NEW ISSUE: “What it takes to be a real man”

Ed's Note

Our very own Rayno Nel is the newly crowned World’s Strongest Man. I like how South Africans are at the centre of every conversation these days. In terms of the “strong man of the South”, I, for one, delight in this sort of thing. As it happens, I have a very strong biologically determined streak running through me and I can acknowledge that lifting menhirs, pushing locomotives, and pulling airplanes are part and parcel of what it takes to be a real man these days.

What? You haven’t heard? Everyone is now going to stay in their biologically determined lanes and do what is right in the name of the Lord and the ancestors — those cave dwellers of deep antiquity who did things according to the tropes newly laid down in the White House. It was all biltong back in the day, I’m told, just endless chunks of protein supplied by the hunters (the gatherers were obviously messing about on country walks all day, not actually bringing home the bacon or even a nut or two).

At least, that is the news in the manosphere — you have to subsist on steak like Jordan Peterson and the hunters of yore. Better yet, you must kill the steak with your bare hands, skin it, and make a fire to roast it: then you really will have earned your masculinity stripes, plus, curbed your inflammation — it’s a win–win. Now, the fact that our hunter-gathering ancestors were pretty much egalitarians and appear to have had a strong sense of impartiality in terms of the value they placed on the sexes and who actually wore the pants should not worry you in the least. Nobody had pants back then, so it’s a moot point.

As ever, we pick and choose our past to suit our current world view — it helps that we can sort of do that with our present too. You just have to persevere with the training of your algorithm. In the spirit of only seeing what I want to see, I have decided to ignore the rise of the “breast is best” movement as modelled by one Lauren Sánchez, consort of Jeff Bezos, and her various plumped-up acolytes, recently seen frolicking en masse in Paris for her “hens do”.

I am glad to report that her bosoms are front and centre not only in this earthly dimension, manifesting as “persons” in their own right, but also up in space, trussed up in the sexiest spacesuits ever seen (or at least since Star Trek met Wonder Woman).

The thing with “her ladies”, as she has cheerfully named them, is that in the new era of clear-cut gender norms — as espoused by the “strongmen” in charge of many, many places all over the planet — they are inadvertently giving drag-queen vibes. Which I quite enjoy, because I like that sort of thing — I am a friend of the playful, the challenging and, above all, the high drama. Men have been dressing as extreme versions of women for as long as we — or, at least, our cultural artefacts — can remember, but what is really amusing for the casual bystander is that whiplash moment when women are dressing like men dressing like women. What are you actually witnessing? It’s the strongman version of womanhood: you have to take it to extremes, otherwise who can really tell the difference?

Things had become vaguely equal around these parts: women got to go to school and university and even work for salaries almost comparable to those of their male counterparts. Never mind the vote. God, crazy stuff — in this brave new world, you and “your ladies” get to lift alarmingly expensive handbags, push up your breasts as high as they’ll go, and pull your tech bro behind you to the gym so he can lay on some muscle, which he was sorely lacking in his previous pasty iteration. I like my world to be simple and self-explanatory, preferably presented in pictograms so I can get the full picture in one. “The ladies” are telling me everything I need to know.

x

Aspasia

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