intellectual badass

There are few things that can be filed under my List Of Things That I Have To Throw Into My Giant Cesspit Of Anger To Prevent Myself From Frothing At the Mouth In Frustration And Fury, but one of these things is the idea that there is meaning in the phrase “what it means to be a man”. It’s a phrase that I hear tossed around a lot—in books, on tv, in movies, from my dad, from other people—yet nobody ever has a real concrete idea of what it actually means. That, alone, would be enough to go on my List of Irritating Things That People Need To Think About More And Actually Use Their Noggins For Once, but when added to the fact that there is no such twin phrase as “what it means to be a woman”, it really starts to piss me off even further, because it suggests that being a man is this mystical, cult-like thing that only those born into it can Truly Understand™.