Philosophical musings on masculinity in modern Zambia

Being a Man....In The Lousy Modern Zambia
It's the nagging feeling that your life is too soft, not manly enough and offers no real tests. we live in a unisex society, one that emphasises the similarities - rather than the differences - between the sexes. Men are expected to be caring and sharing, and to carry their infant progeny around.

Without manly work, with women doing men's jobs and men becoming househusbands and childminders, we have to try that much harder to be 'male' or 'female', and turn in desperation to outward displays of gender.

There's more violence because beating someone up is one of the few ways left to prove you're a man.

And prove it we must, it seems. We're simply not genetically programmed to be happy as 'new men'. Men have ten times more testosterone than women, and it needs to do what it was put there for: to face danger, to endure pain, to fight.

I should be seeking out danger and difficulty, and exposing myself to unnecessary hardship and risk. The cause of this urge to keep risking life and limb, is down to, for me, what modern Zambian man lacks: the Rite Of Passage - the special testing that males in most primitive Zambia passed through. The opportunity to prove, once and for all, that you're a man.

Always, it involves at least the possibility of death, or great endurance, or killing (usually some dangerous beast), or mastering some skill (usually making something to kill some dangerous beast with).

The civilised Zambian male has no such rite. We no longer see life as a journey in which one is transformed by experience. For us, happiness comes from having more: more money, more cars, more clothes, more relationships, more freedom.