It's A Man's World. Whatever That World May Be....

Recently I have been pondering the question, "What does it mean to be a man?". Beyond the physical body hair and big strong arms of course, has the archetypal character of the human male become tarnished over time or ruined by modern life and what exactly is a man in the 21st Century?

In Ancient Greece, men were in charge of the family and house. They would work during the day and when they returned they would lay on a couch and were fed and entertained while the women and children ate in another room. Not much has changed certain feminists would argue, and to a degree this is true. In other respects though, the role of the modern male has completely changed.

Gone are the bearded and muscled warriors of old, replaced by a new generation of perfectly groomed, manicured psuedo-males who would rather hunt for a bargain on moisturiser than a deer. Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister claims that at the end of the last century, an Aboriginal could outrun Usain Bolt and that any Neanderthal woman could best Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm-wrestle.

So what happened us? The concept of a man been devalued and we're now the worst men in human history according to the big-brained boffins. It would be easy to take the lazy route and blame feminists, but I disagree because a strong man should be able to take any strong-opinionated woman in his stride. The truth is we've become lazy, complacent and if anything, cowardly.

In my own opinion however, nothing can adequately surmise what it is to be a man, simply because it's a constantly shifting ideal. The world has changed a lot between ancient times and the present and as a result of that the world's inhabitants have changed along with it. The modern man may have swapped his spear for a telly remote but I believe that at the core of us lies strength, integrity and kindness - traits that set us apart from the rest and traits that are timeless.

Regardless of whether you buy your clothes in Abercrombie and Fitch or the military surplus store or whether you're name's Phil or Alonso. We are men, and we will continue to be men because being a man isn't about shooting animals or skinning them alive no more than it's about sitting in front of the telly - it's about being strong and dependable, whatever the world dictates that to be.

You Never Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression...

I have to say it, blogging is one of the strangest, most pointless things a person could do. Why would anybody spend time writing about their daily lives when nobody’s going to read it? And even if they do they’re probably going to hate it. Anyway, if it’s personal thoughts and feelings you want to get off your chest, I hear that Samaritans run a very good helpline, albeit one run by people who like most other helplines these days probably only speak Urdu.

And yet here I am. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here if truth be told, I suppose it’s just pure curiosity. Strange men in white coats tell us that we all display an innate desire to tinker with things that terrify us. That explains the reason we go to watch horror films, fling ourselves out of aeroplanes and probably also explains why Margaret Thatcher stayed Prime Minister for so long, we’re all simply obsessed with fear.

Unlike elderly men who peer out through slatted blinds at hooligans outside their front gardens or Daily Mail readers who are never happy unless they have something to be scared of, my fear lies in the omnipresent, all-powerful modern phenomena that is the Internet.That’s not to say I’m anti-technology, because if I was I would hardly be blogging. I’d be living in a cave somewhere in Albania and preaching about the end of the world to any goat unfortunate enough to traipse across my path.

And I will openly admit that the Internet can be a great positive force in the world. For instance it can be extremely beneficial educationally, you can share your great aunt Nora’s flair for nude chainsaw-balancing with the world in seconds and you can order anything from shoes to wives almost instantaneously.

It’s however when the internet shows it’s darker, meaner and more scurrilous side that things take a downwards twist. For instance, your children are being mercilessly driven to suicide on Facebook, your dad spends the majority of evenings showing off his private parts to a young Belarusian girl, someone’s just pilfered your entire internet savings account, and that video of you on Holiday in ’83 that you believed to be gone forever is now number one on the E4 programme Rude Tube.

And that’s only scratching the surface. You can’t take a quick pee in a bush anymore without being videoed, you can never harmlessly join in the Nigerian lottery without being declared bankrupt and having a nasty computer virus to add insult to injury and you find the novel you’ve been working on for 20 years has been swiped and published by a man named Pablo.

The thing is, if something can be put on the internet it can be stolen. Money, music, DVDs, literature, newspapers are all going down the drain as a result of e-theivery. And there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. In fact, I can guarantee that there has been at least one person read this blog and became overwhelmed with the urge to plagiarise it.

Like a roaring pseudo-Orwellian-all-pigs-are-equal-freedom-is-slavery behemoth, the Internet has in the space of 10 or so years enslaved the majority of the Western World and the question is less wether we benefit or not from it, but more how to control a beast that is seemingly uncontrollable.