I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about manhood and masculinity over the past year or so. I haven\u2019t been obsessive about it; it\u2019s not like I borrowed or bought a bunch of books and tore through them. There\u2019s still some stuff that I\u2019d like to read that I haven\u2019t really gotten around to. But it\u2019s been one of my dominant interests. Why is that?<\/p>\n
I think a part of it has to do with growing up, and thinking about what it means to be an adult, period. But I also have grown to think that there certainly is something about being a MAN in particular. It feels a little funny to say that, it\u2019s almost politically incorrect just to say that. The past few years have seen a lot of conversations about the complexity of gender and sexuality \u2013 we\u2019ve learnt that it isn\u2019t all that binary, that there are people who don\u2019t tidily fall into one category or another, and so on. And I think those things are valid and true, and I\u2019m happy to see progress on that front. I am a supporter of marriage equality, and I\u2019d like to see 377A repealed in Singapore. Trans people are people, and they should be treated with the same respect as anybody else. We should appreciate how difficult life is for them. So on and so forth.<\/p>\n
That said, I think there\u2019s something to be said for traditional gender roles for the majority of people. And again, there needs to be a caveat here \u2013 there are lot of ugly and toxic ideas out there, and history is full of them. Women should be free to be whoever they want to be, and they should be treated fairly and equally under the law, at the workplace, everywhere, really. And men shouldn\u2019t feel pressured to conform to an oversimplistic notion of masculinity \u2013 hiding their feelings and whatnot. Perhaps here might be an appropriate time to say, \u201cA real man doesn\u2019t really care very much about what it means to be a real man \u2013 he just does what he thinks is right, as informed by his values and beliefs, which he questions and evaluates\u2026\u201d<\/strong> you get the idea. Blind adherence to anything is dumb. Pay attention, reorient yourself, learn, blah blah.<\/p>\n ALL of that said (what a monster caveat), I think that there\u2019s something about gender that tends to get ignored or overlooked, at least in the intellectual\/writerly\/academic\/activist type circles. There are definitely differences between genders, in aggregate. We can observe this in nature (but yes, humans have in some senses been unshackled from nature\u2026 but in other senses we have not). There are still certain things about our biology that remain true. It\u2019s still true that it takes a woman about 9 months to carry a baby to term, and that a single man can impregnate thousands of women in a lifetime.<\/p>\n Around 8,000 years ago, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man. (This statistic seems weird, but it has to do with survival rates \u2013 a few men had most of the children that survived.<\/strong>) Apparently today\u2019s human population is descended from twice as many women as men, and this is described as the single most under-appreciated fact about gender. Throughout the entire history of our species, about 80% of women reproduced but only 40% of men did. Poor children were likelier to die. \u201cHead of the household\u201d was a definite thing.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know, as I try to trace my thoughts around all of this \u2013 it\u2019s just endlessly complicated, and it seems like you could spend your entire life trying to grasp all of it and never quite succeed. But I feel like it\u2019s something that\u2019s worth making sense of, because we all do live in a world of humans, and gender and sexuality is such a big part of who we are.<\/p>\n Anyway \u2013 what my experience and instinct has been telling me lately is \u2013 old habits die hard. It\u2019s unfashionable right now to say things like, \u201cwe\u2019re all products of our biology\u201d, or \u201cwe\u2019re shaped by our biology\u201d, even though we surely know that a part of it must be true. Yes, nurture and advertising and whatnot shapes the way we think and feel, as does language. But I think there\u2019s also something quite fundamental about our urges and impulses. I mean, why is infidelity such a rampant thing throughout all of humanity? Why aren\u2019t people able to be monogamous, despite incredible societal pressure and huge disincentives?<\/strong> It\u2019s easy and convenient to say something like, oh, those people didn\u2019t really want it \u2013 but why are there so many of them?<\/p>\n I guess as I get older, I find myself wanting to be clearer about the truth about how the world works, because trying to operate with a faulty model of the world is painful and frustrating<\/strong>. You\u2019ll screw yourself over and find yourself in shitty situations because you misread them.<\/p>\n I was having lunch recently and I noticed that the teenagers from the nearby school were all split into groups according to gender. Which is to say that girls hung out with other girls, and boys hung out with other boys, and there were no exceptions. I wonder what that is. Is it simply because we were \u201csocialized\u201d as kids to hang out with kids of other gender? I\u2019m sure some folks have done some research on it.<\/p>\n I HAVE seen some mixed groups of older teenagers before, and in my reading of the situation(s) (and maybe I\u2019m projecting), it usually seems like there are a couple of girls in a boy\u2019s space. There\u2019s this interesting process of experimentation that happens. I don\u2019t know how to describe the specifics, but now that I think about it I think Robert Cormier did a pretty good job with it in The Chocolate War, and Mean Girls did a pretty good job too. There is a gendered element to social groups<\/strong> \u2013 women seem to tend to have a group of female friends they call \u201cthe girls\u201d, and men similarly tend to have a group of male friends they call \u201cthe boys\u201d, and there\u2019s something about all of that\u2026 why is it the way it is? Why isn\u2019t it different? “The existence of purple doesn’t invalidate the differences between red and blue.”<\/p>\n I was also thinking about my own experience as a male student in an all-boys school, and how much I enjoyed that \u2013 and I saw something recently that implied that same-sex schools were a bad idea. I\u2019m not sure why but I just impulsively felt that that was wrong. That there\u2019s something that boys can learn only from men, and that thing, whatever it is, is important and good, and I think we have a deficit of that in the modern world, which is why I\u2019ve had friends ask me questions like \u201cwhy are fathers so lacking?”<\/p>\n It\u2019s all one big mess, and this doesn\u2019t even begin to properly outline what I think about it. This is all one big preamble. But I\u2019d like to have some clear thoughts about it. So I\u2019ll probably be developing this over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about manhood and masculinity over the past year or so. I haven\u2019t been obsessive about it; it\u2019s not like I borrowed or bought a bunch of books and tore through them. There\u2019s still some stuff that I\u2019d like to read that I haven\u2019t really gotten… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[330],"class_list":["post-10256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-essays"],"yoast_head":"\n