WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MALE?

Given that the role of the male has changed mainly in matters of degree, rather than substance, over the last few thousand years, this is an odd time to be male. Hunting and gathering is now conducted online or in offices. Fatherhood is now as much a legal condition as mental or biological. The men folk, once the local muscle power and mental elite, are now the machine-herds and code-tenders. Even war is now something which can happen in the third person.

Masculinity has changed into a conversation piece. Sport has replaced most of the violence, and your sexuality is whatever it happens to be. That makes sense, because the nearest thing to a masculine expectation the average male is required to fulfill is to be what he claims to be. Not too challenging, really.

Most of the stereotypes are obsolete. It’s difficult to be the huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ type, because there’s not much left to hunt, shoot or fish. The executive type was fashionable for a while, but kind of dull. The criminal is glitzy but inclined to be away for long periods. The activist/revolutionary has been around since the French Revolution, and is basically noisy, self righteous, and interminable. The redneck generic equivalent is noisy, self righteous, and uneducated, even with multiple degrees. Not a great choice. Enlightened pauper-hood is out of fashion. Being rich is still in style, somehow.

From being “who” you are to being “what” you are evidently wasn’t much of a step, conceptually. Men can be young or old, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy… tack on that “M”, and that seems to be about it. You don’t actually have to be male to do any of that. There seems to be something missing. Being male, once, meant something other than a bit of cheesy demography and psychoanalysis.

I don’t think men are “confused about their identity” or “trying to adapt to a changing society”. Most males couldn’t give a damn about that. As a sex, nobody can make us give a damn. Nor are we under any obligation to follow whatever fluffy little sets of social etiquette and personal protocols flow from the unrestrained orifices of the self-proclaimed intelligentsia, or the rest of the dog food manufacturing process.

Being male can be a bit demanding, believe it or not. The role varies a bit. Notable males over the last few thousand years include Da Vinci, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Socrates, Demosthenes, Shaka Zulu, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Vlad The Impaler, Sun Yat Sen, Gandhi, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, Mel Blanc, The Marx Brothers, Beethoven, Mozart, the Huxleys, Voltaire, Humphrey Bogart, Max Ernst, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Jerome K. Jerome, H.G. Wells, Danny Kaye, George Marshall, Rudolf Nureyev, Wallace Wood, Bill Elder, Leonard Bernstein, and Attila The Hun.

A fairly mixed bag, in a rather small selection. Not a suit among them, either. Sorry, guys. However, this diversity tends to create a suspicion than perhaps being male is more than a question of being pointed in a particular direction by your anatomy. Could well be that there is more to being male than that. The social role, historically, is obvious. The role of the individual is much more difficult to place.

It’s like suddenly half the actors have to write their own scripts, in the middle of a play. The set, however, isn’t really cooperating. Try being a swashbuckling grocer, or a Wild Man Of The White Goods Department. There probably was a time when the call of the wild could make itself heard over the chat shows, pornography, poker, and therapy sessions, but not for a while.

Women made a good argument about “the role” of women, after a hundred or so years of trying to explain their position. Half of the entire human species took that long to get a rational perspective applied to them. There are parallels for men. Instead of a housewife, the guy is supposed to be Something In A Suit. Instead of a sex object, the guy is supposed to be a multimillionaire stud, dressed to the tens, and dripping materialism from every protrusion and cavity. So rich that people have orgasms thinking about his bank statements.

Well, according to the marketing morons, anyway. The image of a male is always a sales pitch for something… just not noticeably a human being. The guy can be a street thug, a middle class robot, relentlessly gay, redneck to the toenails, whatever, but there it is; The Great Idiotic Cookie Cutter In The Big Blue Sky. An average is created, and stuffed with merchandise. Typically, the idea that this degree of banality could annoy anyone has yet to have any impact on the advertising industry in the last 50 years. Occasionally some fool tries to be male-egalitarian, putting all of us on the same plane, and just makes it worse. It fascinates me that anyone, at least anyone breathing, could not know how irritating that really is.

It is arguable that a society which barely deserves to be called “a shopping list with taxes” could only produce images like these. The systemic devaluation of the human being is now so far advanced that nothing can work as a personal image without a jingle. Men, of course, are pretty easy pitches. Sex appeal, peer values, security, it’s a no-brainer. Somehow your shirt is your identity. Your car is your libido, and your self-esteem is that easy to manipulate.

This delightful wankfest also extends into character roles, courtesy of mass media, that well known refuge for genius: Being a total jerk is also acceptable. The hard man of the toilet sales franchise, or the Mussolini of used cars. The sleazy bastard in the office. The criminal piglet. The slimy businessman. If you don’t have a personality you can swipe one. Not only can you look like someone else, but with a bit of rehearsal, you can be someone else. In newborn chickens it’s called imprinting.

Here we have the other tool kit for male egos. Fear is the driving principle. Testosterone is a strange thing. It can turn any male into a killer, but it also drives the adrenals. To cause fear has always been a defence. To scare others is a cheap and easy way of providing security. To be scared into a defensive/offensive role or image is also easy. Just add the paraphernalia, and your identity is anyone’s guess. It’s what it looks like that sells. Men buy self images as weapons.

So you don’t look like a clothes salesman’s retirement fund, you look “dangerous”. Your rather hackneyed efforts to embezzle someone or something become “smart”, and you were only caught because some loser accidentally happened to notice those few missing millions. He also cheated, using a spreadsheet and an IQ with more than two digits. The gun, with which you may or may not be able to hit anything, is a “male statement”, not an expensive excuse for someone to shoot you. Being a geriatric geek is “patriarchal”, not pitiful, and indicative of how little you’ve learned in all those years. Patriarchy gives you authority, in theory, so you can scare people with that, if nothing else. Whatever it is, it’s used as a weapon, as much as a gun.

The messy interactions of males with their world are a sort of black comedy. Not a great one, but an interesting series of slapstick moves. The wannabe stamp collections of self-images bump into each other with an idiot regularity. This is where the market logic breaks down a bit. Somewhat sadly, not everybody is a store-bought image. It’d be nice if everyone could just flutter about among their own self-delusions, but some of the personal image stuff is a real liability. The “dangerous” look can be put to the test, and probably will be, by any sufficiently irritated guy. Being “smart” can get you a very long way up a very well known creek, without a canoe. A gun, under nearly all circumstances, will definitely get you the kind of deference that only a nice funeral can really explain. Being male-authoritative will inevitably bring you into conflict with just about every other male in any environment.

So where does all this imagery get us? A bloody long way from ourselves, into situations the guys that have lived through them wouldn’t spit on… love the odd euphemism…

There’s three billion men on this little planet. We’re being sold a particularly implausible pup, daily. How could this load of constipation possibly be “who we are”? Who asked to be told how to be male? I could not possibly give a damn what anyone thinks of me, in actual fact. That’s mainly because I’m now on the profit side of the ledger, where I’ve learned enough to know what matters to me.

Not so easy for the younger guys. Being trapped in the ridiculous, cheapskate, Neanderthal “youth culture” obviously isn’t much fun for independent thinkers. Peer groups are toxic to personal independence. People get buried in them. How many kids have blundered in to something really destructive, on the basis of a peer group? Must be billions of them, all dragged in to the massive group vortex of their teens. I think that’s why we’ve had this obscene little image-scam about how great it is to be young, poor and on the street since the 1970s. It sells well to the middle class kids, who don’t know any better. The male image, for a young male, is Macho Uber Alles. Conformity or death, as the suicide rates seem to agree.

Worse, it’s repressive. The ignorance is brutal. Kids get stomped on by their environment. God knows things weren’t really that great in the brain-dead Golden Ages of Western suburbia, but it wasn’t anywhere near this bad. Just as a final insult, it’s practically compulsory. Kids can’t avoid most of the crap they get hit with on a daily basis. They’re structured into a system which in some cases is literally killing them. There are more teen suicides per year than deaths in most recent wars. Really sounds like fun. You couldn’t pay me to be a teenager these days.

To give due credit to the poor bastards, they’re obviously not fools. It seems that the current generation is virtually unfindable by the dogma-gods of marketing. That really is a major achievement, the first generation in history not to be held hostage by the machine. Selling to them is tough, because they’ve got better sources of information and their own networks. They’re hard to dictate to, and nobody seems to quite know what they’re into, beyond being online and hyperactive all the time.

I think what we males need is some built-in sales resistance. This may well be how to get it. We’ve just had 20+ years of “greed is good”, “conspicuous consumption”, “dress to impress”, “selling yourself”, “designer drugs” and the rest of the consumer-slavery dunghill opera. Most of this is paying for a very limited series of design choices, conceptual and personal, nearly all of which are much the same. Most of this is in the name of marketing. Things aren’t manufactured because they’re any good, they’re produced purely on a cost return basis. Does anyone really believe that the stunningly unimaginative, spectacularly boring rubbish being passed off as men’s clothes is the result of an art?

Whether anyone likes it or not, we males, as a group, have the economic muscle to force the market to change its ways. We can make a buyers’ market out of this gendercide, clear across the board, and the boardrooms. Nobody has to buy this crud. Sickly colors, vomit motifs,… who ever asked for that?

This applies in the wider spheres, too. One of the reasons the modern male is more of an accounting exercise than an actual human being is the way modern business and economic practices remove any possibility of human life. Nobody specifically asked for insane market policies, either.

For examples, these little triumphs can go and live with the chickens, too:

Planned obsolescence be damned. What’s so impossibly difficult about just ripping out an old bit and sticking in a new one occasionally? How the hell does anyone benefit from the desperate need to buy a new toaster every few years? Shoes that are unwearable, and actually dangerous to posture, are good for what? Shirts that can barely stand contact with water, sunlight or air, are proving what philosophical point? Because they aren’t proving any commercial points.

First, we kill all the sophists and hack number jugglers…

User pays… for Wilbur and Orville Wright’s early education, presumably, in the airline industry. That’s been a big money spinner, and it’s killed more companies than will ever be known. No attempt at improved efficiency or better cost structures, or (perish the thought) a realistic cost base. Just add on to prices, trying to make a profit out of a lousy, operation. Then keep doing the same old things, just as badly. Then wonder what’s going wrong. Share costs, don’t just load everything on to a unit price. You’re supposed to be selling product, remember, not bookkeeping lessons.

This applies to any industry you can name. Result is that nobody can function without being virtually neutered at birth by costs.

Have a look at the “male” image as it stands:

Job: Corporate clown suit, non-customizable. Paid poverty. Locked into affordability, at whatever level.

Car: One step away from a slot car, far less durable. Major liability, in terms of costs and potential for costs and injuries.

Career: Based on whatever half-baked, under-medicated, cost-center-driven, institutionalized slopfest some sad little pack of gerbils/managers has managed to glue together with their lousy grip of mathematics.

Relationships: Based on possible diseases, neuroses, and lawsuits.

Lifestyle: Whatever more or less fits on a credit card, and doesn’t interfere with the mortgage and Death Wish 10 school fees. Try and live through eating whatever you can afford, and wherever you can put a roof over your head. Then think about health insurance, if you’re lucky. Attempt, nobly, not to get killed by the 20-25% mental illness factor, the epidemics, and the general all round total incompetence of the society to handle any of its problems.

Recreation: Various expensive poisons, and media created by some form of insect suffering regular overdoses of diuretics. As light relief from this excessive intellectual stimulus, there are the regular global/local disasters, and the odd funny war for people to be intelligent about on camera.

Talk about fun, I almost became a coroner. This is a life fit for a human being? Masculinity, as defined by what? This is for cockroaches. “Scuttle around among the appliances, and look busy. The world will be a better place if you wear a tie. Be a man! Grovel for a career! Everyone else has genital herpes, why not you?” All just performance anxiety in different forms of drag. Some of it is personal, some is financial, all of it does damage.

What’s wrong with:

“To hell with you. We don’t need you. We don’t have to do any of this. It’s useless. Come up with some sane prices. Stop pretending just marking up existing prices is profit. Stop destroying disposable income. Get the laws workable. Make education a rational process. Get rid of the spin doctors and market psychologists, the sycophantic executive trash, and the dead guys who get paid to just watch the wheels go around while they spend weeks or years nitpicking on any available subject. They’re what’s killing your profits, anyway. Enough of the lousy, unprofitable job designs, where we’re paying for the money you’re not making.

Take some risks, for once in your bloody lives. Nothing big ever happened because people played safe. How does doing exactly what everybody else is doing make you more competitive? Get out of the damn meetings, and back into the real world. ”

The theory here is that if anything is going to be done better, it has to be done differently. Maybe not done at all, replaced entirely. Imagine not having to deal with every petty piece of circumstantial garbage this mindless behavior pattern generates.

Most of human life, for some reason, is about money. Anyone who moves in with better prices and better deals will get somewhere. This society is ready for the scrap heap anyway, why not push it there a bit faster, and take the ridiculous, insulting, “male role” with it? Redesign human life completely, into something worth living?

Just as an added sweetener, think how many useless, soft, overpaid, obstructive, inept, scum would be removed. Nobody would ever have to think about them again, or listen to the grinding, ingratiating drivel of trivial little self-serving egos. (I’ve often wondered why some of these managerial bric a brac are employed by anyone. Sentimental reasons, I suppose…)

Life generally gets tough because someone makes it tough. This isn’t a society any more, it’s an obstacle course. The next generations are going to get creamed, if somebody doesn’t start kicking heads. Time for a bit of testosterone to start doing its thing, and generating some respect. Whatever you believe in, whatever you care about, this maundering mess has got to go. It’s costing everyone a fortune, it’s getting nothing done, and it’s wasting people’s lives in the process.

No, ladies, being male isn’t a license to be a sort of randomized jerk. Maybe that can be proven, after all.