Being a Man

Much mucking about, slogging, via the Internet, through the unreason of the Pretentious Many on the subject of Masculinity (Who gives a fuck about femininity?  But wherever you've got a nice thread going on the subject of men and why they act the way they do--comes forth some knuckle-dragging female telling the whole world, over and over again, why she does not shave her legs as a symbol of her resistance to the 'Patriarchy,' and what her legs look like unshaven from several different perspectives, and why, once again, it's an insult to her femininity to shave them), I've discovered that there are two basic views of Masculinity:  (the only probably true and scientific one, that it's something innate in the character of most men) Essentialism, and (utter horseshit, piped through the sewer of Foucault from the original dungpit of Freud, by women who envy, hate and fear it, and men who never had much of it and so are anxious to deny that anybody else did either, e.g., John Stoltenberg and Michael S. Kimmel) Social Constructionism.  God what lengths the unmanly will go to, to assuage what must be the dreadful certainty at their hollow centers that they are silly, weak and contemptible!   Well, just to hasten their implosion--not that you'd want to come to me for testosterone implants or anything--I am and always have been Masculine.  Partly or mostly, it's a negative thing, sure, and it means that I have no Feminine Nature (even my Gay Nature is Butch); and indeed I would despise myself and try to compensate for it if I thought I did have some taint of the feminine; because, frankly, effeminate men and nasty women repulse me as strongly as sexy masculine men attract me.  And let's not even approach the subject of autogynephilia, transsexualism, and Lorena Bobbit.  Transphobe is what I am--and keep away from me!   Still,

I may have gone too fast.  Vanity, incuriosity, and a certain incapacity for reflection have led to some major misconceptions about men among women and the curious fellows that emulate them.  Women, and their imitators, commonly suppose, for example, that, because men make less display of their feelings than women, they feel less, and less sympathetically, than women do.  And, counting the display of feeling a vanity too insignificant to quibble over, men seldom bother to contradict this doubtful, if not false, assessment of their affective natures.  Yet it must be allowed that certain feelings, stronger than any we see exhibited  by women or effeminate males, are the hallmark of unalloyed virility; chief among them the horror that all true men have of genital mutilation.  A man (or a woman) who would do that to a penis is not only somebody we don't want to know, he (or she) is someone we'd just as soon know nothing about.