Something is Wrong With Our Society And You Won’t Be Able To Figure Out What It Is From Upworthy.

New in hot topics: how everyone is being so mean to boys and young men. Poor, misunderstood Millennial men being told by men and women alike to grow a pair. This is why they’re angry and confused about their role in society: people tell them to stop being a pussy. They have to be a man. Be tough.

So mean.

Stop a moment. Let’s take your fingers off the “judge” button and hear me out.

As a member of Gen X, I want to play a little game. Perform some exploratory surgery on the subject. We are spoon-fed these “Upworthy” activist causes, and we go “Yeah! This sucks! Death to the man! (or in this case, Be nice to the man!).” And if we are particularly moved, we might try to make some conscious effort to stop using the phrase “man up.”

These trends in behaviour that we find reprehensible are symptoms of a bigger problem. The thing I dislike about Upworthy trends is that it’s like slapping a Band-aid on the bite of a brown recluse spider. You might make a surface change and ignore the festering rot that’s boiling below the surface. How many of us go poking our fingers into the wound? 

I lived through the 80’s. That decade was the quintessential era of sexual deconstruction, when all the lines became blurred. The boys were girls; the girls were men. Helloooo, Annie Lennox? Boy George? The concept of bad-assery was ungendered and universally appealing. David Bowie proved eyeshadow wasn’t emasculating. Nothing was off limits; when it came to finding your role model, who wasn’t nearly as important to us as what. Wayne Gretzky proved that even the little guy could take on the giants in hockey. Christa McAuliffe made us all want to be astronauts. Because of Pat Morita, Ralph Macchio, Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal, it was a great age to own a dojo. And let’s not forget: the US military reached out to men and women alike in with Hollywood propaganda flicks and its sexy new phrase “Be All That You Can Be.” 

I would give Gen-Y’s soft-touch mansumers odds of about 200:1 against any child of the 80’s in a street fight. We enrolled en masse in the physical activities of gymnastics, boxing and ju jitsu. You lot sit watching My Little Pony on your iPhones. The hell? Far be it from me to tell you what children’s programming you should or shouldn’t enjoy but I would just like to point out that you’re grown men. Not bronies.

Hang on a tick, cause I’m going to squeeze some pus.

In the extremely short span of 20 years, we went from the latch-key kids to helicopter parenting. We were Gen X, so we walked or biked home alone from school distances as far as three miles and let ourselves into the house. We ran loose around the neighbourhood and as far as we could pedal our bikes until dark or we heard the cow-bell summons.

Recently, my friend had Children’s Aid Society called on him because his 10 year old and 8 year old walked home alone from school one day. Two blocks. Inside a sub division built around the school. Crossing only one street with a crosswalk, stop sign and with intermittent traffic. 

Gods help you, these days you need to have a baby sitter who has passed a certification course to be present if you leave an 11 year old at home while you run to the corner store.

Needless to say, I thought I had it pretty good in my life. Then you hear stories from Gen X’s parent’s generation: the kind of stories where, when they were teenagers, they put a 1-ton 10-foot telephone cable spool through the side of someone’s house. They were rolling it down a hill to land it in the river. Took an unexpected bump. Oopsie. They were hauled in front of a judge who noted that nobody had been harmed, declared that “boys will be boys,” and told the parents to break out their chequebook to pay for the damages. In those days, those were family matters and the government felt that it was improper and a waste of taxpayer funds to undermine a parent’s authority unnecessarily. Rather than get criminal charges and juvie heaped upon them as they would have today, they were free to go home with said parents for a parentally-administered ass-kicking. 

Do you see a trend? Most of Gen X’s parents are still living today. Of course they think the world and its youngest adult generation is ridiculous. Hell, we of Gen X think you and your excuses are ridiculous.

Today we live in a world where you can sue people because your coffee’s too damn hot and you’re a klutz. We have to undergo a regular and routine re-labelling of terms to describe others because people haven’t figured out that it’s the act of segregating, uniquely classifying and labelling a subset of peoples and that gives words negative connotations in usage. Kids and adults are encouraged to never grow up and disclaim all responsibility for their failure to do so.

Maybe this is why Gen X gets so grumpy; the ethics have changed and it feels like the joke is on us. Remember when hard work was rewarded with things like promotions and retirement, and the bad guys in life mostly got their just deserts? 

Gen X is the last generation who was expected to move out of the house between 18 and 24. We remember when you fixed a television instead of throwing it away and buying a new one at Wal-Mart. When you solved angst and bullying problems with words, fists, or friends instead of a drug prescription or a “like” button. When teachers gave zeros and used red pens without worrying about damaging our self-esteem because we weren’t crushed by failure. Oh, and when we fucked up in that fashion? It was our fault. Not our parents’. Not the television’s. Not the teachers’. Not Call of Duty.

Yes, I’m talking to you, Beiber. And also everyone who thinks that that little dippy-doo (who is busy wasting so much more than most people will ever get) is a tragic victim of too-much publicity and other people’s expectations.

Something’s wrong with your lay-down-and-die attitude. We of Gen X remember a decade of optimism and hope for the future that occurred in the face of the full-fledged cold war and a shit economy, because we believed all we needed to overcome bad things in life was a little elbow-grease and our smarts.

Prior to 1995, we were expected to problem solve by extreme or unorthodox methods before seeking someone else’s intervention. Not punching a bully in the nose meant you were inviting future bullying, and telling on others was considered narking. Narking was uncool. A definite ding on your man-card. Or woman-card, as it may be–as I’ve already established, we were equal opportunist bad-asses in Gen X. In this age, however, we’re mostly rendered powerless to defend ourselves or one another.

It seems ironic that Upworthy trended a video about the “three most destructive words a guy can hear” (be a man) at around the same time the internet was in an uproar over the photo of the man brushing his daughter’s hair. Like a spider sitting in the middle of the interwebs, I lurk, watching as social trends vacillate between juvenile #YOLO and posturing like a gorilla. As I observe the worst behaviour the young have to offer when they think they’re secure in their anonymity, I can understand why the ageing generations are struggling not to have an aneurysm. All the old-school values, the things that they fought wars for, the social revolutions they’ve endured, and the hours worked hard all their life to pass along privileges to their offspring–shat on and discarded like so much toilet paper.

Gentility appears to have gone on permanent hiatus, as has the art of conversation, patience, bravery, wisdom, self-sacrifice, independence, care for the weak, tough love, loyalty, honour and accountability. This is what was intended to be invoked by the very phrase “man up:” a respect for the code of behaviours that represented the best of what the gender had to offer. 

This is why the females of Gen X saw no problem with having male role models. A great many of us wanted to represent these ideals too. And why not? They were good ones. Not all of us aspired to be Barbie.

Maybe it’s the fact that the 90’s ushered in an era of high divorce rates, broken homes and boys being deprived of proper role models because the hostility of their parents’ divorce. Not that we in Gen X didn’t endure any of this, but we were older. We were already secure in our independence and had the greater perspective that one only achieves with age. How does one learn the proper code of “manly” behaviour if your home is broken while you are still just a child, you become the object of a nasty power struggle between your parents, and have your visitations monitored and outlined by judicial decree?

I would like to blame the media for the twisted concept of male behaviour with its underwear models, non-stop articles about how to lose 300 pounds in six weeks, reality TV programming, Cosmo, shitty skewed news reporting in mainstream media and its gross oversimplification of every damned gender issue. But the reality is that the media is only partially at fault. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun–if prostitution is the oldest service industry in existence, using sex to sell things was no doubt invented soon afterwards.

If the media only weighs in, who is ultimately responsible for creating the proper definition of a man?

I bet everyone automatically lemminged the answer “the parents!” or maybe “society!” Because that’s how we operate now; we’re pre-programmed idiots who have had culpability bred out of us like the hair out of lab mice. We are a society, which means we work as a team to some degree. But no matter who gave you a list of traits that make a real man, the ultimate authority on upstanding manly behaviour, of course, is you.  

And maybe you do need to see the words “suck it up” occasionally. Why exactly shouldn’t you be subjected to the judgement of your elders if your behaviour is not apropos for someone who aspires to be treated like an adult? Every time I see the annual internet anthology of teens and young adults snarling about how mean their parents are for not getting them an iPhone for Christmas, the first thing that comes to my mind?

Someone needs to tell these twits to put their big-kid pants on.

If you uphold the image of a “real man” as a compassionate being and pillar of integrity who takes no shit from anybody, then being told “be a man!” stops being a crushing insult. You either are being a man by the best of definitions, or you’re not. If you’re not being a good man, then you deserve the reminder.

So. How about it? Are we going to sit around and talk about our feels together, or are we going to grow a proper pair of hairy manly balls in true Gen X fashion?

I vote for the latter, ’cause I hate soap operas and ponies.