Toughness
Most White American men have been erroneously taught that toughness is about being durable against the slings and arrows of other men. Mistaking it for meanness. But toughness, real toughness, is about having the endurance and leathery will to face a world, made by mean men, and stand in defiance of it.
This ill-shaped world of counterfeit masculinity attempts to steal all of the beauty out of the boy. His humor, his gentleness, his empathy: the brick and mortar and finery that build a boy into a man.
The people of low-calorie masculinity hate these things because they too had them stolen away when they were young, and they shame the boy and tease and bully him until they have killed all the glorious gentility inside him. They hate the boy because he reminds them of what they once had: the soft strong bonds of sharing, the eagerness to do the work of the day, not just for the self, not for wealth or power, but for those we love.
They, these little, selfish men want every boy to look like them, because they are afraid. Fearful that if a boy becomes the kind of man they once dreamed they could be, they will be forced to look and witness all their failed potential.
A man is not defined by how mean he can be to a mean world. He is defined by how he comports himself in spite of the world being mean. He embraces the wild joy found in the challenge of life, deciding simply: "No matter what you do to me, I will make my world a better place."
And when I am done with The Baroness of the Eastern Seaboard for Shortwave Books, this whole concept will be what my next book is about.
