Tuesday, 26th August, 2003 - All Man

So what is a man? What has he got? Dur nur nur nurrr nur. He's got a lot.

Wise words these. And that's not me, that's Frank Sinatra talking. Or at least the man who wrote 'My Way'. And some of the words may be wrong.

My point is that I am about to exhume a tired old topic that has been continually re-hashed by lazy journalists time and again for the last decade and probably beyond, but one that has been injected with fresh and vital resonance because I now have personal experience of it. Because the world revolves around me. ME.

I am a man. This is an irrefutable, genetically verifiable fact. But - to slightly alter a rhetorical question, asked to no great purpose by thousands of pompous bullshitters in the past - what does that mean today? Not just today today, but 'today'.

I ask this having spent a weekend feeling (due to my own paranoia and natural defensiveness) silently admonished for not being 'masculine' enough. No-one is to blame for this except myself. The fact that anything could make me worry or feel bad about being insufficiently macho is down to my own neuroses. I know this.

Specifically, the factors that appear to erode my - I repeat, genetically verifiable - manhood are thus: 1) I don't work with my hands
2) I don't understand or fetishise cars
3) I rarely drive, mostly leaving it to Jane

It is this last one that appears to be the unofficial litmus test of manhood. On several occasions this weekend I was asked "So does Jane always drive?" To which I would reply "No, I do sometimes drive, but she seems to prefer it, whilst I am quite happy to sit in the passenger seat reading a tabloid newspaper". But the response would inevitably bounce straight back off my interrogator's bemused face as he stared into the mid-distance, no doubt picturing me dancing naked around my flat with a hoover, and my penis tucked between my legs, like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.

This irked me. But what irked me even more was that I was not able to just rise above the stupidity. The idea that I am a sissy because I 'allow' my girlfriend to drive our car most of the time is ridiculous, but if it did not carry at least some weight, I would surely not allow it to annoy me as much as it did.

Another bone of contention, that my finely-tuned slur-detector ears managed to pick out, was that, as a man, it is expected that you will earn more than your partner, and 'provide' for her. Thus, since I earn a roughly equivalent amount of money to my girlfriend, and we split most things down the middle, I am less of a man.

I should re-iterate that this was never directly said. I was simply asked - by a man who earns significantly more than his partner, and who conspicuously pays for everything they consume - whether we both pay an equal share toward things. My mind has done the remainder of the equation.

Which is what confuses and annoys me, and what makes this the worst entry I have ever written. I know that the fact that I allow myself to be driven places by my girlfriend does not make me a sissy. But, I can't help but be annoyed by the suggestion that it does, to the point that I now feel that I would like to get into my car and drive it hundreds of miles, just to crash it through the front window and into the living room of my accuser, wheel-spinning madly and pausing just long enough to laugh in his terrified face before mowing him down.

Also, I know that in 2003, it is not really expected that a man should 'keep' his partner. But, on he other hand, I know that deep down in most people's minds, it really is. Thus, when we go shopping, I prefer to pay on my credit card, and impatiently bat Jane's hand away if she tries to offer me money in public. I then demand the money when we get back to the car, greedily stuffing it into my wallet like some lowlife ponce.

So, does being a man simply involve having a cock and some balls? Or some pre-defined set of social responsibilities? If so, who decides what these social responsibilities are? Are they really as retrograde and arbitrary as 'man is strong, therefore he provides'?

I ask these questions, not because I think there is one simple answer, but because it offers me a satisfying way to write myself out of this boring entry.

Sorry.