Manliness and Living With a Woman

Is confidence vital for manliness? Do you have to be confident - without apology - to be a man being a man? It seems so. In a short Esquire article that was really about men writing better than women (written by a woman, mind you!), I found this definition of manliness: “Confident, without apology, ready to be humiliated, without the prudish restraint of grace, or the contemporary stink of what lit critic Harold Bloom might call gender guilt.” What a load of I-love-bad-boys crap. Just look at it this way:

Four things that makes men men
1. Confidence
2. Ready to be humiliated
3. No grace restraints
4. No gender guilt

This has nothing to do with manliness. This is a cartoon version of machismo: two-dimensional and brightly colored. The description fits only shallow fiction characters from movies and books. There are no way a man can live up to this (and we’d be stupid if we tried).

Source:

There are a lot of politically-correct meddlers and angry femmes who want to keep us apart. But I see something in Snows [The Snows of Kilimanjaro] that makes me keep coming back. Behind all the cursing, erections, spitting and shooting is a man being a man. Confident, without apology, ready to be humiliated, without the prudish restraint of grace, or the contemporary stink of what lit critic Harold Bloom might call gender guilt. Male lit is violent, offensive, and crude, but it’s also genuine. (Men Write Better Than Women - Esquire)