How Modern Life Transforms Men Into Wussies
Manly Activity
Ever watched a classic action flick? Of course, you have. Movies like Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lethal Weapon, First Blood, and 300 have become fixtures in the American psyche. All these movies feature either a lone man or a small group fighting in a desperate, violent struggle and yet, somehow, someway coming out on top. Throughout most of America’s history, the average man could more easily relate to the experiences in those movies the way someone who shoots hoops at the park could relate to watching a NBA game. Sure, they might not be able to do what they were seeing on the screen, but they were well acquainted with violence. Either they had inflicted it, suffered it or seen it up close and personal. We’re a nation that was birthed in a bloody revolution, where feuds and dueling were frequent occurrences, where intermittent battles with Indians occurred until the twenties, where roughly twenty percent of the male population served in WWII, and fist fights and brawling were relatively common.
Today?
The average man may have seen hundreds of thousands of murders on his TV screen and committed tens of thousands more playing video games, but he has also probably never struck another human being in anger in his entire adult lifetime. In other words, he may be captivated by the imagery he sees at the movies, but he goes home knowing that he will never even live out a pale imitation of what he’s just seen.
This same experience is repeated in a myriad of different ways in modern life.
To many men, examples of “manly” activities might include shooting a bow, repairing a car, skinning a fish, climbing a mountain, surviving alone in the woods, building a cabin from scratch, or hunting, killing, and skinning an animal. However, most men didn’t take up these activities to be “manly;” they did them because they were necessities and those who were good at them thrived and were admired by other men. What are those same “manly” universal activities today? In large part, they’ve never been replaced.
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