#378

Proof, you say of my credentials to speak so confidently of what authentic masculinity looks like?

Oh, strap in motherfuckers

it's about to be 

FACTUALLY MASCULINE 2024

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First thing to maybe keep in mind is that the body as the fulcrum of the progenital act is objectively a detached and clinical thing. Procreation as something which is involved with gender is memetic, not biological. The body that is able to impregnate happens to be vested with that equipment, and the body with the capacity for impregnation happens to be vested with equipment which interacts with the preceding. Maleness and femaleness are not significant here except as enhancers to this basic drive which we have in common with so much that is alive.

Behavior is rigid when it is encoded in instinct. Significantly, behaviors which we show to be instinctual, or are anecdotally preconscious, are reliably similar in all human beings, regardless of gender. Degrees of difference related to biological sex can be measured, but broadly, humans react instinctively to stimuli as humans, not as men and women. It is in the social sphere, in the more malleable learned behaviors, that one sees gender come into play. And the forces that work to shape our learned behaviors train us in the performance of roles that are suited to the gender not by what is set in stone but by what they dictate in the name of organizing societies, which is the layering of our instinctive group behaviors and the parallel evolution of culture.

What a man is, what we think of as a man, is something created. Something invented. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn't.

Fact is, the definition changes all the time, and means different things at different times the world over.

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Well, let's say it's not just that you don't even believe any of that, it's that you don't even believe the world is more than four thousand years old. You may think it is reasonable that said world is flat and domed and placed at the exact center of a spherical, limited universe, with the light of God coming in through holes in the dome. Let us crawl backwards diagonally into the worldview which has us as created by conscious entities operating on a different level of metaphysical reality. What I mean is let's say you think God raised Adam from the clay and breathed life into his body, and made woman as a corollary to his creation, a way by which the multiplication of Adam might be achieved. Or that we are all made from the materials of a giant, and what we are in this life depends on whether the universe fashioned us from the head, the arms, the legs, or the feet, that by our thought and deed we may, however, climb our way up through those materials and escape their affect to join the perfect eternity of the universe. There are many more just such ideas. Very likely you believe that the history of the world resembles something written down in a religious text far more than it does an objective historiography against the backdrop of geologic time. 

There are many other ways I could say it, but the crux of it is, you believe that what a man is is a thing fundamentally sacred, ordained by the divine, defined as such, and that no mistakes can be made when it comes to what a man is--evidence to the contrary is sacrilege, is defilement. 

Just gonna come out bald with it: priests lie. It's fundamental. Until you basically wake up to that, you're not gonna get any farther.

A breakdown: 

• That there is a transcencdent nature to existence, that something impalpable has a presence in the life of the world and the life of human beings, is something that has been appreciated by human beings as long as we have existed in this world.
• It cannot be true at the same time that this transcendent nature applies more concretely to your own culture, your own people, and that a human being from a different culture can correctly believe the same. Yet we all have an explanation for why we are exceptional in the eyes of the beyond. 
• This is because that is the kind of motivation that energizes and unites a tribe into becoming a culture, into organizing itself a into a society, and a society into a civilization.
• Civilizations are built on inequality. An important early distinction in human group existence was that of the shaman and the rest of the tribe, and while matriarchal and tribal norms dictated the terms of existence and the performance of gender, this was a stable and equitable arrangement; the shaman was a conduit to the beyond, a nature in which human beings were a tiny part of a vast whole. Decisions were made in this spirit that led to the spread of the human animal and others like it through vast areas in sophisticated and durable units. This would eventually lead to geographical hotspots that gave rise to populations which were able to rely on what became agriculture, bringing with it a revolution in human behavior. 
• The revolution disrupted this arrangement, and the moment was primed for new stories, stories that would serve as points of concrescence around which society could be designed and stratified by storytellers and seekers of power. Power, for the first time, could be wielded economically, through proxies, through new taboos, through further, stratifications of class driven by the rise in population and proximity, through innovations that exalted the strength of the arm and the need to pay homage to that strength, which was an extension of the strength of the beyond, the strength of universe, the strength of gods, who shaped the world--not a pack of frauds who didn't want to do any work.
• The shenanigans would only get worse and more widespread with time. Call me a liar.

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We gotta come back to that shamanic energy. We gotta forget the dams and come back to the river, and we gotta let that river flow where it'll flow. We gotta understand that the universe is infinite, and accept no intermediaries between ourselves and the radiant light of the beyond. That we are a near-insignificant point in point in a vastness that can only be imagined and an essential and irreplacable part of that vastness. 

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Happy Sunday motherfuckers! The sun is out where I am and the sky is an unbelievably electric shade of blue. EDIT: Factually Masculine 2024 runs seven posts, however long? Is that how I decided? I dunno. We're doing it like this now. I don't care.

--JL