I wasn\u2019t really sure what being a real man was supposed to feel like, but the very insecure and clumsy state of mind I was in most of the time just didn\u2019t seem very masculine.<\/p>\n
A real man was the guy that was portrayed in Playboy Magazine.<\/p>\n
He had a real man watch, a real man car, smoked real man cigars, drank real man whisky, and fucked real men women.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t do any of these things.<\/p>\n
A real man was both sophisticated and arrogant, he was funny and smart and had a lot of money, and he didn\u2019t give a shit about how he was perceived by other people.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t even come close to this bag of real man traits.<\/p>\n
When I was around 16, I started on a journey to become a real man, which involved working on my muscles, wearing expensive clothes and putting on expensive French after shave.<\/p>\n
For years and years I added stuff to this routine.<\/p>\n
I read about picking up women (\u2018humiliate them, they LOVE it!\u2019), and I read many books on how to impress everyone in the room (which never happened because I was always trying to remember what I was supposed to say to impress everyone in the room).<\/p>\n
I stuffed my head with knowledge that was supposed to make me look like this worldly creature, and I started drinking and smoking, although the brands weren\u2019t particularly expensive or exclusive.<\/p>\n
Everything I did, I did to come across as a particular powerful person.<\/p>\n
I became really dominant and exuded aggression and cynicism.<\/p>\n
I made harsh jokes about every person in the world except me.<\/p>\n
And I DID get some money, and I DID get to sleep with some very attractive (and even famous) women, and I might have even looked like a real man once in a while, but I remained insecure and unhappy as fuck.<\/p>\n
The reason I tell you this story right now, is that I just skimmed my bookshelves and saw all these books that were supposed to build up and support my manliness.<\/p>\n
And the other reason I tell you about it is that I realized I stopped caring if I look or behave or smell like a real man or not.<\/p>\n
For a very long time I wore this image of Being A Real Man like an extremely uncomfortable coat, a heavy, badly patched collection of superficial ideas and clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
I tried really hard to be like the man I invented while reading Playboy, without realizing that he doesn\u2019t exist, and if he HAD been alive, would be nothing short of a complete freak.<\/p>\n
I believed that pretending hard enough would finally replace my excruciating insecurity and deep notion of being weak and uninteresting, with the bold swagger of the real man.<\/p>\n
Looking back it fills me with tender, loving pity for this deeply unhappy guy who tried to change the personal story that limited him so much with a bunch of shiny ideas.<\/p>\n
If there IS something like a real man, he\u2019s probably the opposite of everything I tried to do and think most of my life.<\/p>\n
And the last thing he probably cares about, is being a real man.<\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019m finally on to something \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Photo by @mroz, for Unsplash)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For a long time I didn\u2019t feel like a real man. I wasn\u2019t really sure what being a real man was supposed to feel like, but the very insecure and clumsy state of mind I was in most of the time just didn\u2019t seem very masculine. A real man was the guy that was portrayed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30969,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[97,117,100,116,107],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30968"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30971,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30968\/revisions\/30971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}