manhood (idea)

Ten Ways You Can Fake It If You Fear Your Manhood Act Is Shaky

1. Believe in a very butch god.
   
2. Start a war.
   
3. Rape someone.
   
4. Lynch or gas someone.
   
5. Force someone to have a baby.
   
6. Whack off to a picture of someone being hurt.
   
7. Whack off inside someone you're hurting.
   
8. Hit or have sex with a child.
   
9. Leave a mess.
   
10. Laugh at a guy's joke.
    

Ten Things to Remember If You Know Your Manhood Act is Shaky but You Suspect That's OK—Because You'd Really Rather Act Out of Your Selfhood Instead

1. Other men have only as much power to judge you as you give them. If you don't give them the power to judge who you are, they don't have it.
2. All men grow up learning to fear other men's judgement of their manhood act.
3. All men grow up learning to mistake their manhood act for themselves.
4. Some men learn to figure out the difference. You can be one of them. That means life as a man of conscience.
5. Some men will never learn the difference between their manhood act and themselves—even though their lives and the lives of other people depend on it. You can try to reach and teach such men if you want. But some of them are really tough cases. Shouldering their problem with manhood may become too much your problem with manhood. For whatever reason, they are intractably committed to their manhood act and to doing things to fake it that hurt other human beings terribly. So you may have to give up on them. There's only so much you can do, and life is short.
6. Your consciousness of your human-beingness does not depend on any common denominator of consciousness among all the other men out there who are also living behind the mask of manhood. Your freedom to let down your own mask does not depend on how many other men have already done so or how many other men will.
7. One of the main reasons the manhood mask stays stuck is because you think you're the only one who sometimes longs to take it off. You're not at all. But you might be led to think that a roomful of masks nodding their approval will give you the permission you need before you really can. You don't need their permission. Their seeming permission to take off your manhood mask is also their power to judge you. You don't need either. To let down your own manhood act, all you need is the courage of your own human-beingness, and the conviction of your own selfhood.
8. You may think that if you decide to live as a man of conscience you'll be alone. But you can't be a man of conscience alone, all by yourself, in isolation, outside of relation. The other people in your life—all the people of all their various races, ages, sizes, genders, and cultures, all of their unique and precious human-beingnesses, in all of their various connections to you—they will all be with you because for a change you will be with them.
9. Still, it isn't always easy to be a man of conscience.
10. The core of one's being must love justice more than manhood.

    
    quotations from: John Stoltenberg, The End of Manhood (pp. 7-9)

Personally, I think that he's quite the babe but, also, he's sexier in person than in his dust jacket photos. YMMV, of course.

Anyway, this may give some context to the widespread notion that Andrea Dworkin believes that sex equals rape or all sex is rape or that all men are rapists.