I somehow find it comforting that not everything that goes onto the internet is forever remembered. That some of it will get lost.

I am intimately familiar with this scenario, having visited a number of forums and partaken in a number of internet-based discussions over the years.

But as much as I hate being the recipient of such wrath, nothing is more upsetting that catching yourself in the act of trying to smite someone else in a similar fashion. A trap that my religious beliefs made easier to fall in to, and still do if I don’t remind myself of such things.

“It was hard to read because I seemed like such a helpless little worm, wrestling with feelings and ideas I couldn’t resolve. I felt like I could see finally see myself in the way other people might have seen me, petty, lost, tone deaf, and insignificantly small.”

Good lord, this reminds me of the day I found a small stack of old love poems. Ug. The horrors I experienced that day…

But even though it’s true that by seeing such a thing you catch a glimpse of what others saw in you, even then it is not the whole picture they experienced. A letter, casual comment or small event taken out of context can make anyone seem less than the sum of their parts.

It’s that knowledge that saves me from self-loathing whenever I think of certain… unpleasantness in my life.

As to writing from memory, you have some fascinating thoughts there. My own memory is so terrible that my life seems to be sometimes half-built from what others tell me about what happened when. It is like I’m living off of a belief in a mythology built to explain my own past self.

But I think that you’re selling short the feminist movement and all the progress made by like minded people when you say: “The expectation that they will be the primary, or even sole, caregivers for children has not diminished in the least, and added to this is the now-overt message that women must also be caregivers for adult men.”

I dare say there has been progress. Quite a lot. And not just in this nation, but in many others. Take Sweden, for instance, where progress is being made. I’d like to direct you to this article for the info: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html?pagewanted=1

Is there still work to be done? Oh, absolutely! But to say that there has been little to no progress isn’t factual.

He promulgated this anxiety (one I’m sure he was not alone in experiencing) in his literary oeuvre, and, since he was then (and is still) one of the most popular and widely read authors of all time, and a nascent example of rock-star celebrity, his ideas carried a LOT of clout.

Again, I don’t think Hemingway was the only man who felt threatened, lessened, by the sociopolitical growth of women; he is, though, noted as being one of the first people to say it out loud, so to speak–to yell and scream and behave badly and brutally because of terror and uncertainty and self-loathing rather than disguising it beneath a saccharine veil of concern of a superior being–man–for the welfare of an inferior one.

Most people weren’t–and aren’t–able or willing to ‘fess up as Hemingway does (which, by the way, is one of the reasons his stories are still such great literature), and seeing the expansion of women’s dominion into the realm formerly belonging to men is still looked at as male habitat loss. Because apparently we can’t share.

In reaction to this perceived threat, the men and women of the Western world have developed a variety of bizarre behaviors, most of which would be humorous if one were not directly affected by them. Women are now expected to present a hyperfeminized or infantilized appearance. The expectation that they will be the primary, or even sole, caregivers for children has not diminished in the least, and added to this is the now-overt message that women must also be caregivers for adult men.

This last is an extension of the changing definition of masculinity. As one feminist ex-boyfriend of mine mused, “There’s not much left now that’s exclusively male except serial killing and pro football.” I see much of the current cultural definition of masculinity as following this idea. “This is all we’ve got left,” masculinity has announced to men, “so we’re going to RUN with it.”

And behold: NASCAR, created as a guard at the gender borders. (It’s now become popular with both men and women drivers and viewers but I maintain that whistling past the graveyard of masculinity was its original purpose and that Hemingway thus bears a significant part of the blame for it.)

And so we come to today: Western culture now proudly presents men as little better in terms of humanity than well trained water buffalo–brawny, ill-washed animals whose only thoughts are of conquest, whether financial, logistical, fantastical, mechanical, physical, or sexual. Impulses to care, to self-sacrifice and form intimate attachments, to work hard or play or cry or worry or create art or care about beauty, are viewed as rare and fleeting in the human male and cause for panic if they should persist (for surely they must be indicative of either faggery or being dominated by one’s female counterpart).

And all THIS stems, in turn, from the idea that masculinity is an additive, not an inherent, attribute of maleness. Since it is impossible to prove oneself male by doing things or having interests that women do or have, the interests and behaviors that men, as a population, exhibit slightly more often than do women, as a population, have been tweaked, bloated, caricatured, and summarily imposed on everyone born in a male-looking body.

And since the purpose of this is gender boundary maintenance, which is best reinforced by extreme contrast, it is bad to be a woman wheresoever it is good to be a man. Thus even heterosexual impulses–those things that make men like women no matter how very hard they try not to do–must be safely contained in a context of conquest or, worse, contempt, as though the conquest is assumed to have already occurred. Because, shit, if you identify with women, you must be some kind of pussy or something. And that’s bad.

_Masculine_ and _male_ are concepts that have been horribly conflated. The saddest thing about Tiger Woods’ text messages to Joslyn James is that Woods may well have felt as he wrote that he was expressing affection, or at least attraction, and paying James a compliment–that he was, in short, behaving properly, the way a good man should. Certainly I, personally, know many men who have felt so.

In light of all this nonsense, I think that we must discuss gender and how it simultaneously fits into and shapes our lives and our selves before we can discuss inter-gender relationships and marriage and how they do the same. We need to go further back and talk about what, exactly, is expected of person as a gendered individual, what those expectations cost that person, and what they will cost his or her relationships. Maybe we should look into redefining gender before we start redefining marriage, because neither institution is serving us the human race particularly well right now.