I’m going to talk about what being a man means to me, personally.
As a man, I feel like I have a different kind of responsibility for my family. It’s not about money because my wife makes more than I do, but it’s about doing the physical stuff and the dangerous stuff and the technical/mechanical stuff. I don’t feel like I have to do these things, and I would have no problem if my wife wanted to do them, but she doesn’t and I kind of like them. Similarly, I don’t like things like cleaning or sewing or figuring out how colors match.
Being a man, for me, is about being expected to take the lead, whether I want to or not. I am expected to be the face of the family. I am the one who has the final say, even though my wife has the final say. I hope that people can understand that. It’s like we both have to put a stamp of approval on everything, but someone our stamps are different. To be kind of silly, there is a manly stamp and a womanly stamp.
Being a man means some specific things in my family that it may not mean in other families. I do the gardening. I cut the dead branches off trees. I deal with the contractors. I set the traps and dispose of rats and mice that are caught (it is my wife’s job to point out that there are rats and mice to be caught).
I do the music. My wife does the education stuff. It’s not that we each couldn’t do the other thing, but because we do them, they have become an aspect of our identities as men and women in my family. In my family, the men cook. Even my mother, the cook of my childhood, defers to me now when we cook together.
More broadly (not me personally) I believe that being a man is about being a human. I’m pretty sure women feel the same. I believe that our manliness or womanliness is about integrity, doing the right thing, being honorable in your relationships, helping others, and etc.
I’m a man. I think about mating with a woman. I am attracted to women. I’m want to be with a woman when it comes to intimacy. I am uninterested in being intimate with other men.
Obviously, there are more gender preferences that the ones I describe here. Not all men are like me. Some men are attracted to other men. Some women are attracted to other women, and there are other preferences, as well. I understand all those preferences, but for me, being the man that I am is informed by my preference for women as partners.
I recognize that my way of being a man is not the only way of being a man. I’m not prescribing my way to anyone else. Other men (and women) should be men and women (or not) as fits them. Still, this is what it is for me, at this moment, in the detail I choose to describe it with. There is so much more, but that’s for another time.
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