New research suggests even more benefits for flu vaccination in older people. The study found that adults over 65 who received at least one flu shot were noticeably less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease up to four years later. More research will be needed to confirm a cause-and-effect link and to figure…
There’s no word yet on if Obi-Wan Kenobi will return to Disney+ for more seasons, but apparently the stories are there. In a new interview, writer Stuart Beattie explained that the original plan for Obi-Wan Kenobi was to make three movies, and the story on the first season of the show was just part one.
One of the most popular tropes in genre television especially is the episode where the characters all act wildly out of character. Star Trek has indulged in this trope dozens of times before, though the reasons for the out-of-character behavior are legion: disease (the original series’ “The Naked Time,” TNG’s “The Naked Now”), weird telepathy (DS9‘s “Dramatis Personae”), an alternate timeline (the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror,” DS9’s “Crossover” and its followups, Enterprise’s “In a Mirror, Darkly,” Discovery’s “Despite Yourself” and its followups), biased historical records (Voyager’s “Living Witness”), holodeck shenanigans (DS9’s “Our Man Bashir,” Voyager’s “Bride of Chaotica!”). And now we get to add alien interference to the list…
In this particular instance, the setting is one we’ve seen before. Every time M’Benga rematerializes his dying daughter Rukiya from the transporter buffer, he reads to her from a YA fantasy story called The Elysian Kingdom.
The Enterprise has been exploring a nebula, and just as they’re about to leave, the ship is stopped from moving forward rather violently. M’Benga is called to the bridge to treat Ortegas, but when he arrives, he finds himself wearing the robes of King Ridley, the main character in The Elysian Kingdom. While M’Benga knows who he is and remembers his life as a twenty-third-century human, the same cannot be said of the others. The bridge has been altered partly to match King Ridley’s throne room, and both Pike and Ortegas have taken on the role of his chamberlain and Sir Adya, respectively.
For the bulk of the episode, M’Benga is forced into a Live-Action Role Play of The Elysian Kingdom on an Enterprise that has been altered just like the bridge. The corridors and layout are the same, but there are fantasy-land additions to every space. Number One (Zymera the Huntress), Spock (Castor, a wizard), La’An (a princess), Uhura (Neve, the queen of a rival nation), Chapel (a healer), Mitchell (Queen Neve’s chief soldier), and Hemmer (Pollux, another wizard, the twin brother of Spock’s wizard) all have roles to play, but the latter’s telepathy enables him to retain his own personality. (Why the also-telepathic Spock doesn’t is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Image: CBS
Hemmer’s engineering skills enable M’Benga to eventually get to the truth, which is that aliens who live in the nebula have created this scenario. This gives us two other Trek tropes, the general one of beings of pure energy, which we’ve seen all over the franchise, and the specific one of those aliens taking a shine to human children and trying to help them (the original series’ “Charlie X,” TNG’s “The Bonding”). The aliens saw Rukiya in the transporter buffer, and are giving her her favorite story.
Getting there, though, is an exercise of pure self-indulgence, and I have to confess to loving the shit out of it, mainly because the actors are having so much fun role-playing. Some more than others, of course; Ethan Peck particularly seems to be enjoying playing Castor, the untrustworthy wizard who betrays King Ridley, while Rong Fu is very obviously enjoying a meatier role as a soldier than she gets saying “Aye, sir” a lot as Mitchell, and Melissa Navia and Rebecca Romijn both are fun as the two badasses.
But the most amazing work is done by Anson Mount and Christina Chong, who go completely sideways from their usual. The chamberlain is a coward, a fop, and a schmuck, and Mount plays his unapologetic cravenness with gusto. And man, is Chong having a blast being a pampered prig of a princess, who carries her little dog with her everywhere.
Image: CBS
Most of the episode is an excuse for the LARPing, but eventually, the real plot kicks in, and what prompts it is my favorite thing in the episode. What makes M’Benga realize that this isn’t just a re-creation of The Elysian Kingdom is when Zymera and Sir Adya hug, and make it clear that they’ve been lovers. In the book, Zymera and Adya have never even met. But Rukiya thinks they should be friends and lovers, and yes, the whole thing is Rukiya’s fanfic that she wrote in her head, and I adore the heck out of that.
In the end, the aliens take Rukiya with them, because they can remove her from her failing body and give her a life as an energy being with them. M’Benga’s whole thing was that he was hoping to find a cure somewhere out in space where there’s all kinds of crazy-ass shit, and it’s a very Trek solution for her cure to be the craziest of crazy-ass shit.
It’s a bittersweet solution for M’Benga, as Rukiya grows to adulthood in just a few seconds, thanks to the peculiar nature of the aliens. On the one hand, he’s missed her growing up. On the other hand, she did grow up, and her adult self is very happy and very grateful.
Interestingly, my assumption of what happened at the end of “Ghosts of Illyria” was wrong. I figured that Number One had to have set up the dedicated power source for the medical transporter with the knowledge of Pike and Hemmer. But in this episode it’s clear that Hemmer doesn’t even know that M’Benga has a daughter, much less one being stored in the transporter buffer.
Image: CBS
And indeed, Una is the one who talks to M’Benga about what’s happening to Rukiya, in parallel scenes at the beginning and end of the episode. Commander Chin-Riley has been criminally underused in the series so far (and yes, I will continue to complain about it as long as it remains true), but she’s well used here, both as M’Benga’s confidant and as Zymera the Huntress. In fact, I was expecting Number One to be Queen Neve, and I think giving that role to Uhura was a smarter move (though Celia Rose Gooding was comparatively stiff in the role). For one thing, it meant that both the king and the queen were played by Black actors, which I liked. I also liked that Ortegas was in the role of “Sir” Adya, and nobody batted an eyelash at that…
SNW is sometimes embracing the goofier style of plotlines from Trek history, and I’m down with this. I don’t need all the new Trek shows to dip into this well—for example, this sort of story wouldn’t really work on Discovery or Picard, whereas it’s pretty much all Lower Decks does—but I like that SNW goes for it sometimes.
I also appreciate that they’re not dragging the subplots out. I was worried we wouldn’t get any resolution on Rukiya at all this season, and we’ve got it with two episodes to spare!
They also finally give M’Benga a first name. To my disappointment, they went with “Joseph.” Rather than mine the tie-in fiction for his first name (successfully done with Sulu, Uhura, and Number One), which has given M’Benga the first names of Geoffrey (in Jean Lorrah’s The IDIC Epidemic) and Jabilo (in the Vanguard novel series), they went with Joseph. I would’ve rather it be Jabilo, but alas…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three short stories out soon: “A Lovely View,” a tale of Zorro, in Zorro’s Exploits, edited by Audrey Parente, from Bold Venture Press; “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” a story that puts together author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson, in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, from Fantastic Books; and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a Super City Cops story, in Tales of Capes and Cowls, edited by C.T. Phipps, from Crossroad Press.
Nothing Phone 1 kommer inledningsvis endast att säljas via ett inbjudningssystem. Det förra företaget Carl Pei var med och grundade, OnePlus, hade samma upplägg vid starten.
I en video från Nothing säger en marknadsförare att det är viktigt att folk från Nothings community får telefonen först. En annan anledning som anges för inbjudningssystemet är att Nothing inte kan tillverka miljontals exemplar som jättarna och att Phone 1 därför kommer ha begränsad tillgänglighet i början.
Pei uttalar sig också och säger att det tar tid att bygga upp ett stort lager: antingen kan de vänta tills det finns ett tillräckligt stort lager, eller börja sälja vartefter via inbjudningar. Nothing hade även problem med tillgängligheten för hörlurarna Ear 1 som snabbt sålde slut, och vill inte att samma sak ska hända för första telefonen.
Få intressenter gillar sannolikt upplägget, men det är så det blir. Ett rykte hävdar samtidigt att Nothing Phone 1 kommer erbjuda 5G-chippet Snapdragon 778G+ med 6nm tillverkningsteknik, samt 8GB RAM. Uppgiften kommer från ett Geekbench-resultat.
Tidigare rykten har hävdat att telefonen kör Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, vilket alltså inte verkar stämma.
By Teecloud
Great gift for anyone that is fluent in sarcasm, and can't help but respond with sarcastic comments. To avoid any confusion: yes, I'm being sarcastic.
Star Wars diehard or Star Wars newbie, if you’re a fan of the galaxy far, far away, you probably have a favorite character that isn’t one of the major heroes or villains, or even one of the myriad supporting stars. Just, you know: that cool background character who maybe shows up for a glimpse, or a tie-in media…
The first volume of Stranger Things season four was released last week, and now we know, once and for all, just how long volume two is going to be. Episode eight will clock in at just over an hour, while episode nine, the season finale episode, is two hours and 19 minutes long. So two episodes of television, about …
If there’s one word that sums up Sony’s flagship wireless headphones year over year, it’s consistency. The WH-1000XM line has seen only subtle design updates since the original WH-1000XM1, but four iterations later, the new WH-1000XM5 bring some big changes. Longtime fans may not immediately fall in love with the…
Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Leah wrestles their mental Krakens to talk about the surprising religious imagery in Our Flag Means Death.
Maya Gittelman talked about the way the show questioned masculinity and tradition in their incredible essay, but one aspect of it I found especially interesting was in the subversion, or really outright rejection, of the patriarchal religion that would have been the default of the 1700s.
To start, it’s worth noting that we only see three religious authorities in the ten episodes. One is Nana, who is a knife-wielding, vengeful nun who’s totally cool with Jim’s pronouns, and with the idea that they’re shacking up with Olu. She also finds it hilarious that the local priest was crushed by a tree.
Screenshot: HBO Max
Nana’s the best, mostly.
Later, Jim themself stands in for a priest (the one who was crushed, perhaps?) in order to hear Geraldo’s confession before they take him hostage to negotiate with Spanish Jackie. (Sidenote: never thought I’d see an enby priest on a pirate show? Sometimes I’m glad I’m alive?)
The last is a Protestant minister who officiates Stede and Mary’s wedding. He delivers the traditional platitudes that make marriage sound like a death sentence, delivers a sermon that ties religion, duty, and society into one untangle-able knot, and seems cool with the status quo of marrying two people who have barely met. (He also lives on an island in the Caribbean but doesn’t know how lighthouses work.)
Screenshot: HBO Max
And the wedding gifts? Stede and Mary receive gravestones from their families—a reminder that while you only have this one life, it’s to be trudged through, not enjoyed.
But as with all things OFMD, the important stuff is the deep sea of emotion that lurks just beneath the surface.
Throughout the show, Stede is rock solid in his belief that he deserves to die for the crimes of accidentally killing Badminton and abandoning his family. He repeatedly says, “I deserve this” and “the bill’s come due” when Admiral Badminton catches up with him. This is an understandable response to breaking the laws of your society—at least, if you’re a soft boi like Stede Bonnet and live with guilt and anxiety as your default setting.
What’s more interesting to me is Stede’s—and the show’s—relationship to Hell. When Badminton’s ship catches up with them, the crew explicitly asks if they should “blow them to Hell”. Not blow them up, or blow them out of the water, but “to Hell.” The following episode, that deals with Stede’s guilt over kinda sorta killing Badminton, is straight up titled “A Damned Man”. And yes, at one point Stede tells Pete and Olu that they have to “get their damned men back” (foreshadowing???) but I think we’re also meant to see the “damned man” as Stede, at least in his own mind. Chauncy Badminton plans to “ride the cat bandits straight to Hell” when he plans his vengeance, and when Chauncey finally kidnaps him, Stede once again thinks he deserves punishment and death.
Screenshot: HBO Max
More than that, Stede seems to believe that he deserves Hell. When he gets stabbed up by some Spaniards, he takes Hell as a given. He hallucinates Mary at his bedside, but she doesn’t forgive him—she tells him to “enjoy Hell” while his father laughs at his terror. He then sees Blackbeard as a flame-eyed demon stabbing him with a trident/pitchfork. (And if you want to cry again, remember that while he’s hallucinating, the real Ed is watching over him as he sleeps.) The throughline is that Stede is wracked with guilt. Some part of him thinks that the only possible outcome of leaving his family and breaking with his society is death and, ultimately, flames.
Which tracks pretty closely with the experience of queer people who are told they’re going to Hell for who they are, no?
But where things get even more interesting is in Ed’s story, and the way Stede intersects with it. The first thing that Ed and Stede connect over is their shared love of fine fabrics. We learn in “The Best Revenge is Dressing Well” (in a flashback that happens right after an upperclass officer calls Ed a “donkey”) that Ed’s mother was in service to a family called Carmody, and brought a scrap of their silk home to her child. Ed was fascinated by it and loved it enough to keep it all those years (and presumably hide it from his father, who would never have allowed any son of his to have something so swish). He associates it with his mother, and in most stories it would simply be a sentimental keepsake, the one thing that the gruff violent brooding man keeps to tell us he has a heart under all that leather. Or, it would be just a symbol of aristocracy, and the fine things he can’t have, while he watches his mother exhaust herself for their survival.
Screenshot: HBO Max
But what he remembers when he holds the silk is his mother telling him: “It’s not up to us, is it? It’s up to God. He decides who gets what. We’re just not those kind of people. Never will be.” This is what he’s meditating on as he gazes at his “tatty” old silk. The idea that he was worthless didn’t just come from class, or society, or the fact that he and his mother are multiracial—his place is woven into the fabric of reality. His mother doesn’t even soften her words with the “uplifting” narrative that noble poor people who suffer on Earth earn their reward in Heaven. It’s God Himself who has decreed that there’s an order, that Ed Teach is at the bottom of it, and there is no escape.
It would be easy to see this as “Christianity is part of the larger power structure of the colonizers of the 1700s” until you think about Ed’s reaction to it. First, his comment on the Spaniards dramatically “blubbering for their God” as they die. (As ever in this show, it’s important to note the use of “their”.) Given that the Spaniards’ God is the same as his mother’s, with this one line Ed makes it clear that he’s separated himself from the God, and thus the cosmic order, that his mother raised him in.
A bold choice!
An episode later, Stede unknowingly takes him a step further. When he folds Ed’s silk, tucks it into Ed’s pocket, and tells him “you wear fine things well” he’s transforming the silk from a symbol of degradation to a symbol of love, untethered from hierarchy. He’s also rejecting God’s order. He’s telling Ed that having fine things isn’t up to God at all. Ed rejected the traditional religious order by removing himself from it; Stede rejects it by saying God is wrong.
Screenshot: HBO Max
Now, Stede doesn’t know this—but I’m pretty sure he’d make with the pocket square even if he did. And the important part of the scene is that Ed does know, and in (eventually) accepting Stede’s compliment, he’s pushing back against everything he was raised with in a new, and more positive, way.
This is complicated by the following episode, “The Art of Fuckery”. When Ed tells the story of the Kraken killing his dad, he doesn’t use gendered pronouns for the beast. He tells the story, the crew is shocked, he swings straight into talking about weaponizing fear. When Stede and the crew ask for a lesson on this, Ed’s reply is odd: “But be careful what you ask your God for. She might just answer.”
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Who’s the God in this scenario? Ed? Ed in Kraken persona? Because if it’s that, Ed just referred to herself with feminine pronouns.
Ed and his crew demonstrate a fuckery, and Stede’s delight becomes the final straw for Izzy—which is where the two cosmological threads suddenly entangle. Izzy demands that Ed abide by his “No Pets On Board” rule, and kill his pet, Stede, in the same way that Fang had to kill his dog. From that moment on, Stede’s murder is framed as Stede being “sent to Doggy Heaven.”
Except Stede doesn’t think he’s going to any heaven, let alone the best possible one.
Stede, when he thinks about such things at all, thinks he’s damned, and Stede’s entire society agrees with him.
This all comes together in the bathtub, when Ed allows himself to cry in front of Stede, and admit to his first murder: the Kraken didn’t kill his dad, he did—he is the Kraken. The thing that scares him the most. The thing at the root of the weaponized fear of the Fuckery. Which means…he’s the feminine God they should be careful of, right?
Screenshot: HBO Max
But the Kraken isn’t automatically feminine.
Leviathan, a creature mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, is sometimes feminine. Tiamat, one of the primordial Babylonian deities, is always feminine, and often the mother of the rest of the pantheon. But the Kraken isn’t, necessarily. One of the most famous pop cultural versions, from the 1981 and 2010 Clash of the Titans movies, were actually given female sacrificial victims a lá King Kong, and I don’t remember Davey Jones discussing his pet Kraken’s gender in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. So if Ed is identifying with the Kraken, and telling the crew to be careful of what they ask for because “She might just answer”—he has created a primordial feminine god in order to overthrow the violent, abusive patriarch who terrorized him and his mother. The man who was the head of the house, who had to be obeyed under an order decreed by God.
Screenshot: HBO Max
In order to murder his father, free his mother, and reject the order of his society and his society’s oppressive male God, Ed didn’t just become “The Kraken”—he became a feminine divinity.
After he confesses his murder to Stede he tells him: “You don’t belong in Doggy Heaven”. (He is, of course, making a gallows humor commentary on his own plot to kill his friend, but I think it’s worth pointing out that In Ed’s eyes, Stede going to Heaven is a given.) Ed can’t bring himself to use the same terrifying identity that murdered his father against a person who has opened a new world up to him, but he can’t keep lying to him, either. I have to assume that he makes this confession assuming that this will be the end of their friendship. In Ed’s world, not so far removed from that of his violent father, and his mother’s oppressive religion, a betrayal like this is met with retribution, punishment—Stede’s immediate forgiveness and understanding are unthinkable to Ed.
Screenshot: HBO Max
But Stede, who already merrily catapulted over one God’s rules, isn’t horrified by the Kraken. He’ll love Ed even if Ed’s a sea monster or an aspect of the Primordial Feminine Divine. For all that he thinks he’s cosmically wrong, and will be punished for it eventually, as long as he’s alive and captain he’ll be the one who decides who deserves fine things.
This imagery gives us a series of subtle but insistent pokes that add to OFMD’s overall thematic tickle fight. Landlocked society, with all its rules and dogmas and norms, is crushing. Toxic masculinity attempts to destroy Stede’s spirit, and traps Ed and his mother in an abusive household that seems to have been approved by God. The hierarchical, patriarchal religion that Stede’s society lives by forces people into loveless marriages and threatens them with Hell.
Screenshot: HBO Max
The world of pirates pushes back on that with images of canine paradises and feminine gods. A bloodless minister only too happy to yoke a pair of strangers together for eternity is overshadowed by a vengeful, loving Nana, who accepts her grandchild for who they are, and has cake and oranges for everyone. A rote confession to a fake priest is countered with a true, heartfelt conversation between two equal men, Ed huddled in a bathtub, sobbing under his boyfriend’s robe; Stede forgiving everything—not because he has to, but because he understands how an abusive father and an oppressive society can twist a person into terrible shapes, and he wants to offer Ed true compassion, and a different kind of life. Instead of a dreary life and the threat of Hell, the pirate world offers fuckery and blood and fire and, ultimately, Doggy Heaven.
Leah Schnelbach wants you to consider: is OFMD‘s moon the best one since Joe Versus the Volcano? It is, right? Come bathe with them in the moonglow of Twitter!
Tesla stopped work at its new manufacturing plant in Shanghai, China on Tuesday due to supply issues, according to a new report from Reuters. The facility, which typically aims to make 2,000 cars per day, only churned out about 200 on Tuesday, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Late Monday, Politico published a 98-page bombshell from the heart of the Supreme Court detailing—in Justice Samuel Alito’s caustic, disdainful language—SCOTUS’ plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that made abortion legal in the U.S. in 1973.
Sen. Ron Wyden told Gizmodo Tuesday that a decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade would trigger a digital privacy crisis, one that could see authorities turn personal data into a tool for hunting down women seeking abortions.
“So I’m very much enjoying this,” I said in a group text to a pair of dear friends as I began to watch Our Flag Means Deathfor the first time, “and there is some very queer queerness happening. But I just have to know. Do we get something on screen? I cannot get my hopes up again.”
Doctor Who has a long fabled history of actors—from Julian Glover to Carey Mulligan—showing up in the series before they went on to explode into international stardom, and Doctor Who as a veritable who’s who (sorry) of famous stars before they really started shining is a concept as old as the show itself. But now, 15…
Earlier today, the much-anticipated Thor: Love and Thunderteasertrailer arrived and sent the whole comics-hungry internet into a tizzy. The trailer is a bit all over the place, but fingers crossed the movie itself will be something more than the sum of the teaser’s parts, which appear to be frantically stitched…
Hello, and welcome one and all to Reader Request Week 2022, where you offer up the topics, and I offer my thoughts on your topics. Let’s start this week off on a manly topic, shall we?
“Just Sayin'” asks:
You have occasionally been criticized by meatheads for being a “girly man” type, and you have dismissed these idiots appropriately.
However, for the sake of argument and fun, please defend your man-cred, and demonstrate your good standing in the white male dominated patriarchy. What tools do you own, and what can you do with them? Can you fix an engine, sail a boat? Are you a deadly shot with a pistol? Do you hunt? What sports have you, can you play well? Macho achievements, skills? Can you drink all night and crank out immaculate prose like a Hemingway? You get the idea.
So, to answer this, I need to go back to high school, and the day that the dance teacher, Joan Rohrback, decided that I was going to be in her dance class.
It went like this: I was standing around in front of my high school administration office, doing whatever the hell I was doing, when Ms. Rohrback marched up to me, said “I need a guy to be in the dance class. You’re it,” and then walked away before I could say anything one way or the other. And just like that, I was the guy in the dance class, because as it happened a physical education class was required, so I had to do something, and also I didn’t want to argue with Ms. Rohrback about it. She was a dancer, she could pop my head right off with her thighs.
It turned out that dance class was in many ways fundamental to my understanding of my own masculinity. This was for several reasons. One, it reinforced to me that I was, in fact, a straight dude — and a cis straight dude, although “cis” was not a word I knew or a concept I would have understood at the time. Regardless, I was very aware of the women I got to be with in the class, and felt like I was getting away with something being able to spend my time with them instead of, say, wrestling another dude into a foam mat. Two, it taught me to dance. To be a good dancer, I think, you have to understand that your dance partner is your equal — you may lead (or may not, depending on the dance and whether it is a partner dance or an ensemble dance), but the dance doesn’t work if you don’t support and aid those you dance with. I wanted to be a good dancer, and as a result I learned to understand, in a very oblique way I wouldn’t unpack until much later, the benefit of equality and support.
Third, it really effectively short-circuited my concern about the judgment of other dudes. A lot of straight men, especially young men, don’t dance, because they think they will look foolish doing so, and when they’re concerned about looking foolish, the people they’re most concerned about looking foolish to are other men — who they often imagine will see them on the dance floor and cast judgment on them, not for their moves, but for being on the dance floor at all. Learning to dance got me over that, by actually teaching me how to dance and by teaching me to enjoy dancing for itself, and by giving my dancing proper focus — not on the other dudes, most not on the dance floor, who may or my not be judging me, but either on my dance partner, who legitimately deserved my attention, or on myself, enjoying the pleasure of the dance itself.
Did I get shit from other dudes about dancing? Sure, both in high school and beyond, but I didn’t care. And some time later, when literally the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my life saw me dancing and then told me we had to dance sometime that evening, and I said “now is good,” and then we got married (not that night, to be clear), my policy of not giving a shit about what other dudes thought about my dancing was vindicated. When I took Krissy to meet my dude friends for the first time, and they all said to me (when Krissy was out of earshot), “We don’t understand, how did you manage this,” I got to say, “Because I learned how to dance, motherfuckers,” and I have to say, that was especially sweet.
So, learning how to dance went a fair distance of getting me out of needing the approval of other men for the things I did, and who I was. It wasn’t the only thing, to be sure, and here are some of the other things that helped: My enormous ego, even as a child, which made me resistant to the opinions of people I thought were full of crap, particularly if they were my peers who I realized knew possibly even less than me about how the world worked; My manifest lack of genuinely useful male role models growing up, counterbalanced with a surfeit of women in my life who Just Got Shit Done; The ability to be in my own head a lot of the time, and to do my own thing, regardless of what anyone else thought of it. And also, you know, the realization that so much of the US Standard Model of Masculinity was just complete bullshit, which was evident to me at a very early age; so much of it posturing and so very little of it actually useful to anyone who had to deal with it, including the men themselves. But certainly the high school dance classes gave me a structure to think about masculinity and my relationship to it, whether I was fully aware of it at the time or not.
Now, let’s fast forward to today, and the interrogation of my masculinity by other dudes. It is correct that I have a tendency to wave away attacks on my masculinity by other men, but that doesn’t answer why I do that. One reason is because I don’t care what these dudes think; they’re all resentfully holding up the gym wall in the high school dance of my life, while I’m in the middle of the floor, dancing with my gal and all my friends. Another reason is that even by their own standards of what masculinity is, they’re usually not measuring up, so why would I let their opinion of what I’m doing matter one way or another?
A third reason is that, bluntly, and again, by their own standards of what masculinity is, I’m wiping the floor with them. Hello! I’m a financially sound cis, straight white man who, even factoring in all the societal buffs he got for free, built a successful career with his own hands(*), and has been living the life he’s wanted to live for going on three decades now. I’m good enough at it that the way these dudes deal with it is to try to demote me out of it. And, my friend, if you have to concoct an actual industry-spanning conspiracy to explain how I’m actually failing in my masculinity, well. You have fun with that. It’s all the same to me. You can’t demote me out of my manhood, and it’s not my manhood that looks lesser for you having made the attempt.
That said, I cheerfully acknowledge that I don’t care about so many of the things that (jokingly presented in the question, but not-so-jokingly presented by the Masculinity Police) are on the checklist for Standard Issue Man-Cred. Who made those lists? What are their credentials? What about those activities are so inherently strongly gendered that someone who is not “masculine” can’t do them? Tool use is not inherently masculine. Sailing a boat is not inherently masculine. Shooting a pistol is not inherently masculine. Writing whilst drunk is not inherently masculine (see: Dorothy Parker). Can I do the things on any random given Man-Cred list? Possibly! But there’s almost nothing on any random Man-Cred list that needs a man, by whatever definition you want to give that word, to do it.
But because we live in a sexist and deeply gender-anxious world and culture, both globally and locally, I concede that there are certain things that men are expected to do, or at least aren’t given the same amount of shit for doing, than other folks; it’s not suggested they can’t do these things, nor is their competence questioned when they do them.
To this end, these are some of the things on my own “Man-Cred” list, the list by which I measure my own success as a man, and which, I suggest, I will not encounter static for being able to do:
Provide, financially and emotionally, for my family
Love and champion friends
Be a good and useful neighbor
Contribute positively to my community
Be kind and fair with others when I can
Use my voice and wherewithal for the things I believe in
Use my privilege to raise people up, not keep them down
Acknowledge the wrongs I do and make amends if possible
Work to be the better version of myself every day
Plan for a future beyond myself and my own immediate desires
Again, there’s nothing on this Man-Cred list that needs a man to do them; anyone of any gender can perform them. But let’s also acknowledge that if men centered these sorts of things in their masculinity, we might be better off in general.
I will be the first to acknowledge that I am not perfect in observing the things on my own Man-Cred list; I’m not always performing my own conception of masculinity to its best. But I do make the effort. I become a better man, and a better person, by doing so. And if nothing else, I still get to dance.
