Pride and Prejudice 1995: Why Men Should Watch It
For the longest time, I was one of those young men who thought that Pride and Prejudice was the last thing I wanted to experience. I had internalized a prevailing social meme that often strikes young men: “Pride and Prejudice is stuffy,” said this meme, “it’s old-fashioned and is just about people getting married.” I was, you might say, prejudiced against it.
When, at the age of 22, I finally encountered the book in my college English class, I rolled my eyes. “Ugh,” I thought, “I’ve never wanted to read this!”
But, oh, how I was wrong.
I devoured Pride and Prejudice like a starving man wolfs down a feast, finishing the book in a few days and diving back into it so as to discuss it with my classmates as we worked through a chapter a week.
The wit! The sheer snarkiness of Austen’s humor! The characters who felt as alive and intriguing as any I had ever known!
Within a few pages, I had utterly changed my opinion on this book, and by the final sentence on the very last page, I was a transformed man. Why? Because, as I read, I not only discovered a wealth of brilliant work I had been blind to, I discovered a deeply ingrained (and dreadfully overlooked) part of myself that had been…
