11:01 pm EST"MANLY QUESTIONS"
It's 2013. What is manliness today?
Do we know manliness when we see it, or do we just think we do? What manly qualities register day to day in our minds? Is manliness a quality that needs the limits of a structure, system or order -- a game -- to exist? or is it an absolute and transcendent quality? Are its vicissitudes parallel, or homologous? What is ultimately manly before and above all else, the one manly trait, without the association and imperative of which nothing else could be truly manly? And should such a trait be untouchable, and is it?
From lifetime to spiritually transmigrational lifetime, are some souls congenitally incapable of developing manliness to satisfy one lifetime? Are some born to scorn and hate it, and to believe it a ridiculous conceit? And in the case of the quality's "fans", does it inspire or direct positive change? If not, why? Is it because worship or admiration precludes real emulation and softly nullifies daring? That is, does vicarious manliness narcotize another man? How much detail would voyeurs need about the character and life story of a presumed "manly" man for the narcosis to not be so? And suppose we got those details; would manliness then seem something tragic, checkered, rootless, ironic? And would we so then introspect and reevaluate the point or destination of its aspects we think are our own?
Is manliness resolute (as the dictionary claims), or is it tolerant, passive, adaptable, accepting -- Taoist?
Can you premeditate manly behavior? Or do you simply act upon a simple and immediately applicable manly code? Under what circumstances can criminality be manly? When is manliness misunderstood, or ignored, or unappreciated -- or perhaps superficially nihilistic? Could a society be a society if baseline manliness was a pacifist default of inaction -- or does a manly man need to fight an enemy to be manly? And is the enemy ideological, or mundane in that case? and would victory be ideological, or mundane? Did the conceptual trait of manliness undergo historical dialectic to reach a contemporary synthesis? What is the synthesis of today, then, and how many have gone before it?
Is God manly? How would He show it, and would He deliberate to avoid doing something not manly in motive or method? Assuming capability, can one choose manliness, and would there be a guide or a divine example to follow? Is the pursuit of manliness the negation of its necessity? If manliness is "honorable" (as the dictionary claims), is it dwelled upon in Paradise -- or shed as mere worldly utility, or a noble vanity, even? Has its moral context always been immutably constant, and if so then how in the world have we made any progress by adhering to it as a code?
Is it racially convenient, or are the manly ones the ascetics? What are the pleasures of manliness? The manifest rewards -- what are they? To borrow a line from the Dr Strangelove farce, does manliness really have anything to do with "youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, skill"? On a deathbed, in a vegetative state: what is manliness? The certainty of past achievement? Is bravery (another manly trait from the dictionary) an industry of war, whether psychological or outwardly violent?
Which teeth are more manly -- molars or canines? What remains of chivalry once the last dragon is beheaded? Is manliness duty, or propensity? Can manliness be exploited? How? What are its obvious sublimations today? When is it id? When is it superego? Is a sexually aroused male feeling manly, or something else entirely?
Finally: was there ever a golden age in which none of the above questions begged to be asked? What year was it?
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