I know you’re joking, but I don’t get people who unironically think like this. Like whats preventing a woman from eating lots of meat and losing money on sports betting? Like what physical barrier prevents them from doing that? None.
Societal expectations. If enough people think it does then it does. Doesn’t mean non-men can’t do it, but they might get ostracized for it, just like men are when they do certain female-coded things. Why is blue for boys and pink for girls? Why are high-heels for women only? Doesn’t have to make any actual sense, it just kinda is right now, even though it wasn’t always the case.
It’s all society. Always has been. Always will be. There are some very specific biological differences in the two sexes, and we’ve used those real differences to decide a bunch of fake differences we stick to out of convention. There’s an idea of what a man is in our collective unconscious, an archetypal “man”, and that’s what people refer to, but that archetype is breaking down. Man, woman, gender in general. We’re realizing that those distinctions aren’t useful, and sometimes, maybe even most of the time, are detrimental.
That all said, humans are social creatures. That pressure, that idea of “man” is all around us. It’s absolutely understandable that people can still generalize what “man” is. The concept doesn’t have to be based on anything tangible to be relevant to our species.
I know you’re joking, but I don’t get people who unironically think like this. Like whats preventing a woman from eating lots of meat and losing money on sports betting? Like what physical barrier prevents them from doing that? None.
So how could that define manhood?
Societal expectations. If enough people think it does then it does. Doesn’t mean non-men can’t do it, but they might get ostracized for it, just like men are when they do certain female-coded things. Why is blue for boys and pink for girls? Why are high-heels for women only? Doesn’t have to make any actual sense, it just kinda is right now, even though it wasn’t always the case.
It’s all society. Always has been. Always will be. There are some very specific biological differences in the two sexes, and we’ve used those real differences to decide a bunch of fake differences we stick to out of convention. There’s an idea of what a man is in our collective unconscious, an archetypal “man”, and that’s what people refer to, but that archetype is breaking down. Man, woman, gender in general. We’re realizing that those distinctions aren’t useful, and sometimes, maybe even most of the time, are detrimental.
That all said, humans are social creatures. That pressure, that idea of “man” is all around us. It’s absolutely understandable that people can still generalize what “man” is. The concept doesn’t have to be based on anything tangible to be relevant to our species.