Beerless Beer And Tobaccoless Tobacco

[Guest KerryUK]

Come on, guys. This thread is your man cave. Do your thing in here. Surely there are things you'd like to talk about. No girls will interfere. (Except for me nagging at you from time to time. )

Awww, no girls allowed - we're never allowed to play with the boys.

[Guest Raya]

oops, girls, but while were here, I gotta respond to what Flint said "there is something graceful about positive masculinity."

Thats what we call a gentleman, guys, and were glad there are some here. See ya!

[JJ]

Ah the old place brings back memories. I've been surprised at how many conflicting pressures and messages I have felt as a man in the world. I knew there would be but living it is different. In some ways as society both changes and clings to old images I think it is a very hard time to be a man.

And yet for me so much easier even so.

[Flint]

Ah the old place brings back memories. I've been surprised at how many conflicting pressures and messages I have felt as a man in the world. I knew there would be but living it is different. In some ways as society both changes and clings to old images I think it is a very hard time to be a man.

And yet for me so much easier even so.

I think it's always been a hard to world to be a man. Despite the myth it's a 'mans world' i mean after who was it that got drafted to wars?

I think it's these myths that make it still such a hard world today for men, but harder in a different way i guess.

I guess the idea we have that its a 'mans world' brings about this idea that grass is greener on the mens side of life, while women just sit around with undue pain. I think this image we have painted is a detriment to both genders, i think male suicide wil continue to rise till we let go of this facade. I think masculinity and men will continue to suffer, while being in invisible until we lose this grip we seem to have on this image of 'It's a mans world' its just not that simple and never has been.

The thing is, life wil always bring pain and suffering regardless of gender. But some pains are more gender specific in that they hit a certain gender more than the other, or they hit a certain gender for different reasons than the other etc. AS humans we will always have pain, but the fact we often brush aside a pain a man has, makes it invisible and making someones pain invisible is the most dangerous thing in the world, i believe making pain invisible is one of the biggest weapons against a person or group of people. We're told we can be emotional as men these days, yet when we are, we're still looked upon as 'less than men' or laughed at, even by the very groups who reckon to be fighting for that sort of thing. It's lik they proivide an llusion where you can finally be heard as a man, and then they tear you down, tear you to shreds for it. I've seen it happen with my own eyes to men i've known, they've been provided with this advertisment that men can be as emotional as women, but then it turns out he has to have proviided his emotion in a 'woman's' type of way and he's torn down for providing the visibale and verbal evidence of this pain.

[Guest Opal]

Just hoping that Evan is out there somewhere and doing OK.