Brotherhood of the male gender

Geez. Redudant title if I've ever seen one.... Brotherhood is by default male, and you can't have a sisterhood of the male gender. So the title "Brotherhood of the male gender" seems redundant. But I digress....

Probably not wise to quote from Howard Stern. But a few years ago he had on two authors who were talking about "the male code," trying to explain it to women. Howard interrupted, saying that men feel they are born into a brotherhood.

Yada yada yada. I don't know where I'm going with this....

Anyway, I just thought maybe it would be an interesting thing to talk about. Part of me thinks it's an incredibly naive and terribly idealistic thing to say that men feel they are born into a brotherhood with one another when the world is full of men killing one another on a consistent basis. But then in some vague, intangible way, I feel like Howard Stern was right.

Total BS if you ask me. Now i've heard of the Brotherhood of Man but that was a '70s pop group that won the Eurovision song contest.

I don't know, dude. I feel a real brotherhood with you at the moment. lol

i think we should have some kind of brotherhood. but i don't think it'll ever happen. well, lemme correct myself. there is a brotherhood between guys and their friends, yah? it just needs for be more open, like my brotherhood with me and my friends. and i think it should extend beyond just one's friends. i think the world would be a better place if peoples saw other peoples and family than as just strangers

Maybe we can all read passages from Iron John and go drumming in the woods! Group hug!

I think it may be an ideal for many men but there's so much bad press about it these days, like Hand_Solo's remark above. If guys talk about it, it makes them seem like a wus. Although it was interesting in the film Superbad how the two boys were actually like brothers and expressed their love for each other. But they were also supposed to be two loser geeks.

i think the op refers to a deeper bond between men.... even if we see men kill other men, we all share something in common, and can proudly say we are men.

Actually, I think that men get along with one another a great deal more thann women do. The lives of most straight males seem to revolve around sports, and most sports are about team work. So, for many men, it isn't a case of everyone for themselves but a desire to work on a team with other men. There are, of course, men who don't like sports and who only care about themselves.

Woah!

You're right. I was referring to something even deeper about men. I just can't put my finger on it.

I'm really impressed that you picked this up, by the way.

Well, I hate to say this, but you aren't male. So, maybe you can't understand.... But there is some basic aspect to the male mind that longs to be on a team of some sort and work with other males. This is most likely why males start little clubs when they are boys, why some go into boy scouts, why some play sports, go into the military, etc.

Yes, girls play sports as well. But there seems to be a need in males to create male-only groups. I for one fuckin' hate it when a female decides she's going to "make a statement" and do something that usually only boys do. I remember going to a high school wrestling meet and seeing that the visiting high school had a girl on the team. She was "making a statement." She wanted to wrestle like the guys. (Not surprisingly, she got pinned almost every time.)

While there are always exceptions, my own observations, and the observations of many I've known (both male and female), are that women have a great deal more difficulty working together than males do. I've had the experience of being the only male in an otherwise all-female company -- and feeling fuckin strangled by the back biting and conniving. On the other hand, when I've worked in exclusively male settings I've experienced a real desire among men to put personal differences aside and get the job done. Not that it's all perfect, but that it's just different in some way.

Oh Henry, what a pity you're not gay. Gay men see this ever so readily and more forcefully. Where straight men have to limit their attraction, avert their gaze, sublimate their fascination with masculinity, gay men embrace it. The power of the male stems from the very thing that makes them male, that defines masculinity itself-- the power of life. From the man comes forth women and men yet no woman carries any trace of the male form within her. We men are naturally the dual sex and, when gay, capable of transcending both.

I think it no mystery that men take life as readily as they seek to create it. We are the irresistible force, the yang, the active, where women are the ever yielding, the yin, the passive. We scourge and run as the violent tornado while they wave and bend but do not break like the blade of grass over which the tornado passes.

As I see men, I marvel at the heart-breaking beauty of us in our youth, sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkward, rarely realizing either. We rush and play and fight and break acting to define our world on our terms, and then just as we might think we have it, adolescents breaks us all over again, tearing our childhood out from underneath us, forcing us to become men, branding us with white hot sexual urges as we lie in our beds naked with straining erections and dark frightening thoughts of how to relieve them. Then we discover the joy of the eruption, the deep wave of the orgasm, and realize much to our too young delight that we're now packing live ammunition. We may not be men, but we can do what any other man can do. In that interregnum, in that netherworld of neither boy nor man, we learn to define ourselves to sever our ties to our parents and stand alone. We examine the men around us, learning from them not so much what they say, but how they live, what we imagine them to be like. Without those men, many boys fall back upon each other and live out short lives defined by the excesses of men: sex, drugs, and violence in the hope that they will prove to be the best man warrior of their tribe.

Surviving that, we leave the last world, entering a new one, proving ourselves against each other and against women too in the working world. We set aside friendships to compete and compete and compete again, taking relief in sex and friends, yet competing with them as well. We build houses, lives, fortunes, gain status and the trappings of status, never showing weakness, never forgetting we are our own last refuge. If we do not believe in our own power, no one else will. In that time we take mates and put our still raging cocks to their purpose, seeding the fertile wombs of lovers and wives, creating life, being men making new men. In those days we work harder, colder, with greater care and desire to compete for families come first. Home comes first, my home comes first, not yours. We become our own monoliths, our own source of strength, sometimes lovingly tended by family, sometimes to lose them when we become monoliths within.

Yet through all that we sense in ourselves an endless awesome power that defines our sex. We are the warriors, the creators, the logicians, the engineers, the brilliant minds that define nearly all of humanity's great achievements. A man invented the gun, a man wrote Hamlet, a man led the Golden Horde to conquer the world, a man became the savior of a great religion, a man invented the computer, a man painted the Sistine Chapel, a man cured polio, a man first walked on the moon, a man created the atom bomb. Our facets seem endless because we see no limit to our desire, no biological clock, no social inferiority. On occasion when women enter into the realms of men, we look askance, we look down, and the woman who proves herself fit to be among them will take on the characteristics of the man. Ask a man whom he respects more, Betty Friedan or Hildy Johnson, Hilary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II or Queen Elizabeth I; it will always be the women who thinks more like a man. The reason for that is not so unfathomable either. Either a woman is your mother, your sister, a little girl, or a crone. Any other woman is fair game to fuck and men think about fucking constantly. Soon as a man sees a woman he immediately assesses her fuckability quotient and any woman who is truly fuckable becomes an object of desire. With her, the man must be in control, he must lead, he must dominate, because if he can't then his cock won't respond and he can't fuck so she becomes a bitch, a lesbo, a Lorena Bobbit, a whore. We may be graceful, we may be powerful, we maybe the sharpest of intellects but we are always sexually raw when we admit our true nature.

Germaine Greer called testosterone, "... a rare poison," we call it the source of all that it is to be male. Both are right. With it we can fuck and fart and scratch and belch and not give a damn about our hair or what the fashion is. We can lay out on the beach with our legs wide open and love the gentle carress of the breeze against our warm and heavy hanging balls, we walk feeling the swing of our manhood in our jeans, running our hands along our whiskered faces, feeling sweat drip down our hairy chests. Our bodies are animal. Then there is queer sight, the eyes that sees beyond, the eyes that openly stare at men in open and defiant lust, worships the cock, the mouth that drinks their essence, both fucks and submits to be fucked exclusively by them, one animal fucking another animal who is just as capable of fucking them back. The dynamic in hot male on male sex is electric in the clash of two positive poles forcing themselves together despite resistance, deadly as two black widows mating, each together riding a single wave of male energy that rises so quickly the air becomes thick with testosterone. In those instances we become female, then male, then female again, and back to male. It is all one-on-one, man-on-man, cock on cock. You breed your boy, you brand his hole, you fuck daddy hard, you match his thrusts with your own and together you explode your seed, actually create physical witness to the fuck, to the blow job, to your passion. Dripping from the end of your cock is the most precious stuff your body makes because it's you. Your essence, your genes, you and nobody else's. That it is even there means you grunted it out when you were at your most vulnerable, that you trusted someone just enough to share it. Yet for as precious as that seed is, we drop it everywhere from public toilets to paper tissues, to the floors of seedy bookshops and inbetween the pages of stashed porn, even inside people we couldn't care less about. We can make sperm our greatest gift or our most annoying byproduct; our eucharist or our garbage.

"Yet, there's a place where no [straight man] can see. We [straight men] are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a [gay] man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts." - Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit (paraphrased).

Jason, that was powerful. I don't wanna cheapen it by giving my personal take...so alls I'm gonna say is it inspired me to get laid. No fucking fear!

Thanks for the response. I just wanted to comment on a few things.

Maybe, because you're gay, you will never know how wonderful it is to avert your gaze, knowing that doing so will help another man feel more comfortable with himself. I've had the experience of being in a gym shower and having good looking men enter the shower, and being curious about what this man has down below -- but rather than looking, I turned my back, knowing that doing so would make him more comfortable, and myself as well.

I don't mean to get all naively idealistic. But there is some level at which straight men do not objectify one another in the way that women do to one another and that gay men do to one another. It's very odd. On one hand, it would be nice to live in a society where everyone is so secure that when the well built young man enters the shower I could very easily look at his body without him being uncomfortable with that. But there's a level where the consideration of knowing that it would make him uncomfortable, and attempting to be considerate to him, is ultimately more important than actually seeing his body.

I'm probably going to anger some people with this statement, but I think that ultimately straight men bond in a deeper way than gay men. I recently read an article about sports psychology and behavior on the field. The writer, a woman, wrote, "Sacrificing your body for another male is the height of male bonding." I think that maybe straight men sacrifice themselves for one another in a way that gay men can't understand, such as the way I sacrificed my desire to look at the other male in the shower -- knowing that doing so would make him feel uncomfortable and objectified. At some level, NOT looking helped me experience his masculinity more than looking would have.