WHAT SOCIETY EXPECTS FROM A GUY?

           WHAT SOCIETY EXCEPTS FROM A GUY?

The society expects that every guy must be" strong, courageous, independent, rich, intelligent ,violent insensitive, less expressive, assertive ".  The moment a guy fails to meet any of these parameters ,he immediately experiences the challanges ,the flip side of being a man .

Here are five ways that men in my life have told me they feel screwed over by sexism: five more rigid, narrow definitions of maleness that men feel pressured to contort themselves into.

1. Make money. When I asked the men in my life what (if anything) they felt was expected of them as men, this one came up ridiculously often. A huge part of how we define maleness lies in men's bank accounts. Even today, when women's income is on the rise and the two-income household is becoming standard, men are expected to rake in the bucks: to be wealthy if at all possible, to be good providers for their families at the bare minimum. Failure to do so catapults men directly into the Girly Man camp. Witness, among other things, this charming article in the New York Observer, exploring the phenomenon of stay-at-home dads... and arguing that the popularity among women of the successful, sexist jerk Don Draper from "Mad Men" somehow proves how dissatisfying it is when men don't bring home the bacon, and instead stay home and fry it up in a pan.
And whatever money men do bring in, it bloody well better be more than the women in their lives make. Whether they're rich CEOs or blue-collar Joes or comfy middle-class guys in between, making less money than their wives or girlfriends makes their masculinity suspect at best. Christopher quoted helpful comments from his friends about his life choices: "Oh, dude, your girlfriend makes three times what you do? Aww, that sucks."

2. Win, win, win! And no matter how much money you earn, it had better be more than anyone else. Because whatever you do, it had better be better than anyone else. The pressure on men to compete -- to win, and perhaps more importantly to care about winning -- can be intense. To be acceptably masculine, men are supposed to care passionately about their position on the primate hierarchy chain. And about other men's positions on said chain. Even not being interested in competitive sports is often greeted with bafflement at best and derision at worst. 
So, unless you're one of the 2-3 percent of men at the top, you're never going to win the game. But you bloody well better care about it anyway.

If you don't, your penis might fall off.

3. Be physically strong. This is an obvious one: so obvious it almost seems ridiculous to mention it. One of the most common expectations of men is that they be physically powerful: big, strong, muscular, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We see this everywhere: on TV, in movies, in video games, all over advertising like a cheap suit. It's tied in with competitiveness, of course -- but it's also very much its own thing. And lots of men I talked with about gender roles brought it up. Even gay men, who on the whole seem to feel a lot more free of these gender expectations than straight men, have a decided tendency to buy into the Big Strong Man myth. For themselves, and their objects of desire. 
and yet this is funny one .

4. Fix stuff. You need to know how to fix a flat tire. Or fix the broken door on the cabinet. Or fix the glitch on the computer that won't let you download mpegs. Men in our culture are expected to have some sort of inborn ability to fix just about any physical object that's broken. Mike, among others, learned from a very young age that being a man meant being "intrinsically able to fix things, especially mechanical things."

This creates an interesting self-fulfilling prophecy. From a young age, boys are commonly expected to tinker with mechanical objects -- and they're taught how to do it, at the side of their dads or older brothers or other men who are tinkering and fixing. And since they're more likely to be taught how to do it, they're more likely to know how to do it. And since they're more likely to know how to do it, they're the ones people turn to do it. Which reinforces the idea that men are better at it than women... and reinforces the expectation of boys and men that they bloody well better know how to do it if they don't want people to think they're sissies.

5. Get it up. If you have any doubts about this one, check your spam filter. Legions of businesses, legitimate and otherwise, are making themselves stinking rich off men's insecurities about their hard-ons. Lots of the men I talked with mentioned about this expectation, but nobody put it more succinctly than Christopher: "You have failed as a man if you do not or cannot give your partner a complete erection for a minimum of 20 minutes before you orgasm."

And we're sick of it.

And we should bloody well speak up about it.

THANK YOU.