Hmm... being a man... Well, Rudyard Kipling put it this way about a hundred years ago:
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Mostly good stuff, though I think "If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you" then you don't actually have any foes or loving friends. It's a fine idealistic description of the Victorian ethos that informed much of Kipling's works, but I really don't see why the last line couldn't just as easily have been, "And - which is more - you'll be a Woman my daughter." 'Cept it needs a single syllable word at the end that rhymes with run to keep the metre. Kipling seems to me to have produced a description of any well-rounded, self-assured person, male or female, ignoring the gender-specific pronouns he kept using. Most days I'm inclined to think that any definition of what it means to be a man or a woman, or to characterize certain things as manly or womanly, is simply a reflection of current social constructs. Apart from the obvious differences--woman can get pregnant, bear children, and nurse them, men can't, for instance, and most men are physically larger and stronger than most women, though I know women who are bigger and stronger than a lot of men--I think trying to define gender roles is a largely a mug's game. I've no doubt there are reasons rooted in evolutionary biology for the differences between men and women, whatever they are, but our culture and technology largely insulate us from the forces that generated them. We no longer need a band of armed men guarding the women and children from the wolves lurking just beyond the light from the campfire. At least, not here.
But maybe they aren't just social constructs. Whatever real differences there are between men and women are rooted in our evolutionary past and reflect our original hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That's what we evolved for and how we lived for most of our history, and it hasn't been very long in evolutionary terms since most of us abandoned that lifestyle, certainly not long enough to have produced much of a shift in gene frequencies. A heavily pregnant woman, or one with a nursing child on her hip, is relatively helpless in a hunter-gatherer society living in an environment with large predators, which accounts for the powerful and automatic protective instinct any normal man feels towards women and children. I'm no anthropologist so I may be full of nonsense here (wouldn't be the first time :lol
, but it seems fairly clear to me that most of the things that have traditionally been regarded as "manly" are things requiring physical strength and action and the protection and support of women and children, and things traditionally regarded as "womanly" have to do with child care and household management and keeping a man happy. Being the bearers of the next generation, and essentially being removed from the reproductive sweepstakes that natural selection operates on for a year or two at a time, I think has to make a significant difference in the psychology of women, just as being reproductively able all the time has to make a difference for men, but I don't think I know enough to say much more than that. So I'll shut up now.
And I'm starting to ramble anyway.
