There’s the “I masturbated into this pot pie” manliness of Steve the Barfer. The “I was falsely accused of rape not once but twice just as an undergraduate” manliness that Pussy Nick learned from “everyone.” There is the, “I don’t know how to read because it’s a gay activity” parody of manliness performed by Donnie the Dickhole.
And then, there’s me. A writer and intellectual, sure—both traditionally unmanly careers of themselves—but I have a voice that rumbles deeply, like the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plate; my balls hang so heavy and low that they brush the ground between my large, well-formed feet as I walk, boom boom boom, assertively from place to place; I’ve never looked a woman in the eye, for fear of losing even a drop of testosterone via hypnosis.
The Greeks, too, have a more fully developed vision of manliness than anything we see in or around the White House today.
For Greeks, manliness does not mean gaudy displays of wealth, like installing a gold-plaited faucet in the upstairs bathroom of your frat house. It means real wealth—old money wealth—where you don’t have to brag, because anyone can tell how big your trust fund is by looking at the “IV” after your name. It means carefully destroying every room after you leave it, breaking each piece of furniture by throwing it at a wall in a feat of manly strength, so that nobody can enjoy the computer lab once you and your boys have infected all the computers with viruses attached to teacher-student pornography. It means developing a manly tolerance to every strain of roofie, so that you can just pour ‘em straight into the main jungle juice pot.
Today, we’re in a crisis of masculinity. Men are unable to hold down jobs or relationships, because they think wearing a fancy hat or yelling, “Sell, sell, sell!” into a phone is all a man can do. But that’s wrong—just look at me, a well-rounded adult, as close an approximation to the Greek definition of manliness as exists today (our motto is: Everything Is Your Property If You Say It Is). Yet I’m also a career columnist, well-respected for his ideas both on the internet and off. Some might call me the whole package. And by some, I mean me.