Seriously, I don’t know how I find this stuff. This dude doesn’t so much solve a problem as much as he just points one out. Basically, he says that our culture pushes men to seek out sex in ways that women have been pressured to for centuries. By that, he means that men think they have to constantly wax, lift weights, tan, etc or else they won’t be found attractive. Yet, on the flip side, he says that women tend to want their men to be “manly” and do not find those things to be inherently manly.

He’s right that most men do not know what it’s like to be desired. I have no doubt that things like that contribute to increased insecurity and relationship problems, because men probably increasingly go out of their way to do something, anything, in order to feel wanted, and often, it doesn’t help. They spend hours on end making themselves pretty, only to have it not be good enough. . . or so they might think. . . because those hours in the gym or salon apparently get them nowhere, so what do they do? They spend more time there, because obviously, they didn’t do enough before.

This whole thing reminds me of the teenage girl, who goes out and gets knocked up, because why? She didn’t feel like her parents loved her and just wanted to feel that love somehow; she wanted to feel special to someone. Luckily, men don’t have to deal with getting unintentionally pregnant. However, I would think that the potential mental consequences of a cultural drive to make men seek out love in a historically feminine manner are just as bad, if not worse, because for each man that falls prey to this (and there are definitely a lot of them), our society gets a new bad boyfriend, bad husband, or bad father.

Is there a solution to this? Honestly, I can’t see anything that would change our cultural norms to help this. All that I can think is that a lot of men probably need to be reassured now and then that they are worthwhile people and that their time might now and then be better spent on something that keeps their mental and emotional lives healthy. . . as opposed to something that they think makes them physically attractive to the opposite sex. Who knows though.

Tags: Independent, manscaping, mental problems, sexual desires, unhealthy, waxing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Criticism, found. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.