It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

I am not very manly, by any degree.

But what is manliness? Is it proportional to the size of one's pectorals? The amount of money you earn? The length of your..... pick-up truck?

According to many out there, yes. But if that's the case, then I might as well take a cleaver and chop off my man-hood (after of course a dose of strong painkillers because evidently I'm not man-enough to take the pain). But then on the other side of things, the Gentleman's side of thing, it's also become a hard-knock life; I can recall times whilst holding a door open for a complete stranger, said stranger endowed me with a look that said 'Am I inept? Am I weak? Do not condescend me with your manners' No 'thank you', no acknowledgement or detectable gratitude. So why indeed should the gentleman even bother.

Of course we could discuss whether one should expect gratitude or expect acknowledgement for what is supposed to be a simple kindness, but we're not going to. It's more to do with the fact that people who are neither macho nor rich and who's only path lies in trying to be a gentleman, find themselves stuck in a purgatory of scorn on one side and confusion/fear on the other.

I'm not trying to say that I'm suffering from some existential gender crisis, but rather that it saddens and confuses me to see what it is that counts towards one's manliness nowadays.

It saddens me to see the gentleman being strangled to death by the combination of the brute and the neo-feminists who appear to live in a world where the former acts as though a star subject cast in one of David Attenborough's documentaries concerning animals mating procedures, and the latter acts as though any acknowledgement from a male immediately means he's a pervert and a rapist (with some good cause I might add, but it's still really fucking sad).

The thing that saddens me most is that it even counts towards anything to be a 'REAL' man. But then again, maybe I'm just a jealous metro sexual who can't seem to gather the testosterone to be classed a man. And I can only apologise for the disarray of this blog entry, it was just a fleeting thought.

I'll just return to my hormonal imbalance and pray for a love of football and cars and acceptance from the LADS. Or not.

Peace.