Drinking like Men

I spent most of last night at a bar with an acquaintance who is fast becoming a friend. We talked about booze, women and being men. We both work in the booze industry (he's a bartender, I work for a wine importer/distributor) and so it's unsurprising we spent a good chunk of the evening talking about our trade. Similarly for women. We'd both have our own travails of late and that's a prime topic of conversation when you're out for drinks with a friend. But what of being men? It's not discussed much at all in any forum, serious or not.

Women have a very established body of thought devoted to exploring the question of what it means to be a woman. And I don't just mean the serious stuff, though that's important, but the silly and irreverent stuff to. Talk about women occurs in all sorts of rhetorical registers in any imaginable type of forum. But no one talks about being a man, except maybe Robert Bly, but I'm not sure he counts.

First off: There's the essentialist question. Is there anything fundamentally different in kind, genitalia aside, between being a man and a woman. This is actually not a question I care to answer in any serious way. I bring it up because my question, what does it mean to be a man, takes as an obvious premise that there is something fundamentally different in kind.

What is that?

Goodnight,
Ev

Returns

I've decided, at the suggestion and behest of a good friend, to return to writing here. Since graduating from college, I've largely lost interest to posting my various musings to this site. There are various reasons for this, but foremost among them are that I don't spent as much time musing as I did while in school, and, what writing energy I've expended has been towards a couple articles I've been working on, one now done.

Why don't I muse about life, language and politics anymore? I'd like to say it's because I'm now living life, engaging in politics and, uh. . .. But it's mostly that I've been doing different things: hanging out with friends, reading about politics and religion, and looking for jobs.

The decision to come back here was sparked by a commitment I made to myself, but cemented by making it explicit to my friend, that I will write everyday. Subject matter and quality are largely unimportant. Don't say you haven't been warned. I'm writing as an exercise in writing.