Man Alive
rediscovering maleness
Men are beautiful, powerful creatures.
I know so many men that I admire, so many that inspire me. I’m privileged to count many of them among my friends. And they don’t inspire me in that dull, tepid vein of masculinity proffered by glorified content-dumpsters like Elite Daily— “Ten Ways to tell if you’re a REAL MAN”— because there’s nothing inspiring about someone reading me a set of rules. Fuck that.
The men that inspire me are nuanced, textured animals, with pains and powers and graces that detonate any boxes set in place around them.
It’s touchy to identify and celebrate the textures of maleness, because we’ve anxiety about the way we’ve annexed those textures away from women unfairly in the past. Everyone should have access to these rough-and-tumble ideas and experiences, and men, by the same turn, shouldn’t be confined within a sort of tough shell, locked away from their own tenderness. Gender is a spectrum, as so many contemporary thinkers like to remind us.
But there was never a binary implicit in maleness for me. There was just the male creature, there, a creature that hurts and rages and runs and leaps and dances with the same breadth of experience at his disposal as the female or any other point along the shining human gradient. My fellow men. Existing. I was never interested in men that didn’t express themselves.
The song “I Enjoy Being A Girl” isn’t necessarily seen by people as a reinforcement of “feminine” essentialisms, but as a celebration of a spectrum of textures and experiences. It’s a reveling in a particular aesthetic, a particular set of experiences.
I see so much drama and thick reality in the experience of maleness that none of those “list” articles are ever going to capture. Just about every assessment of maleness I’ve seen on the internet recently is an assessment of maleness in relation to women, or in relation to a problem, or in relation to a specific model of manhood, a set of dos and don’ts that attempt to curb our issues with contemporary male aggression via proscription and aspiration towards some kind of suit-wearing, call-returning, door-opening, always-on-time, always-supportive, faceless mannequin.
You see this shit right here? You see this?
http://i0.wp.com/ilovemylsi.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/the-real-power-of-a-man-.png?resize=500%2C707
You can take that and shove it right up your ass, world. You can go fuck yourself. My power and identity do not come from my ability to please someone else.
I don’t think people develop shining, effective identities based on proscription, based on lifeless cardboard cutouts like that. Based on what other people think they should be. I think that kind of development requires inspiration. So when I feel lost in terms of my drive, fire, ethics, or identity, I look to men that inspire me. Not to lists of fucking rules.
http://youtu.be/4wfJE40znI0?t=2m32s
We’re not just here to build products and perform disruptive corporate takeovers, either. In the era of the tech startup, the Steve Jobs model of masculinity’s emerged as the newest one-dimensional rubric by which we’re measured. Never mind that Steve himself was a complex man with storied wounds and passionate visions who advocated staunchly for experimentation with LSD; his primary role as a myth post-death has been to exhort men to Make Successful Products, which is the role men have been jammed into for thousands of years; Think Different indeed.
But Steve was beautiful, in his own way, just like these other men are beautiful. My goal here isn’t to tear anyone down. No, quite the opposite. I want to understand and demonstrate the possibilities, because I know how easy it is, as a modern man, to lose sight of them.
I want to identify with what I feel in my body when running up a mountain trail or concentrating over a watercolor painting or singing along with a group of musicians. I want to relocate my understanding of my identity in my physical form, not in online forum debates about identity politics. And I want the expression of that identity to be messy, and I don’t want it to only have validity in relation to another person or a rote social movement or a set of obligations to the culture or to a partner.
I think that element of vitality, more than anything else, is what keeps me caring for myself and striving to be a better person. A vision of being myself, being male, and being someone I can believe in.
Why, for example, did this father start hopping trains when he was young? And why, when he got older, did he take his son with him to do the same thing?
http://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/train-travel/Rolling-Nowhere-Part-Two.html
There’s something at the core of each of us that resists classification, that resists routine, that resists dimming and darkening itself. That retains fine, worn intricacy of identity, the same way this man’s memories of riding the rails did. Those memories, that skillset, those experiences, they belong to him, and he passed them along to his son. They can’t be mass-produced or easily summarized.
These things, when I cultivate my “manhood”, are the kinds of things I care about. I don’t mean, here, that generosity and care for the community and for my friends and partners aren’t qualities that I admire or try to exemplify. But I have a deep worry that one of the reasons so many men respond badly or ineffectively to exhortations that they take on responsibility, that they curb themselves, that they be a particular way, is because they have no idea WHY they’re doing it.
“You must do X” is only meaningful if one knows who “you” is. The men I admire most carved their core values out themselves. So when I look at them, I see, not perfect adherence to a particular standard, but a unique personality that awakens me to the possibilities in my own life. I don’t want to be the same as them— I want to discover my own version.
And that version does not exist just to please other people. That version of me is constructed of my experiences. It resonates with the things I’m in love with. I’m driven, not by some bullshit external standard, but by a romance with reality and the world that makes deep sense to me. That inspires me. That bears me aloft on my own memories and consistencies. These values of mine are often related to my love for other people, but I decide what values. I decide which people.
You’ll notice a lot of the examples I’ve used have been musicians and performers. I can’t help it— they inspire me. Here, I get to see inside the emotional lives of these men. I see them being incredibly powerful, and at the same time I don’t see them trying to be strong or perfect. These men annihilate that binary. Their raw vulnerability and their power are the same thing.
I can’t resist a whole person; a man who expresses sides of himself that are complicated, unique, nuanced, singular, riddled with feeling and memory. Bristling chest hair, thinning heads, lanky limbs, barrel bodies, living wounds with fire in their bellies. I can’t resist an explosive man, because that’s where I get my fuel. These men are not incomplete. None of us are, no matter how hard the culture tries to sell us otherwise.
But please, only take all these images as a starting point for this conversation; that’s all I intend. Even better, show me the men that inspire you. That’s what I really care about. I need to know. I need to see. Because that shining image isn’t going to look the same for me as it does for you. And it shouldn’t. That’s the entire point.
Of course, the most inspiring men in my life are the men I actually know— because I get to see everything. I get to see all the little things you do to make the world better and more interesting, every day, that the world will never credit you for. And there are plenty of you that could give any celebrity example in this thread a run for their money.
You know who you are, guys, and I salute you. Keep being you. Hard. I love every single second of it.
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