By Matthew Villanueva, Features assignment editor
Let’s take a quick break from all of the Coronavirus-craziness going on right now and have you answer two questions for me:
If you are at a funeral and the eulogist describes the departed as a “good man,” what made that person a “good man?”
Now, how would your answer change if the eulogist described the deceased as “real man?”
I bet you had different answers for those two questions.
For the first question you probably thought along the lines of “kind, compassionate, virtuous, honest or selfless.” For the latter you probably thought differently: “Strong, risktaker, authoritative, tough.”
Why is there such a large discrepancy between the two? Aren’t they relatively the same thing?
Maybe it was Earnest Hemingway that brought it out in Americans. The iconic American author was a war vet, survived shrapnel in both of his legs, shot a lot of bears, hunted wild animals in Africa, tracked Nazis after the war in a boat, drank a lot of whisky and somehow survived a plethora of more gunshot wounds, plane crashes and other life-threatening diseases only to be killed on his own terms with his own pistol.
In “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway’s titular character, Jake Barnes, is a classic “man’s man,” similarly to a majority of the bard’s protagonists. Barnes comes back from war unwilling to confess the emotional strains it caused him and instead he drowns his sorrows in wine.
Barnes’ masculinity felt no emotions, rather his emotions drowned. Hemingway’s “manly” protagonists put a stigma onto men having emotions.
Or maybe it’s the toxic masculinity radiating from the president that invokes the disparity. His emasculating rhetoric at his rivals, Marco “Little Marco” Rubio, Joe “Sleepy Joe” Biden and Adam “Shifty” Schiff have attracted his loyal MAGA base. His “grab them by the p****” spiel wasn’t enough for his supporters to fray from his campaign along with the 169 lawsuits being held against him.
Jill Filipovic puts it perfectly in her New York Times article, “The president is a perfect figurehead for this bizarre moment: a man who carries all of the negative characteristics of stereotypical masculinity while adopting almost none of the virtues, occupying the most powerful and exclusively male seat of power in the nation (and perhaps in the world), who ascended in large part because a yawning fear of female power kept one of the best-qualified candidates in history out of office. He is ego unchecked, narcissism in place of dignity”
I see this nonsense when I work with kids over the summer. One fourth grade boy eats his pasta drowning in marinara sauce without his fork and makes a mess. He then claims he is “eating it like a real man.” Another group of fourth grade boys were swearing at each other and about to fight, when I asked them to explain why they were about to exchange fisticuffs, they answered, “to see who was more of a man.”
Boys are being raised to be brutes, you hear it all the time, “men don’t cry” or “men have to be tough,” but sorry boomer, sometimes, there is crying in baseball.
While I am not advocating for men to not be consistently melancholy whiners, a real man should be compassionate. A real man should be honest. A real man should be consistently willing to put other’s needs before their own. A real man should be thoughtful.
Rudy Francisco describes the feeling in his poem “Rifle,” “We keep telling each other to man up / when we don’t even know what the f*** that means.”
When I look at the male role models in my life, I see no discrepancy between the two. My father, older brother and educators I have looked up to take virtue to both definitions as a good and real man. They are all compassionate and tough. They are all honest and risktakers. They are all selfless and strong. They have emotion and are authoritative. They are all people that I look up to and hope to be like.
Let’s cut the gibberish of “boys will be boys,” and show our children that a real man is not a beast. Above all, a real man is kind.
villanjv18@bonaventure.edu
