In today’s society, outdated and out of touch definitions of manliness are everywhere. From commercials about game day tail-gating to presumptions of Friday night beer drinking, strip clubs and late night poker, our culture is in the business of telling men what they should consume and what they should act like while they’re doing it….
Please take five minutes and watch this presentation by psychologist Philip Zimbardo on “The Demise of Guys”, and tell me what you think. “Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they’re totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static,…
Boys don’t cry. Don’t be a wimp. Stop being selfish. Be a man about it. You’re not good enough. Sound familiar? “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” – Robert Bly…
It sometimes feels as if we’re caught between the old model of aggressive and combative manhood, where everything is a battle, and the new, kinder, gentler man, for whom everything is a compromise. And we don’t have a whole lot of examples of men walking the middle path in our modern culture. It’s either Die Hard or…
Evidently, to be a man, you must drive a pickup truck (or motorcycle), eat at BBQ joints, go fishing, do your own home improvement, watch a lot of pro sports and auto racing, subscribe to sports and men’s magazines, and eat a lot of “salty snacks”. At least according to Sperling’s Best Places, Weber Shandwick,…
In my reading, both on the web and in print, I’ve come across two basic types of men: those who believe that their development as a person and as a man is finished (and anyone who thinks differently is some kind of girly-man or should ‘get over it’), and those who are willing to go…
I recently stumbled across a web page from “Radical Conservative” (an anonymous blogger who apparently lives to bash people who don’t believe as he (she?) does) called Retrosexual Code. The Code is full of so many tired stereotypes that I can’t help but feel sorry for the person who wrote it. I’m going to help…
One of my favorite t-shirt designs has a picture of a TV with a hypnotized-looking person staring at it, and the caption, “Why do you think they call it programming?” So it probably goes without saying that I don’t watch (or even own a) TV. I just can’t bring myself to expose my family to…
