November 29th, 2006
As my grandma used to say, "No matter how bad things are, there's always someone worse off than yourself." And, I suppose, this is true looking in the other direction as well: No matter how good you got it, someone's got it better.
So, what, keep climbing that cliff?
You see, John Stoltenberg, former partner of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, wrote about male anxiety in terms of the cliff. It's a brilliant analogy and could easily have come out of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels:
Imagine "manhood" as a vertical cliff that you and other men spend your whole life climbing up. In the upward direction is "more manly" and downwards is "less manly" ... except the cliff is infinitely high and bottomless. So that means there is no "100% man" or "0% man". Nevertheless, the more you climb that cliff the more manly you are in comparison to people below you on the cliff. And, of course, you are always less manly than the people above you on the cliff.
The analogy goes just as far as you like: People will always be kicking dirt down on you because ... well, because they can, I guess. And if you are in pursuit of the "real man" image that we are all supposed to crave, you will of course capitalize on every opportunity that comes along for dislodging rocks and dirt to fall onto the heads of the "less manly" that are climbing up beneath you.
Remember, that cliff has no top or bottom, so here are the features that define the existence known as "The Pursuit of Manhood":
- You will always be climbing; you will never reach the top.
- There will always be more manly men above you and they will always take every opportunity to kick crap onto your head.
- There will always be less manly men below you and you will always take every opportunity to kick crap onto their heads.
That's the gist of Stoltenberg's metaphor.
And constantly climbing this cliff is bloody uncomfortable, you know?
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