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I challenge all those who answered 'no', to say, wear makeup, short shorts, take um knitting, cry a lot in public, tell everyone how wussy you are.
That's right, I'm skeptical but I expected most to assert they didn't care. Most guys DO care to some extent, sometimes, even me, not the best example of husky manliness, admits this.
The only problem with your "challenge" is that those who've said 'no' probably don't care if your skeptical or not, including me.
That's right, I'm skeptical but I expected most to assert they didn't care. Most guys DO care to some extent, sometimes, even me, not the best example of husky manliness, admits this.
I'm with ya. I think the vast majority of people out there in general do in fact care what other people think. In our society (if not the world), it's somehow perceived as a bad thing to care about outside judgment so we don't admit it (Ironic).
Also, people confuse caring what other people think with changing or altering the way you are specifically for their approval. It's quite possible to care about disapproval or judgment to a small extent and then continue down the road you were initially on. It just shows that you are aware of the world around you and you give a little thought to it. That's a good thing!
Plus, if you're nuts about this sort of thing like I am, you care about these things because you want everyone to know the truth and adopt a healthy, justified view. You have a preference = you care.
This crossed my mind after seeing fleetiebelle's post in another thread:
From my experiences with male friends and coworkers, it seemed many of them were extremely concerned with appearing "manly". ....
Well personally, I couldn't understand this. I mean sure, when I was maybe seven or eight years old all the boys wanted to look tough (me included), but we were just kids. I stopped thinking that way a long time ago, and I would have assumed others did, too. My coworkers seemed to have this incredible fear that someone might think they were not manly, or even worse (to them) homosexual. Is this normal? Am I the weird one? (I mean, I know I'm weird, but am I weird in this way, too? )
I'm seventy-four, so I have seen quite a few changes in how males are perceived, and how I see myself as a male.
Robert mentioned the thing about crossing the knees, I can remember being corrected...by my mother, I think, and told not to cross my knees because only women did that.
As Lamplight described I went through a period in childhood of wanting - no, needing, to do everything that other boys did, and do it well. Of course, I couldn't perform the entire gamut of masculinity to perfection and it did put a knot in my juvenile self esteem oftentimes.
Not being very skilled at sports combined with being an excellent student set me on the royal road to being labelled and treated as a sissy or a que er in jr. h.s. and h.s. However, I had the savvy to figure out how to outman the men amongst my teenage peers. And that was by copying the behavior of much older teenagers and adults. And in my case, as we were working class, I had some dandy models to emulate.
So, I smoked starting in the 7th grade. I was first served in a bar at age 14 and I hung out with guys a bit older who had cars and could go to a local sleazy lake bar strip where they served underage kids. These two activities got me lots of points. A man-boy who drinks and smokes doesn't have to play ball. Then came the big S...I met a gorgeous girl who went to another h.s. (she actually asked me out.), and almost immediately we were going together.....I could not believe that his beautiful girl was interested in me, but she was. We began having sex regularly, and you don't have to be a psychic to see that the casual physical conduct of people who know each other sexually differs from that of a couple who are just dating with no sex. Thus, smoking, booze and sex made a man of me in h.s......despite the fact that I still couldn't catch a ball and was a terrific student. Smokes, drinks, screws - this made me part of the upper edge of the upper crust of h.s. society, right up there with the football players. Quite amazing, but I have to say, I loved the status...even as I recognized that it was the result of manufactering an image specifically to earn it.
It did have the unfortunate effect, however, of making me appreciate the power of duplicity, and how often books were judged by their covers.
In college there was far, far less of this sort of measuring whether a guy was "manly" or not. However, what I had learned by virtue of my successful compensation in h.s. was that "rough," "crude" and not a little bluffing could carry you a long way into manly - even macho - territory. In the summer I worked the night shift in a factory, and that added a lot of fine tuning to my presentation.
My first job in NYC was very low-paying night shift work and I ended up in 1960 mixing with some tough and weird male co-workers, and when you got out of work the places that were open for us to go to were often really edgy. Quite frankly I was totally scared to death and out of my element, but in the company of genuine thuggish guys and by putting on an act I came out of every tight spot OK.
So it was like the old saying: Assume a virtue, though you have it not, and soon it will be yours. Only I was doing sort of a noir reverse of this....it helped that my father had been a manual laborer and a not especially polished number.
Eventually I did acquire some genuine self confidence based on other activities than posturing as an unpolished blue collar gem, and came to the realization that in my jobs I moved among people and in environments where these cultivated characteristics were unnecessary. And it was perhaps in my thirties and certainly by my forties that I could see my own act as quite funny, though it had been useful.
So, the question of my manliness in my own mind had shrunk to the size of a wart over the course of several decades. However, as much as I was now quite a self-confident person, and considered questions of manliness as running the gamut from silly to stupid, I still had a problem with it.
And that was that the role-playing characteristics had become ingrained in me. I had become a rather aggressive person, and verbally rather calculating, approaching discussions as a kind of sport....something that a couple of female friends have picked up on and commented on at several points in my life. By mid-life I was almost the opposite in masculine affect and in personality to what I had been in my childhood and early teens. And while rather "bookish," and I suppose, intellectual; nevertheless I was still presenting a rather contrary persona, which by then seemed to have become a graft that had taken, so to speak.
Thus, at the end of it all I find myself in something of a quandry. I think tallying up signs of manliness ridiculous, but at the same time I am sure I would not care to be taunted in public as unmanly...and I think were that to happen I would definitely automatically over-react in a crude "manly" way.
I don't even give a tenth of a s**t about manliness or masculinity, or others' perception of such.
Maybe they mean the manly man that has HONOR...but I doubt it..Being respected and loved is important. Carry yourself with dignity is important- BUT being some tough scary biker jerk is not manly..it's just being a dumb animal.
Lunar Delta gets a bit manly when he curses "I don't give a tenth of a s**t"---- that took some manly thought..
I'm with ya. I think the vast majority of people out there in general do in fact care what other people think. In our society (if not the world), it's somehow perceived as a bad thing to care about outside judgment so we don't admit it (Ironic).
Whether or not we care about outside judgement wasn't the question that was asked, many posters on here have said that they care what their friends and family think of them (including me). That wasn't what we were asked though, we were asked "Men: Do you care if other men think your "manly"? and that's what we replied to.
If you or the OP wishes to change the criteria of the question then start another thread and maybe a few of us will reply to that question aswell.
Whether or not we care about outside judgement wasn't the question that was asked, many posters on here have said that they care what their friends and family think of them (including me). That wasn't what we were asked though, we were asked "Men: Do you care if other men think your "manly"? and that's what we replied to.
If you or the OP wishes to change the criteria of the question then start another thread and maybe a few of us will reply to that question aswell.
If it's someone's contention that most people care what others think about them, period, I don't see how you figure this is some exception. But don't worry. I don't care enough to debate whether or not you're being truthful with us, or challenge you in some way
My Dad was cool. He was in an occupation/trade that did not require college. He could be blunt and crude in his observations, but could "clean up nicely" and impress people with being well-spoken beyond what was expected of his occupation and education.
I generally don't care what people think, but can tell you that some people, in a position of authority, can get weird about stuff, especially if they're uptight and/or hicks. One Saturday morning, I went into the office to do some work and had an Andrea Bocelli CD playing with the volume low. I can tell that a few guys did not think this was "cool." I've also torqued people I was with during the lunch hour when I ran into tourists or out-of-towners and spoke to them in another language because I enjoy that. I checked the "depends" box, but only because of situations like this.
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