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" Published in the February 2012 issue I am a man. There is nothing inherently admirable about that, nothing particularly laudatory. In fact, I find it&amp;#039;s mostly a series of contradictions. I have my wishes, my ambitions. But the facts of me confound. There&amp;#039;s not one shred of role model inside me. I suspect there&amp;#039;s nothing worth emulating, not that I can declare to the world, anyway. So, not great, I guess. Here&amp;#039;s the thing: I don&amp;#039;t worry it too much. I am a man. Two years ago, I first heard the term mancession. A term that purported to describe these as tougher times for men than for women. Inside the recession data, it seemed, there was a heretofore-unseen trend that showed men were at that point the primary victims of the economic downturn. More men worked in the private sector, the reasoning went, so they were the first to lose jobs and would be the last to get them back. The stimulus money propped up public-sector jobs first, in which women dominated the workforce. Two years ago, for just a moment, women occupied more jobs in this country than men. As further evidence of the suffering of men, economists predicted the closing of the perpetual wage gap between the sexes. Headlines trumpeted that sixteen of the country&amp;#039;s highest-paid CEOs were women, that the glass ceiling had finally been shattered. Before we&amp;#039;d had time to really breathe that in, thoughts turned to the implications for men. Women \u2014 single, college-educated, unmarried, childless women living in major metropolitan areas \u2014 had started earning more than their male counterparts. Somehow, this was supposed to be bad news for men. Thus deepened the mancession. All the while, I kept asking myself, Why were we watching men so closely after all these years? Why is everyone concerned with the fate of men except men themselves? It&amp;#039;s because men are men. Like, I hate having physicals. I&amp;#039;m told most men do. (Though I&amp;#039;m equally sure many men love them. It&amp;#039;s important to remind yourself that you can&amp;#039;t generalize when it comes to men. But I&amp;#039;m going to from here on out.) It comes down to this: I don&amp;#039;t want to be told what to worry about. I don&amp;#039;t like the creation of worry. And yes, it becomes a kind of blindered existence, a preference for ignorance, one that&amp;#039;s led me to many of my own bad habits. I eat too much. Take too many pills to right my wrongs. I don&amp;#039;t exercise in the right ways. I&amp;#039;d rather shoot my Glock in a cow pasture and count the calories burned by the footsteps it takes to walk to the target fence than take a jog any day. And yes, I walk every morning, but I walk to McDonald&amp;#039;s, mostly because I like paying a dollar for my coffee. My self-preservation is tangled up in my fairly base eccentricities. It drives my mother mad. It irks her. She tells me it&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m a man. And I&amp;#039;m telling you, I&amp;#039;m a man. Not any particular type. Not the essential man. Just man. For this I blame no one. I don&amp;#039;t celebrate it, either. I&amp;#039;m simply explaining the chromosome here, or lack of it, or whatever. I&amp;#039;m just saying I hate physicals, that when it comes to my well-being, I like to press on. I live with it. Men get through. At my annual physical just the other day, the window shades of my doctor&amp;#039;s examination room were open. I&amp;#039;m sitting there, practically naked, thinking, Christ, anyone can see me. This is the first floor; the window faces the parking lot. Out there people run this way, they scurry toward this window, locking their car doors behind them, running out from under the rain. Behind this one? Me, sitting fairly naked, only vaguely wrapped in a gauzy paper gown. Me, in that crinkling swaddle, stripped to some version of my essence under a glowing bank of fluorescents shining every bit of the scene into the glower of a dark late-November morning: Me. I don&amp;#039;t particularly relish being near-naked like this. But I don&amp;#039;t blame the doctor for asking me to get naked, either, nor for leaving me that way for so long. I hated the sight of me, reflected on the inside of the glass, looking a little disabled by the moment, as if I&amp;#039;d somehow been rendered powerless by the paper gown itself. I wore it like a kind of symptom, though in my case it meant nothing like that. After a while, I stood, took off the gown, folded it, and lay it on a countertop scale. Naked as revenge, in full view of the parking lot, I weighed it: 23.5 grams. No one watched. People don&amp;#039;t want to see a man naked. Or maybe the windows were tinted. I forgot to ask. Later, the doctor, a very smart thirty-four-year-old woman, gave me a prostate exam, inserting two fingers in my anus as I pulled my knees into my chest, declaring that my prostate felt &amp;quot;boggy.&amp;quot; The word pitched toward geography, cartography even. It did not surprise me that I do not care for descriptions of my own insides. She pulled the latex glove inside out and said, while tossing it out, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know. Sort of wet. Heavy might be a word to describe it.&amp;quot; None of that spoke to me. None of it told me what to worry about, whether or not I was doomed. Then she said something else, which I did not hear. I put my hand to my ear, like a very old man. I couldn&amp;#039;t hear her. I&amp;#039;d been shooting my Ruger that morning at an indoor range nearby, on the west side of Indianapolis. The entire world sounded like the ceiling fan was set too high. I started thinking about my gun just then, thinking how my father would be disappointed that I&amp;#039;d let handguns become my hobby. So when she said something about fun, I thought she said the word gun. &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s a little more than you think you have a right to expect.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when she looked at me like I was a mynah bird. Clearly I&amp;#039;d answered the wrong question. I have argued that we ought to watch out for boys, that we ought not forget their needs, ought not hinder them with an educational system that does them no favors in terms of learning styles, that blames them for what they need from school (&amp;quot;The Problem with Boys,&amp;quot; July 2006). But men? Come on. The men are fine. Here&amp;#039;s why we don&amp;#039;t have to worry about men: Times are not that tough, and men are not all that simple. I think about the men I know, just the ones in my inner circle, the ones I get to tell stories about because I have listened and they have done the same for me, because I have loved them or they me. It&amp;#039;s not all that hard to know what tough times mean: This one man, born on a boat right out of Saigon; this other eating the rooster crest the butcher normally gives to his own dog; this other man with a daughter born without kidneys, so she lived just one little day; this man arriving soaked in piss, pinned in a cargo container; another having a shotgun stuffed in his mouth until it hit his epiglottis, so he vomited right into the barrel; this man, as a boy, canoeing through his front yard, past the ruined kitchen, calling out the first name of a brother they&amp;#039;d never find. Different men, tough times. I&amp;#039;ll tell you where men suffer: the steam room is where. That&amp;#039;s where they go, one place, anyway, to sniffle and inhale, to punch out their stories without eye contact, at a pace related only to how much more they can take. Some men live for this, others only visit. The sweat runs, the great fleshy truth of the moment is undeniable. And if you&amp;#039;re in there, you listen, you check the clock or the lay of your scrotum, you close your eyes, but you take it. I&amp;#039;ve sat with a legion of men \u2014 the unemployed, the disappointed, the downsized, and the never-were \u2014 and no one, not one of them, has ever mentioned the mancession or anything like it. Wrapped in a towel, neck crouching in the righteous weight of the steam, breathing deeply, they talk about sandwiches or hockey teams, about their children or what they plan to do next. I was in the steam room in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas last week, sitting thigh to thigh with five sportswriters, guys who&amp;#039;d seen nine different jobs among them disappear in the past four years. What we did? What we talked about? The six of us worked a four-way football parlay over and over again until I could take no more of the heat. I stood, repeated the four winners, and stepped out. I could hear someone singing then, someone in the room where there was a small pool. The words were indecipherable. I got my head around the corner. It was a young Japanese guy, standing chest-deep in the water, singing in the otherwise empty room. I lay back in the showers and listened to the distant opera. I was certain he was sad. But he was in a robe on the chaise longue, drinking a Budweiser, when I finally got to the pool. &amp;quot;Sad song,&amp;quot; I said. But he sipped his beer, stared straight past me, not understanding a word. No matter.  Trends are ugly, vacuous creatures. They demand acknowledgment, ask for argument, a measure of outrage, or judgment. One year I&amp;#039;m supposed to worry about men because things aren&amp;#039;t going the way they used to for them. This mancession thing becomes the talking point of a dozen writers, each backed by her very own pet academic doomsdayer, ready to declare men redundant, receding, unimportant in the new dynamic of work. Someone declares &amp;quot;the End of Men&amp;quot; \u2014 builds a case on the apparent implications of a given set of employment statistics, a headline designed to evoke some sort of low-level boardroom panic \u2014 and no one seems to really care. The trend disappears a year later, buried under the weight of evidence that indicates men want to work, men want to earn, that they can and do make the changes allowing them to work. In 2010, the numbers swung back in favor of men; the mancession was declared at its end. Men regained jobs twice as fast as women that year; the wage gap regrew or reappeared or had never gone away in the first place. Since the recovery in 2009, higher-paying jobs in the private sector \u2014 with wage scales that favor men \u2014 began returning their tilt toward men. All the scales tipped back except among older men, who were less willing than women their age to settle for a lesser job or lower salary. The first thing? Good for men. Oh, okay. The second? Bad for men. It&amp;#039;s all so malleable. The Venn diagrams these gel-bots use to create their one-word trends are about as complicated as a two-way game of Trouble. So the mancession was dead \u2014 if it had ever lived at all. Or it was in remission, dug in as a long-term trend spelling out the end of men. To the detriment of women or not, in numbers slightly greater or slightly less than before, because they are greedy or indifferent, because they are driven or compelled toward work \u2014 taken as a kind of whole, it is clear: Men are fine. How do I know this? Why is it so? My own brother, an architect, a builder of schools, has been looking for work for almost two years now. The west side of the city I live outside of is a series of icy fingers of vacancy and foreclosure. Do I think men do not suffer? They do. I know my brother is hurting. I know he is the victim of the trend I&amp;#039;ve just pissed on. But I know he&amp;#039;s the victim of a dozen trends, a dozen cultural vacillations that dominate our lives at any given moment. That doesn&amp;#039;t tell the story of him in any way: that he doesn&amp;#039;t buckle, that he wants me to call more, not less, and that he always has a joke for me, just as he always has. He is a man. Last summer I stood in my neighbor&amp;#039;s yard, where he was selling, among other things, his father&amp;#039;s bowling ball. It came in a faux-leather bag, included a pair of twice-repaired size-10 bowling shoes, an official rule book, and a few pencils from various bowling alleys in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Four bucks. I don&amp;#039;t bowl, which is not to say that I wouldn&amp;#039;t if I could. I am simply too weak, too sore of back and hip, too without natural aim to bowl. But I retain certain hopes. I am a man. So I bought this ball, with just a peep to the guy that it seemed fairly shocking that he&amp;#039;s selling his own dead father&amp;#039;s shoes. &amp;quot;They don&amp;#039;t fit,&amp;quot; he told me. Then I stuck that ball in my closet and forgot about it. About four weeks ago, I was buying ammo for my 9mm, speaking with a guy I like named Andy. A kid, really, he&amp;#039;s twenty-two, all work and girls and hunting. He&amp;#039;s the night manager at the local supermarket. He&amp;#039;s an excellent hunter, one of the best shots in the county. He was talking about having fired an AK-47 at his cousin&amp;#039;s farm the night before, about how they&amp;#039;d shot up everything they could find: a plastic picnic table, a television, a bowling ball. It was the usual stuff, unbearably stupid maleness. Most of the time, it just seems like chatter. But Andy spoke about it so happily, with such marvel in his voice, that I couldn&amp;#039;t help but ask, &amp;quot;Whose gun?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My brother&amp;#039;s,&amp;quot; he said. I asked what it did to the bowling ball. &amp;quot;Pretty much cut it in half,&amp;quot; he told me, smiling sly and narrow. &amp;quot;But then it went into little pieces.&amp;quot; I kept asking. I found that I couldn&amp;#039;t help myself. I told him I had a bowling ball back home in my closet. He said we could shoot it up. When, I asked. Anytime, he said. Just bring it by my cousin&amp;#039;s. You gotta buy the rounds. I said I would. It&amp;#039;s been four weeks now, but I will. The bowling ball is out, and on the floor of my dining room. There will be two of us, men each one. The ball, with all its untold history, will crumble under the spray of bullets. It will fall in the grass at the fence line and be forgotten. It will seem both juicy and without a point, feel like it taught something and wasted something. We&amp;#039;ll shake hands and shout each other&amp;#039;s names. We&amp;#039;ll forget it by year&amp;#039;s end except when we tell stories about what we have seen. It hasn&amp;#039;t happened yet. You know it will. We are men. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12454/men-are-men-0212/?click=esq_more>