What is a Man?

I’m not usually very good at making predictions, but I don’t think there are too many people who could have predicted the way things have shaped up over the last 10 years.

Imagine, if you will, just a decade ago. If my math still works (and has not gone woke) then that puts us in 2014. Now imagine you’re at work, maybe in some soulless hell-pit of slave-cubicles furiously tapping away on your computer, and your boss had wandered over.

“You’re going to have a wear a badge with your pronouns on”

“I’m what?”

“You need to put your pronouns on a badge and wear it”

“What the absolute fuck are you talking about?”

OK - you may not have quite phrased your response like this unless you knew your boss really well, but back in 2014 you’d have looked at your boss like he’d just grown a pair of balls on his forehead.

People forget, I think, just how ridiculous an idea it is because so many over the last decade have discussed this nonsense seriously.

The purpose of such a badge¹, as we all know, is not to inform, but to demonstrate allegiance; allegiance to a set of ‘ideas’ loosely described by the term “gender ideology”.

And what about the theythems? You might as well wear a badge which announces your pronouns as Narcissistic/Twat. Quite apart from the linguistic lunacy this engenders it’s a signal that you want to be thought of as ‘special’.

In one sense I get it. You’re unique and special and you don’t feel you quite fit in a world where, if you’re born male, you have to sit with your legs wide apart and endlessly explain things to women.

Welcome to reality. Let me clue you in. Nobody fully conforms to any set of stereotypes. Even the manliest of manly man things has some aspect of his character that would fall within a female stereotype at times. We actually are all unique and special - but ordinary, too.

So, you don’t feel like the binary world of he/she is sufficient to contain the magic that is you - and so you invent a new box that you can be put in, the enby (NB) box. The Box of Enbefuddlement.

I’m not entirely sure how I’d respond to someone telling me in person that ‘their pronouns’ are they/them. It would probably be something along these lines

Winding back a bit further than a decade and you’d have men who conformed to more female stereotypes being described as effeminate. It wasn’t entirely complimentary. Go even further back and they might be described as a ‘fop’ or a ‘dandy’.

So much of the current mess harks back to the unholy confusion that has arisen, in my view deliberately, from the mix-up of sex and gender.

Although sex is firmly-grounded and established scientifically (despite the existence of extremely rare edge cases where some developmental abnormality has occurred) gender, as a concept, is rather slippery and vague and the definitions of what ‘gender’ IS themselves rely on the notions of a biological sex.

When someone who is male claims to be a woman they mean the ‘gender’ of woman and not the sex. They are, clearly, not of the female sex. It’s the existence of a set of trends that enable this. We all know what those trends are, and they have been the driving force for a lot of comedy, for example.

Just to give one example of where differences in behaviour might manifest I want to go back a few years when I took my daughters out for the day. Can we go to the DIY store, Dad?, the eldest asked. I need to get some paint and it will only take 10 minutes because I know exactly what I want.

Like a fool, I agreed. 3 hours after we hit the store my daughters had to come find me, and wake me up, where I was asleep in the garden furniture section. Three hours of agonizing and discussion over subtle shades of paint between the two of them. I shudder to think what would have happened if she didn’t know “exactly” what she wanted.

Is this fascination with the most microscopic variations in paint shade assigned at birth, or did their mum have to take them to the school of feminine conditioning unbeknownst to me? Was my utter disinterest to the point of coma also assigned at birth or did I learn somewhere along the way it wasn’t a very ‘manly’ thing to be interested in?

What is a man?

I never thought, or predicted, this would be forming one element of a presidential election in the US. Yet it has been, in amongst the joy and vibes, one plank of the campaign. We’ve had the “white dudes for Harris” slogan, which neatly encapsulates two strands of identitarianism. And then we were told that people like Timmie represented a ‘real’ man, a better kind of all-new and improved masculinity.

Few things that advertisers describe as “all-new and improved” live up to their billing. My washing powder, by now, ought to be making my whites dazzle so much they contribute to global warming, but my shirts still come out that faintly grey off-white shade (it’s misty winter morning white that can be found in aisle 9 of the DIY store).

There’s a reason I wear mostly black. Being indoctrinated into masculinity since birth I can neither close my legs when seated nor wash whites effectively. But at least I cried at the end of The Notebook, so I can’t be wholly toxic, I hope.

According to ads for the Harris campaign, building on the success of the re-branding of masculinity through the vehicle of Timmie, real men eat rare steak, and carburettors for breakfast. They ask whether you are ‘man enough’ to vote for a woman?

It’s true though - fully 90% of the male brain is located below their navels. Women’s vajayays² pump the blood up to their brains and so they’re better suited to high office.

Or sumfin.

That Harris ad was something else. But then it got worse. Incomprehensibly worse. Stick your brain in the freezer for a couple of hours before watching this if you don’t want it to liquify (42s)

You could be forgiven for thinking this was something dreamed up by the Republican team. I am still having a hard time believing this ad was a genuine attempt to promote support for Timmie. But it is.

Nope. Still can’t believe it!

The only way this ad makes sense is if it’s an anti-Timmie ad.

But should I really be surprised? The kind of people who think this ad is cool are also the kind of people who think that a man becomes a woman through the auspices of a simple declarative statement.

Their understanding of what makes “sense” is obviously very, very different to mine.

But it’s good to know that Kamala has enlisted the help of another manly man thing. She’s turned to another ex-President for help. This guy did stuff with cigars - that’s how we know he’s a real man. But I think even he can’t quite inhale the Harris fumes.

I can only watch in horror at this unfolding spectacle - and I pray that some kind of sanity can be restored to the US after 5th Nov.

Meanwhile, I’m off to the paint shop to get some new paint for the walls. My daughters are not invited.

1. Just as the purpose of the mask during covid had absolutely nothing to do with ‘health’.

2. Thanks to the wonderfully funny Jenna McCarthy for this terminology