Junior Year English Journal #6

"What does it mean to be a man?"

To start off with, I would like to use a cliche and say that Webster's dictionary would probably define a man as an adult human male. Of course, since the first days of the existence of the homo-sapien species, humanity has tried to delve deep into its existence to try to come up with a much deeper and more thorough meaning of what it means to be a man. This is most likely why there are so many manhood confirming rituals in this world, from a Jewish Bar Mitzvah to an American father taking his son out for a night on the town when the son turns twenty-one; however, I feel that manhood has many traits that can also be found in the female gender but are more commonly male stereotypes. Being a man means that you are strong, you take responsibility for your actions, and try to be a good role model to all while at the same time maintaining a high sense of dignity, self-esteem, and independence. A man also sticks up for himself and is not easily intimidated by anything or anyone. Examples of this stereotype I have just mentioned would include such actors as Arnold Schwarzenegger taking on an alien in Predator or Sylvester Stallone taking on the entire North Vietnamese Army in Rambo. Of course, being a young adult American male, I find myself admiring such stereotypes and I am not bothered by them in the slightest, neither am I bothered by the opposite end of the man definition spectrum, characterized by stereotypically female traits such as sensitivity, however, like most men these days, I find myself thinking that a balance of the two sides or a middle ground is essential to normal adult male life.