Disintegrating Masculinity
Masculine. Masculine. Masculine. Masculine. Say this word until it completely disintegrates and loses all meaning. Until it is nothing more than a sound formed by your tongue’s and lips’ shape and proximity to each other. The masculine son and the holy father. The masculine cup of green tea. The masculine oak tree in summer.
Traditional masculinity is really… a fraud. It fits the definition of a fraud. Look, according to Dictionary.com:
fraud (n.): deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
Akin to a pyramid scheme, traditionally masculine men sculpt their sons in their image, for the promise of happiness and peace in their adult life by the virtue of “fitting in”. Have you heard the phrase, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results”? How can you know peace if anger is the only permissible emotion for you to express outwardly? Real men deal with their sadness on their own and never EVER seek therapy. Life is tough, like a week-old cookie, and so anything that makes life easier is a threat to the operating system.
It was marketed by our guardians that there is one way to be a masculine person. You’ve aged quite handsomely and realized that something about that definition has been inhibiting your human experience. You now know that the same way that saying the word “masculine” over and over disintegrates the word and loses its meaning, deconstructing the concept of masculinity into its subcomponents leads to the realization that it doesn’t exist in the real world. But if masculinity is not the sum of having a muscular figure, a buzzcut, an emotional wall, an uncontrollable sexual desire, and a deep voice that sounds like drilling into concrete, then what is it even?
It is not your fault, words have always placed humans under a spell. A trance of some sort. Don’t be fooled, for words are only a means to an end, and a lot of the times, that end is manipulation to buy into their worldview. We are in an age of many things: age of information, the digital age, and age of deconstruction. Our deconstruction era if you will. Ushered by Millennials and Gen Z, the age of deconstruction serves the same goal as does repeating a word over and over. Disintegration of meaning to a point where you can finally ask the question, “but what does it even mean to be masculine?”
After countless iterations of this question being asked, we arrive at ✨ progressive masculinity ✨. Still not quite there yet. There is still an assumption that masculinity is anything more than a tribal categorization system of roles, to maintain simplicity, efficiency, and predictability within a community. Sure, there is also the biological aspect: genitals, body hair, testosterone and estrogen levels, and what have you. But to go from there, all the way to saying, “people born with penises are better at decision-making and grilling meat” is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? It would make, however, an interesting sci-fi film depicting a dystopian caste system based on genitals. Sort of like the 1900s.
