Intelligence > Males >

Exploring some ideas.

See also:

• Adulting
• Fathers
• The Way of the warrior

• Well-being

Boys have male parts, and predictable levels of hormones.

A girl is about as likely to become a man as they are to become a Genius or brought to Enlightenment.

Adding male qualities later in life will never make up for “lost time”. While the time is itself significant, there are critical periods of development which are lost. For example, liking girls isn’t actually “being a boy at heart”, and a girl growing up hiding that is not the same as actually being a boy who is forced to live with it.

Males are various. This forces recognition and allowance; one does not fight an endless war against a fact. Because “otherness” exists, using the title of “man” doesn’t really matter. “Tolerated” is just a veiled insult, and because acceptance isn’t a concept in male bonding, there is a sort of de-escalating apathy. Nobody gives a flying fuck about the odd fringes of maleness.

On the one hand being a male isn’t a choice, and on the other there is an altogether other kind of person who is more a man because of their will.

I appreciate the argument that “man” can be likened to some sort of “grown up boy”, but it is the lucky boy who grows into a man through some sort of “life escalator”, as though it were eventual or inevitable. To me, simple ageing isn’t enough, and threatens to deposit an aged-boy into an “old boy” instead of “man”. It is extremely unlikely, and arguably damaging, that a mother or woman can raise a boy into a man. There is no example, no understanding and no experience for them to draw from. This doesn’t mean a man or father can do it either.

The usual man doesn’t grow, but must instead be made. I neither mean “moulded out of clay”, nor “forged from steel”, and though I think these ideas say a lot about one who hold these ideas, I do still mean something along that axis. I also don’t mean made from experience alone; there is a sort of well which is filled by an an unbroken lineage of men which a male might draw from. There is an idealism; a sort of fiction that might be something to aspire to, perhaps including “gentleman” or “real man”, but it is often captured in mythology.

There is an objective concept of “man-ness”, even if it’s something just out of our intellectual-grasp. This isn’t to say there is either an ideal or predictability, because one of the traits of a man are both an aspect social individuality and biologically-driven variety.

Self-improvement is rare or even harmful compared to men grouping to help one another.

maybe more to come, one day

Ideas ∞

• Social individuality

• Situational idealism

  • I’m not sure what I meant by this..
• A woman is not a parent.
• A mother cannot raise a boy.
• A man is not raised, but is made.

• “Self-made” men are rare.