The Art of Manliness

A respected, time-honored tradition in the world of Mandom is that of working with one's hands. All men who are real men have the ability to make things. Manly things. Things like a very heavy box that is subsequently named "a workbench." And upon this workbench a manly man (a "Man") will build more manly things.

A Man does not make unmanly things. He does not make flower arrangements. Or caligrifi. A Man does not even admit to knowing the correct spelling of the word "caligrifi."

If a Man is not making things, then he is fixing things. The whole notion of little boys tearing things up "because they are boys" is only partly true. They do not disassemble items due to a genetically predetermined path of destruction. They destroy because that is a necessary first step before the item can be "fixed." It does not matter that the item worked perfectly well already. What matters is the Man's inner drive to repair something and to satisfy that need he must first take it apart.

His qualification as a Fixer is determined by measuring how far from "working" the item was before the Man began to fix it. Reattaching the leaf catcher to a lawnmower is not fixing. Retrieving a lawnmower blade from the side of a tree, installing the blade back on the mower using a spare wingnut (that doesn't really fit) because the original nut can no longer be found anywhere in the yard, and applying multiple layers of muffler tape over the hole in the lawnmower shroud where the blade originally took to flight – that is Fixing. Without the blade the mower did not work. Now, it does work.

The fact that the blade would have stayed attached to the mower had the Man not removed and reinstalled it in an attempt to "make the mower cut faster" is not relevant. What matters is that the lawnmower went from non-working to working because of the Man's ability to exercise his manliness. The mower may not now be working as well as it did last Saturday, but everyone knows that as things age their performance begins to suffer, even in as little as one week's time.

To gain higher recognition as a Fixer, the object being fixed must start off as far away from working as possible. It was for this purpose that Men originally tried to uncover the secrets of blowing things up. Whatever rightful inclination towards exploding rockets and bombs Men may have due to the intrinsic destructiveness of these devices, Men are inexorably drawn to the appeal of repairing and rebuilding afterwards.

These are the things a Man does. The things that define his existence, determine his worth and declare his manliness. He builds. He fixes. If there is nothing in need of fixing, he makes it need repair. He is a Man.