What (in your society) is a 'real man'?

[FrustratedFool]

What does your culture say a real man should do/be?

[Angrboda]

Beats me.

[Fake Messiah]

Holding a log.

[tackattack]

Fair enough. So the ideals for man and woman are different.

Men are primarily protectors, women primarily nuturers, in your view.

So a man who was far more a nuturer than a protector wouldnt be a real man, yes?

Your assumption and mindset are that there is an either or dynamic going on, which is incorrect. You can be a male with 100% nurturer as a trait and that has zero bearing on me identifying them as a “real man”. As I stated nurturer was not part of my definition of “real man”. you can be both a nurturer and a protector but they are not the same thing.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that the definition of real men and women that we're talking about boils down to providing poles for the range of coping and parenting skills we think might need to be on hand. For example, the protecter/nurturer split boils down to how people are not generally incentivized to admit wrongdoing or misgivings to any disciplinarian agent in their life. Whether that's mom and dad, or the fuckin cops. So if dad, say, is the one in the business of handing out the timeouts - that would negatively impact any need the child might have to express those concerns or talk about those actions to a loving and punitively impartial audience. Basically, if you're good at dad-ing, in this regard, you're going to be bad at mom-ing, and vv. It's a practical solution to a labor distribution and specialization problem.

[Foxaèr]

Yet the reality is that parent is not a necessity for being either a man or woman.

[The Grand Nudger]

OFC not, in reality, but real man and real woman are cultural constructs, not facts of reality. The kid is on the list of acquisitions. House in the burbs, good job, savings account, smoking sex slave er..life partner...and 1.5 kids.

[Foxaèr]

Between the John Deere lawnmower and Hamilton Beach bread maker, amiright?

[The Grand Nudger]

Exactly. It's just a list of things that, for better and for worse, society takes to be the standard -functioning- model. We can all share horror stories about having grown up with bad examples...but even as we say that we acknowledge, either implicitly or explicitly, that they are bad examples.

I'd take any story about a society informing any one of us here to be raging assholes (of any kind) with a whole truckload of salt. That's social commentary, observational criticism, but not an accurate description of what their (or our) society insisted on.

[FrustratedFool]

Fair enough. So the ideals for man and woman are different.

Men are primarily protectors, women primarily nuturers, in your view.

So a man who was far more a nuturer than a protector wouldnt be a real man, yes?

Your assumption and mindset are that there is an either or dynamic going on, which is incorrect. You can be a male with 100% nurturer as a trait and that has zero bearing on me identifying them as a “real man”. As I stated nurturer was not part of my definition of “real man”. you can be both a nurturer and a protector but they are not the same thing.

But I can't be a zero protector and 100% nurturer and be a real man, yes? But I could be that and be a real woman.