Being a Man

Over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Scott H. Payne details some of the angst he endured in the days leading up to his recent wedding, and thinks out loud about what's he's learned and how it factors into what it means to be a man.

Payne posits that we men have been knocked down a couple of rungs on the hierarchical ladder, and deservedly so. Similarly, women have quite logically become more empowered to make up the gap.

Amusing as the Homer Simpsons, Jim Belushis, and Kevin James’ of the world might appear on the surface, not only do I find them an offensive and unnecessarily inaccurate depiction of my gender, I also think them thoroughly destructive to our overall cause. An empowered and strong woman is, at least in my experience and estimation, ill-satisfied and paired with a dullard as a counterpart, and if we are to address many of the pressing issues that face us today, we are best suited to have everyone — male and female, man and woman — firing on as many cylinders as possible.

I remember when I made the decision to leave the workforce and stay at home with our newborn son for his first year, my male peers acted as if I was resigning from the human race.

So clearly branded with the mistaken concept that men are defined by their careers and not by what they bring to the family dynamic, co-workers warned that I would either go insane from lack of interaction, or I would effectively be committing career suicide.

None were willing to concede that perhaps there was a greater calling in life than meetings, lunches, and a paycheck.

It is in this regard that I think the women of the world have as much at stake in encouraging a productive discussion about what it means to be a healthy man in this twenty-first century as we males ourselves do. The outcome will, in part, determine how we choose approach and cultivate the next generation of sons (and daughters) into will-be fathers and husbands. The conversation needs be seen as a forward moving dialogue that does not seek to brush aside the daming critiques of patriarchal dominance, but rather takes those truths to heart and seeks to find ways of discerning an equal strength in manhood that is augmented by its sensitivity to those truths. We might seek to build a platform of manhood that lifts all of the benefits of classically pragmatic male sensibility and marries it with the requisite softness of soul to feel into the spaces we deserve to live, breathe, and be.

On Being A Man , via The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Half-life of friends: 7 years

LiveScience details the completely unsurprising fact that we tend to replace half of our stable of close friends about every seven years, and we tend to find new friends in the same places we got our old ones.

Stunning.

I'm not sure what this means in the era of MySpace and Facebook, where little effort is required to tag someone as a "friend", and maintaining the "friend" designation takes even less trouble. Without getting into the qualities and qualifications of what constitutes a "close" friend, it's difficult to apply any real-world test to this data.

I wonder if the whole thing doesn't take us back to caveman days, when we operated in smaller clans, and if you got too small self-defense became a challenge, while growing too large meant difficulties in transport, nutrition, and other pack-like events.