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Manly Preferences
Which is the more manly preference: 1) the practical, 2) whatever one feels like, and to heck with anybody’s opinion of it, or 3) the opposite of whatever women like?
For example, soaps. A female friend once observed that I was the only guy she knew who buys scented hand soap. Undoubtedly, many guys would say it is unmanly to care about scents. But obviously they do care. Otherwise, they would sometimes get the scented and sometimes the unscented because they don’t pay attention to the labels. The way I figure it, if a soap that smells like coconut or lemon costs no more than soap than smells like lye, then it is practical to buy the soap that smells better. I can understand as a man not wanting to smell like flowers. But fretting about scents while pretending to not care doesn’t strike me as very manly.
Is it manly to dress in whatever is comfortable and suits one’s own personality? Or is it manly to dress according to what society expects of him? Suits, for example, were invented by Northerners who need multiple layers to stay warm. Is it manly to cook in the Southern summer sun? If cargo pants with many pockets are useful but not stylish, which is more practical and/or manly: utility or conformity?
Is it more manly to love a dangerous activity because of its dangers or despite its dangers? Does a man enjoy being daring? Or is he merely willing to be daring? In such scenarios, what’s the difference between a man’s man and an idiot?
Beards? Mustaches? Clean-shaven? Is this decision purely subjective?
Feel free to propose your own crossroads.
Published in Culture, General
Good thing for Misthiocracy is that he carries an “alarm” whistle to defeat his Thunderdome opponents.
I firmly believe that definitive, intelligent action requires some sort of distanced analysis as well to succeed. :)
Are not a lot of these great manly qualities (competence, protectiveness) also great womanly qualities? Apart from shaving with a Bowie knife (and I agree that is important) what’s the difference? Is the opposite of manly unmanly or womanly?
There’s a theory that play is practice. Wolf cubs chase and bite and wrestle to prepare for hunting and real combat. Likewise, boys pretend to battle and hunt so that as men they are prepared to battle and hunt.
So, in a roundabout way, we could chalk up the daring involved in stupid teenage antics to preparing for the risks in business, family, and jokes about Democrats.
You say alarm whistle, I say HYPERSONIC DETH BEAM!!!
Potato potahto…
Seems I can only accomplish that in the form of blazingly intelligent and on-point Internet comments.
The real world, no so much…
The opposite of manly is unmanly.
So say I.
Ah, but that provides ammunition for those who want boys to sit down, be quiet, listen, and be good, all the time, because that’s the kind of work environment that’s waiting for them, even for many (most?) in the military of the future, and hunting is now a pastime rather than a necessity of survival.
Traditional manliness has become a luxury good. Maybe that’s why progressives hate it so much. They hate any luxury good that modern society makes available to the masses at low cost.
oh, dang… I just described this man in an essay. (ok, it’s hidden somewhere in the middle of the thing). Not yet posted… later today.
And yes. Quilting, working on cars, playing an instrument, these are all manly things because they are creating, as Arahant points out. But that short-cropped bearded fellow wearing the scarf and the black-rimmed glasses, who picks up a guitar at every party he goes to and starts blessing us all with his teary-eyed folk music… that’s the guy you’re talking about. He wants to sound deep in the coffee shops until you have the audacity to interject an alternate viewpoint, and then he calls you offensive and says he can’t handle your overly-political personality, then runs off crying into his craft-beer.
I really resent the craft-beer part, because I love craft beer. But so does he. What a jerk.
Manliness has no virtue component. it is a completely separate attribute.
Those are examples of productive artists whose art was of a high quality, which supports my axiom that manliness is about form following function.
Hemingway would not have been manly if he’d been a lousy writer. He simply would have been a drunk, womanizing, bum.
Salvador Dali was manly, again because he was hard-working and his art had value. Take away his work ethic and his artistic talent and he would have been an eccentric mental-case, reminiscent of The Joker.
Weirdness doesn’t kill manliness, but weirdness without good effect does.
(Furthermore, if Hemingway or Dali had made their livings from N.E.A. grants, that would also have killed their manliness. Hemingway and Dali submitted to no government.)
Argr.
Is that a pirate growl?
Oh I disagree. I think virtue is a prerequisite for manliness.
Take what you can get! :) I’m impressed ….
Well, everyone needs something that matters!
No, just an old Norse word for unmanly. Had you called a viking that, you’d be taking an island walk (holmgang) within a week.
a) Why does he love craft beer? Can he even tell you the reason, in an intelligible and non-pretentious way?
b) Actually, I would suggest that the statement “I love craft beer” could qualify as pretentious, arguably, and could therefore be considered unmanly.
After all, surely you cannot genuinely claim that you love all craft beer. There must be some craft beers that you don’t like, and surely there are MANY craft beers you’ve never tried.
A more manly version of the statement would be “I love trying different craft beers, and there are some craft beers I really love.”
I had a friend (no longer a friend) who loved to attack people for being pretentious, but he was really just being a working-class snob. He’d attack, for example, my fondness for Guinness. “You’re just trying to look superior!”
Well, no, actually, I happen to genuinely enjoy Guinness. It’s really quite a unique beer. It’s not a average beer in a fancy label. It genuinely tastes different, and I happen to enjoy that taste more than I enjoy Molson Canadian or Labatt Blue.
The difference between me and the hipster d-bag who “loves craft beer”? My statement is logically plausible and factually defensible.
I think Tuck nailed it, and Bruce Campbell showed it. Ineffable? We’ll see about that.
Picture the scene. My son and his wife have just delivered their first baby. The midwife reaches in between them to check on the baby. They both, honest to G-d, growl at her. Momma’s being womanly and Dad’s being manly. It’s not what you do. It’s why you do it.
Why is Ricochet turning into a fashion blog?
First the Yoga pants post, now the scented soap post.
What’s next?
Shall we discuss the cultural significance of sweater vests? A girl in a Las Vegas bar once asked me if I was gay because I was wearing a sweater vest.
Cowboy boots are what girls wear around here.
What did you say?
Well, perhaps the 1 thing we can all agree on, is that sweater vests are the opposite of manliness.
Am I right?
No. I said no.
Most of what’s being discussed in this thread, I posit, is mere fashion. From a book I’m currently reading:
“Indeed, in many ways, he was the epitome of a Sasanian: tall and handsome, in the imposing manner expected by the Persians of their royalty, and with an exceptional talent, even by the standards of his forefathers, for playing the dandy. Just as the great banner that billowed above his tent glimmered with fabulous adornments, so did the king himself: for it was his habit to sport, in addition to all his other sumptuous jewellery, “a pearl of wonderful whiteness, greatly prized on account of its extraordinary size” as a stud in his ear. Foreigners may well have viewed such obsession with personal adornment as effeminate, but the Persians themselves knew better. A haughty and refined delicacy of manner; a sashaying, hip-swaying gait; a reluctance so much as to be seen in public “stepping to one side in response to a call of nature”: these were the marks, in Persia, of a bold and gallant warrior. Anyone who had the wherewithal was fully expected to pose and strut like a peacock. Rare was the Persian who knowingly underdressed. The gorgeous showiness of their fashion was notorious. “Most of them,” it was reported of the Persian upper classes, “are so resplendent in clothes gleaming with many shimmering colours, that although they leave their robes open in front and on the sides, and let them flutter in the wind, yet from their head to their shoes no part of the body is seen uncovered.”
George Washington had similar traits. Was he unmanly?
LOL. A girl in NYC asked me if I was gay because I was well-dressed and got along with her gay friends, and didn’t immediately try to make a move on her.
She’s now my wife. :)
Not really. They are independent of one another. Manly isn’t just a collection of desirable traits that you are trying to norm.
There are downright utter bastards that are manly as hell. In fact the more of a bastard you are, the more likely it is that you are going to be manly, insofar as manly traits and virtuous traits are correlated.
Its actually pretty simple:
Pretty much everything else is fashion and signaling.
What a missed opportunity! You could have asked, “If I were, would you try to convert me?
I disagree.
I don’t think about the category, “manly”, so I don’t partition the behavior space that way. I favor clarity of thought, deep understanding, forthrightness, honesty.
I would use “manly” to refer to behavior that applies the manly virtues, such as courage, loyalty, tenacity (I think that’s probably one).