Understanding Masculinity and What it means to be a Man

What it means to be a man and how a man should lead his life is a vast topic and a lot of great thinkers have thought about it. In this article I will just touch the tip of the iceberg, just a tiny fraction of this vast and profound topic. I highly encourage you to explore more on it, as it can change your life for good. A warning though, there is a lot of crap written on how to be a man these days. So you need to be very careful on what to listen to. Two good books on understanding masculinity that I would recommend will be

1. The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire
2. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

To really understand what it means to be a man, we need to first understand what is the role of a man in this world. Once we understand that then we can put things in perspective and clearly realize our position in this universe.

So for what purpose did the Mother Nature create man? Thinking biologically we see that the function of a female is to bear children and nurture them to their adulthood. On the surface it might appear that men that way merely act as a source of the sperm. With advent of biotechnology and genetic engineering, scientists will soon be able to create a sperm artificially in the lab. Some people are even suggesting that the males will become obsolete once this technology becomes available. Does this mean that we men are merely bags of genetic material? The answer is a clear No! Although it may sound fascinating to picture a world without men, it is not happening anytime soon.

Men have a very important function to play in the survival of our species. Here is how it works. We are biologically programmed with a strong desire to transfer our genes to the next generation. However since we cannot make babies ourselves we need to find a woman who is ready to mate with us and bear our children. However a woman will not just mate with us. For her, bearing a child is a huge investment. Raising a human child takes enormous time and effort and a woman will only mate with a man whom she views as worthy of all the effort. Before mating, a woman would judge if the man is capable of providing her with the resources she needs to raise a child. If she realizes that a man is not capable of that, she will decline the man’s offer and look for other candidates.

With many options open to her, a woman will always choose the man who has the maximum potential to gather resources for her and her children. So men have to compete with other men for the resources and the attention of women. By competing with each other, men prove their fitness to the ladies. Only men with traits, which make them winners in this competition, will get a chance to mate. Rest of us will just be thrown out of the gene pool.

This process of knocking out of unfit males plays a crucial role in keeping our entire species fit. Only the fit and competent men transfer their genes to the next generation. The next generation then inherits the traits of the successful males and as a consequence is fit. This way our species remain healthy and well adapted to all the changes in our environment. If a man can’t compete with other men for the resources, he ends up at the bottom of the hierarchy and believe me nobody cares about such a man. Such men receive the scorn of women, other men, their community and the society in general.

So, now that we have understood our place in Mother Nature the answer to the question “what does it meant to be a man?” should be obvious. A real man is someone who is capable to compete with others to gather resources and all the resources that he gathers are never for himself, but for the people that he loves and cares about. Depending on a man’s capacity this group of people can include his family, his community, his country and the entire humanity. By developing this capability to provide something of value to our community we gain the respect of our community, and our community deems us fit to transfer our genes to the next generation.

Manhood is generally thought of as a privilege that all the boys get entitled to when they grow up. Nothing can be far from the truth. The reality is that manhood is not an entitlement. Women are inherently valuable to humanity as they can bear children and bring them to this world. Men on the other hand have to prove that they are valuable to the society by gathering resources for their community. This is why a woman’s womanhood is never challenged while a man’s manhood can be challenged.

So, to be a man, a real man, forget about all the machismo such as drinking a lot or eating a lot or getting a tattoo or any other paraphernalia. Manhood can be summarized in just one statement “To be of use to your family and your community and perform all your duties as a son, husband, father, brother and a citizen diligently without any fuzz” and there you have it, what it means to be a man.

Originally published at www.kaa-yaa.com.