I hope that at least this gets this pussy-face laid.
We are offering up a fast food menu of impoverished stereotypes to our sons, based on rigid class systems and exclusion. The thought of filling 21st century boyhood with the same stale old guff on evil foreigners and government-sanctioned assassins makes me feel tired and more than a bit concerned.
This is a scary and thrilling time to be male and I can’t help but think we are shortchanging our sons. The new millennium has seen the unravelling of old, obsolete male values, and good riddance to them, too. Men have come to realise that we need new ways of being male if we are to negotiate the contemporary world of globalisation. Why do we feel the need to inflict our own nostalgia and wishful thinking on our children? Such stories offer no advice on how to survive and thrive in our increasing complex and accelerating culture, while fostering an unhealthy fear of otherness.
What we need is a literature that feeds and nurtures a sense of courage and quest in our children; a solid and trustworthy base from which they can explore and inhabit themselves. Through our literature we need to be equipping them with the tools to forge a sense of self that is strong and elastic enough to survive the bewildering cultural landscape we inhabit. We must resist confusing them with mixed messages of violence as courage and reaction as quest.
Oh, bollocks, Nancy.
Speaking of pussy-faces, Kerry’s announced that he’s not running.
I hate it when otherness wants to behead me.
Natalie is hardly a man’s name. Stay out of my indentity politics woman!
So what’s with this “our sons” business?
Well, y’know, happyfeet, it takes a matriarchy.
Now, if you guys could help us out and bring down Hillary Clinton’s campaign, I’d be forever in your debt.
That right there is all we need to see Nancy is totally full of shit. Like every other male that ever lived I learned how (and how not) to be male from the examples of the males around me as I grew up, primarily my father. I was pretty bookish and I’d say literature had about a 0% influence on my attitudes on masculinity.
Most of the people that rail against “how our boys should be raised into men” wouldn’t know a real man if he was bitten on the ass by one.
Oh but do so hope they get a chance to test out if I’m right or not after the next “boys night” at the Blue Oyster Bar.
Oh, God….. Lemme guess–’cuz she’s a rightwing capitalist warmonger.
I’d like to raise my firstborn as a new Genghis Khan: he was a guy who knew how to deal with otherness. Conquer them.
How the f*** would he know?
(I’m gonna cockslap this damn browser for turning a line-break into a “submit” click.)
This is a scary and thrilling time to be male
As opposed to, um, when, dude?
Is this another outbreak of “Golden Age” syndrome? Should I go get a testosterone booster?
How about you try just being yourself, dude, and let the rest of us come up with our own definitions. Kee-rist these people are so full of themselves.
A new way of defining what it is to be male?
Look pally, that “sensitive Alan Alda male” stuff was jettisoned with disco, orange shag carpeting, and Jimmy Carter. It was tried, found laughable, and jettisoned. We are not going back there again, okay?
Guilty as charged.
Scroll down – The Poetry section is in the comments
Yeah, that’s why I named my kid:
“Malleus Maurum”.
But I’m not telling him. He’s going to have to earn it!
So how exactly do we go about growing breasts?
Poor Lurch, always the last to know.
Man, this has to be, hands down, the most absurd, laughable sentence ever written about masculinity.
Which “men” have come to realise this? Undoubtedly metrosexuals.
How many of these “men” are there? Curiously, they equal the number of male Democrats.
And as far as anyone knows, there is only one way to be male, that is being born with (and keep) a dick and set of balls.
Furriskey, where are you? I’m looking for that uniquely British word that expresses my utter contempt for this “sensitive new age guy” stuff.
Oh, I remember…..
TWADDLE!
Never mind…
It sounds like the author injested too many female hormones in his youth.
Mummy made him eat tofu,Zoy.
What a collectivist pud. Lemme guess. This guy’s a boomer. Who else would indulge in such navel gazing.
That whole thing was gay code, right? Either that or it was written by a girl.
CODSWALLOP!
I for one enjoy the internets for how it brings me back. To junior high.
Nishi–
If you’ve still got one of your passes, you should look up Cythen. She’s apparently a kick-ass gamer.
erica–
Well what do you call it when a guy lip-synchs vagina monologues?
I can’t fault this.
Honour, family, country is totally passe.
family? What are you some sort of breeder? eeeww!
Balderdash? Poppycock?
Anyway, as I mentioned across the pond, the hero of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”, which this pillock is recommending as an antidote to James Bond etc, is the knife wielding son of a dead British SBS officer. I’m happy with that as a male role model for my own adolescent son, and he certainly enjoyed the book.
That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve read today, and I did my taxes over lunch.