Two days after my eldest son turned 16 I posed the question “what does it mean to be a man?”
I couldn’t help myself. Now that he was practically a man, I wanted to know how he perceives men and their place in society.
As any mother of teenage children knows, this is not exactly a great way to segue into a fruitful conversation. My question was met with a half-eye roll (he was too tired from 12 hours of sleep for a full eye roll) and then a blank face.
He didn’t have an answer and I had trapped him at the table over breakfast. He started chewing more quickly to escape.
I rephrased my question. “What does it mean to be a good student at your school?”
He attends an all-boys Catholic school and I figured if he is surrounded by fellow men-in-the-making, he has a good idea of what it takes to be a good student and that represents at least a portion of manhood from a pubescent level.
Out came the answers: reliable, independent, consistent.
After some additional prodding, more escaped his lips along with a silent plea to be excused to go upstairs.
Reliable: you have to do what you say you are going to do and be there for others.
Independent: you have to be able to do work on your own
Consistent: you have to maintain your work to keep up. Consistency is key so you don’t fall behind.
These three qualities are also part of manhood. Men are certainly admired for their independence and encouraged to be reliable and consistent in their actions and words. Men that are flakey and inconsistent are seen to be unreliable. These 3 traits loop back and influence one another.
But there is more to being a man than that.
I decided to do the modern thing and turn to AI to answer a seemingly human question. That is what one does these days, isn’t it? If a human doesn’t know the answer surely AI does.
After typing in the above question, the little dots on the lower right of the Chat GPT screen didn’t cease to move. I started counting…. 10, 11… 25, 26, 27 ... Boy, this question is really making this program work, I thought. I imagined it scouring the information in its vast library and to find an answer to my question. Accessing various languages and old texts and modern treatises on manhood to summarise things nicely in 5 paragraphs or less.
Alas, after 32 seconds an error message appeared. I tried again and received another error message. AI is not able or willing to answer this question at the moment. Or, perhaps, it was not a topic in 2021 as this is the last access point for data in its databank.
Whatever the case may be, I am still on a quest to understand what it means to be a man. Please chime in. Maybe AI will learn something from our collaborative effort that we can eventually access in 2025. I think we can be faster than Chat GPT in figuring this out. Or at least I hope so.
My 16 year old and his peers need some input other than reels from Andrew Tate when it comes to the meaning of manhood, so I am truly asking for your input. As social media is deluged with the “what is a woman” question, it is high time we take a look at the meaning of manhood, too.