he gets a chance to use it?
And for God’s sake, if you like her, fucking let her know... And if she rejects you, don’t act wounded, angry, or disappointed. Just move on and like someone else, because that interaction doesn’t affect your worth in any way, and that’s the beauty of it. Unless you’re the kind of dumb, dumb man that, in the middle of a very tense confrontation, insults the shoes of his opponent. In that case, I have no advice for you. I grant you no points. May God have mercy on your soul. Fucking idiot. Next time, I’m going nuclear. I’m going for his haircut!
Now, this should have been posted on Friday, so whatever you guys did during that weekend, I hope it didn’t involve drinking a full bottle of Jack Honey, banging your head very hard on... something, starting a fight over WhatsApp, reconnecting with your niece (Hi, you Ungrateful Potato!) and then waking up to your favorite person on the planet cleaning blood from your face. That would be shameful. Fucking sweet drinks, amirite?
Peace.