Manly Men

I bring us once more to the train, however this time I won't be talking about what I saw, rather what the other people saw. Recently I have been involved in a theatre production, I love acting and being on the stage, however as I boarded the train to return home from the show I would always receive some strange looks from the other passengers. For the first few days I couldn't figure out why they were looking at me, then I realised what happened, I had forgotten to remove some of the stage make up I had to wear for my show. This meant I was boarding the train with eye liner and a little more blush than I should have. The reaction that they had to a man wearing make up really got me thinking - why do people care? Are men not allowed to wear make up? Does this retract from our masculinity?

Upon researching further into the topic of masculinity and what defines it I was able to sum things up pretty well in one Disney song. The song I am referring to of course is I'll Make a Man Out of You from Mulan. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the song I have provided (using my incredible tech skills) a link to youtube. This song talks about how to be a man, and apparently we need to be as swift as a river, with all the force of a typhoon and have the strength of a raging fire. Now I can't speak for the entire male population, but personally I don't know how to achieve any of these things. Does this make me any less of a man? So to try and ease the pain of losing my masculinity I dived further into youtube to try and find a video to help me regain my manliness.

All I could discover was a video posted by my youtube counterpart Peter (he runs the Smart Yet Casual youtube channel, while I have taken over the blogging side of things, world domination here we come). He posted a video on how to be a man, this was perfect for me, I obviously needed to know these secrets so the people on my train would stop judging my make-up choice everyday. For those of you out there wanting to learn how to be a real man I'll include the video, it's worth checking out. For those of you who don't want to watch the video or say you watched it but didn't, I'll give you an overview. To be a man, I need to curse more, grow facial hair, get a victory dance and have no fears. While I wouldn't mind having a victory dance or having no fears, facial hair always seems to elude me no matter how hard I try, not to mention my curse word vocabulary needs a bit of work. Turns out I'm not a manly man by this standard either.

But who's to say I'm not manly? Just because I sing, act, play music and can't figure out how to get stage make up off before I get on a train doesn't mean I'm any less of a man then the guy who spends his day with a bunch of other guys running a round a field chasing a ball then having a beer to celebrate. As a society we need to embrace all levels of masculinity no matter what they may be and stop judging people for what they love! And for that matter stop judging people because they can't use make-up remover properly!