The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man (36 page)

Porn objectifies women.
A woman is not a pork chop; she’s a lady. Porn dulls men to the fact that women have needs (both sexual and otherwise) that go beyond playing a naughty nurse. A real man sees a woman for who she is. He sees her as his equal and as a person that deserves respect. It takes a lot of work and effort to establish relationships with women, but real men have the
cojones
to do it.

Porn dampens your love life.
Porn-obsessed guys have a hard time starting any type of meaningful relationship because the women they meet don’t measure up to the women in their magazines; they find their love life ho-hum in comparison to the raunchy porn they’ve ingested.

Porn saps your manly confidence.
Porn saps your self-confidence. Men often turn to porn when they’re depressed and lonely. Instead of making the effort to get out and change whatever is really bothering them, they sit at home, er, polishing the banister. A box of Kleenex will inevitably fail to lift your spirits.

Be Countercultural

At least when it comes to the hook-up culture. Instead of putting in time to establish a relationship before hitting the sack, young men and women are doing the horizontal hula after meeting each other once at a party or bar. While hook-up proponents defend the practice as good, harmless fun, it, like porn, spreads your manly virility quite thin for a couple of reasons.

Hook-up sex ain’t that great.
Sex is essentially the most vulnerable thing you can do. You’re totally naked, worried about your performance, and well, sticking your body part into another person. Good sex therefore involves a lot of trust; a trust born of real love and intimacy, not drunken groping.

Hook-up sex is ill preparation for a real relationship.
Hooking up prepares you for real relationships like playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! prepares you to fight in the Heavyweight Championship of the World. If your goal is to become a gentlemanly lover and someday woo the woman who will become your wife, you need to practice how to be truly romantic and unselfish.

Figure 8.4 If your goal is to become a gentlemanly lover and someday woo the woman who will become your wife, you need to practice how to be truly romantic and unselfish.

Humility

“Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

On December 31, 1967, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys met on Lambeau Field for the NFC Championship. Later dubbed the “Ice Bowl,” temperatures hovered at 13 degrees below zero, the turf was as hard as rock, whistles stuck in referees’ mouths and members of the halftime band were sent to the hospital for hypothermia. For sixty minutes, these rival teams duked it out. With sixteen seconds left in the game, the Cowboys held a 17-14 lead. On 3rd and goal, quarterback Bart Starr executed a quarterback sneak with offensive lineman Jerry Kramer giving him the block needed to get into the end zone and win the game. The Packers had made it to another Super Bowl. Yet Kramer didn’t dance or pull a Sharpie out of his sock to sign an instant autograph; he simply walked off the field.

Humility oftentimes conjures images of weakness, submissiveness and fear. But men of the Greatest Generation, like Jerry Kramer, knew that real humility is a sign of strength, dignity and confidence.

What Humility Is

The definition of humility need not include timidity or becoming a wallflower. Instead humility simply requires a man to think of his abilities and his actions as no greater and no lesser than they really are. The humble man frankly assesses what are—and to what magnitude he possesses—talents and gifts, struggles and weaknesses.

Humility is the absence of pride. We are taught to think pride is a good thing. But pride functions only when comparing yourself to others. We often gain a sense of prideful satisfaction by comparing our strengths to someone else’s weaknesses. In doing so, we lose sight of the ways we need to improve ourselves.

What Humility Is Not

In their quest to be humble, we often confuse humility with false modesty. For example, we spend many hours putting together an excellent presentation for work, and when praised, we say, “Oh, it was just something I threw together.” This guise of false humility is often used to garner more praise and adulation from others. You want people to think “Wow, he just threw that together! Imagine what he could do if he had spent hours on it.” When you do something well, don’t toot your own horn excessively but do truthfully acknowledge what you accomplished.

How to Practice Humility

Give credit where credit is due. The prideful man will take as much credit for a success as he possibly can. The humble man seeks to shine the light on all the other factors that came together to make that success happen. No man rises on the strength of his bootstraps alone. Innate talent and lucky breaks, coupled with a supportive family member, friend, teacher or coach, always contribute somewhere down the line.

Don’t name/experience drop. Have you ever been in a conversation with a man who felt it necessary to interject how he’s been to Europe twice, got a 4.0 in college or knows a famous author, all at points in the conversation where such tidbits of information didn’t belong? These
miserable little snobs
are clearly insecure; they do not think they can win the interest of others without front loading all of their attention grabbers. A humble man doesn’t always have to be
the biggest toad in the puddle
. He understands that others have equally important and interesting stories to share, and his turn will come.

Stop one-upping people. Few things are more annoying than a man who must constantly one-up others during conversation. You say, “I ate delicious authentic Mexican food at Julio’s last night.” He says, “Ha! You call that authentic? I ate Mexican food prepared by the loving hands of Senora Consuelo in Guerrero Negro, Mexico. What? You haven’t heard of Guerrero Negro? That’s because it’s not some crappy tourist trap.” Whatever someone says, the one-upper must do him one better. Resist the urge to take part in these pissing contests. You usually end up with pee on your shoe anyway.

Afterword

Now that you’ve arrived at the end of this book, you’ve come to see that there’s far more to manliness than monster trucks, grilling and six-pack abs. The skills and advice presented here have hopefully given you the confidence to begin a lifetime pursuit of the art of manliness.

One can spend years trying to dissect the meaning of manliness. But at its most basic, manliness simply means being the best man you can be. No matter what stage of life you find yourself in, whether you’re a father, friend, lover or all three, manliness calls for you to magnify these roles to the best of your abilities.

Manliness is a great power which can be harnessed for good or ill. At their worst, men have started world wars, oppressed the poor, enslaved their brothers and committed genocide on the innocent. Yet men have also invented cars, planes, phones, computers and atomic energy. Men sailed around the world, discovered new lands, defeated evil fascist empires, and built and designed the world’s bridges, buildings and roads. True, honorable manliness is one of the greatest forces for good the world has or ever will know. Properly harnessed, manliness can change a nation, build a community and strengthen a family. It is a force that has been on the ebb of late, but in places from San Diego to Sydney, men are once more embracing the call to man up. There is truly a man movement afoot.

Men like Alexander the Great and Demosthenes, Lincoln and Washington, Roosevelt and Churchill, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., have blazed a trail of manliness for you to follow. Step wholeheartedly and unabashedly into this legacy of manhood, for the next chapter of manliness will be written by you.

—Brett and Kate McKay

Appendix A. One Hundred Books Every Man Should Read

Every man should seek to fully understand the complexities, dilemmas and possibilities of the human condition. While much of this knowledge is culled from daily interactions, our personal perspective gives us a very narrow view of human nature. We need a much broader and more expansive vision of the world. The reading of great literature provides a man with this indispensable education. The works of the world’s greatest writers allow a man to experience a thousand passions and conflicts, and visit every era of human history without ever leaving his armchair. Reading great books will make you well-rounded in intellect and character, add profound grist to your speeches and impart an informed depth to your decisions.

What follows is a list of a one hundred books every man should read. Make it a goal to thoroughly absorb each one. Check them off as you go and enjoy the feeling of an ever-expanding mind.

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli

Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

1984
by George Orwell

The Republic
by Plato

Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith

For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie

The Call of the Wild
by Jack London

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris

Swiss Family Robinson
by Johann David Wyss

Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac

The Iliad
and
Odyssey
by Homer

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

Walden
by Henry David Thoreau

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand

American Boy’s Handy Book
by Daniel Carter Beard

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
by John Krakauer

King Solomon’s Mines
by H. Rider Haggard

The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A River Runs Through It
by Norman Maclean

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris

The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas

All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
by Plutarch

The Bible

Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry

The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett

The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Histories
by Herodotus

From Here to Eternity
by James Jones

The Frontier in American History
by Frederick Jackson Turner

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig

Self-Reliance
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

White Noise
by Don DeLillo

Ulysses
by James Joyce

The Young Man’s Guide
by William Alcott

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse

The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry
by Christine de Pizan

The Art of Warfare
by Sun Tzu

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer

The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri

Leviathan
by Thomas Hobbes

The Thin Red Line
by James Jones

Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

The Politics
by Aristotle

Boy Scouts Handbook: The First Edition, 1911

Cyrano de Bergerac
by Edmond Rostand

Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller

The Crisis
by Winston Churchill

The Naked and The Dead
by Norman Mailer

This Boy’s Life: A Memoir
by Tobias Wolff

Hatchet
by Gary Paulsen

Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Beyond Good and Evil
by Freidrich Nietzsche

The Federalist Papers
by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison

Moby Dick
by Herman Melville

Frankenstein
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Hamlet
by Shakespeare

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates

The Boys of Summer
by Roger Kahn

A Separate Peace
by John Knowles

A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

The Stranger
by Albert Camus

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

The Pearl
by John Steinbeck

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac

Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

Native Son
by Richard Wright

Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco

The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux

Education of a Wandering Man
by Louis L’Armour

The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper

Les Miserables
by Victor Hugo

Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck

Bluebeard
by Kurt Vonnegut

A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens

Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl

The Outsiders
by S.E. Hinton

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez

Paradise Lost
by John Milton

Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury

Oil
by Upton Sinclair

Fear and Trembling
by Sören Kierkegaard

Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad