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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8798697" data-attributes="member: 6799660">My great grandfather was a a "real manly man" -- He farmed and later worked on the railroad. When WWI rolled around, he was sent to Siberia and built rail tracks to take supplies to the Eastern front (never ended up being used). When WWII rolled around, he was too old to go fight, so instead worked at keeping the infrastucture on the home front running smoothly. He also helping raise the children (changing diapers, washing baby bottles, reading bedtime stories, and answering the hard questions about where daddy was) of the next generation while they all jumped on hot, cramped metal coffins and headed off into the Pacific with no clear understanding of how likely they would ever see home again. He put his shoulder to the wheel, axe to the grindstone, yoke on the beast, and hammer to the nail. He also put food in bellies, clothes on backs, shoes on feet, and then those feet to the schoolhouse steps. He sacrificed dreams and aspirations for love of country, faith, family, and doing what was right. He also was thoughtful, reflective, concerned with the moral implications of his actions, just, and decent to those around him.He would be profoundly disappointed in these guys' conception of masculinity.He wouldn't have these words for it, but the point he would make is that manliness as his generation envisions wasn't meant as a way to separate the manly men from the unmanly ones, or even the men from the women -- it was to distinguish the man from the child -- "adulting" by another name. Taking responsibility, doing the hard (and/or unpleasant) work -- because it needed to be done or even to spare others from having to do so, making sacrifices, being able to walk a mile in another's shoes (and after having done so, tossing them a nickel for the wear and tear on their shoes), and so on. Manliness was never, "I'm a man's man, superior to that other guy, and thus I get to.../they ought to.../they shouldn't criticize my...," it was, "I strive to be a man by ______ [act of service or sacrifice]."I try not to do any 'kids these days' kind of commentary, or framing things as a crises of masculinity. However,  if we're going to use the term manly or masculinity as a specific positive attribute, I really wish we were able to reset it as a term others got to bestow on you when you when you committed acts exemplifying adulthood, sacrifice, and hard work; rather than a self-declared capacity defined by metrics arbitrarily self-defined as being more masculine than others of which one wants to feel superior.</blockquote>

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