Awarding “Man Points” for stereotypically masculine actions is misleading and can be damaging. But I love how that chainsaw helped me grow.
I have always admired my grandfather for his ability with his hands. Growing up I watched him fix cars, do carpentry, grow his own vegetables, sculpt, and mix and lay cement. Even at 80 years old he still walks the hills near our home. Over the course of his life, he has been a soldier, a lorry driver, a taxi driver and a mechanic. He is ceaselessly practical and while I fundamentally disagree with his political views I admire him more than anyone else I know.
For a long time he struck me as what society wanted a man to be like: physically strong and good with his hands. Having dreaded rugby at school and not knowing which way up to hold a drill, I felt like society would judge me to be a fairly poor excuse for a man.
So, when I graduated and got a job as a nature reserve warden, part of my excitement was at the possibility of earning some man points (and of taking a break from the cerebral world of academia I had spent the last four years inhabiting).
For over two years I learned how to mend fences, how to manage sluice gates to control water flow, how to help herd 100 cows, and, the icing on the cake, how to fell a tree using an electric chainsaw (and take home the logs to chop with an axe for firewood). There is something awesome about bringing down a 20-foot tree with your own hands.
“I had learned there are better ways to earn “man points” than by being able to pick up heavy tools.”
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Having a chainsaw sitting on my dining room table made me proud and excited – surely now I would feel more like a man, according to the definitions society had set me up with.
As the seasons came and went I appreciated that having more ‘man points’ by society’s standards didn’t make me happier. My relationships and work were healthy and fulfilling for other reasons.
One evening in the depth of winter I stood alone on the heath near my cottage. An easterly wind rattled in from the sea, about half a mile away. It spat droplets of salty water over the land as it blew in. The heather around me was brown and withered, asleep and dreaming of August when it would don its purple garment of flowers again. Wading birds flew overhead, whistling and piping to one another as they returned to the river estuary to roost. And I tended the embers of a fire whose energy was dissipating the cold air and ground; we had spent the afternoon feeding its voracious appetite. The orange glow of the ashes bled upwards into the sky, tingeing the sunset. The freezing air was already starting to turn the dew in the air into crystals on the leaves. With just a pitchfork to lean on and my own company, I reflected on the past two years. I had learned there are better ways to earn “man points” than by being able to pick up heavy tools:
(1) Integrity not masculinity
Through the friends I made during those years I learned that being a good man is about how I treat and value my relationships with the people I love: treating them with respect, honesty and integrity, and redressing things when I cause them hurt. They don’t care how masculine I am.
(2) Dealing with hurt
Having these skills and being physically stronger did not give me a strong heart. When I was sad or lonely, feeling like I was more manly was not what brought me solace. It was an ability to be honest about my emotion and open up to others that helped me, something traditional masculinity suppresses in young men.
(3) Principles make us good men
I valued the new skills I learned not for making me more masculine but for the values they taught me. What improved me was the conscientiousness, patience and perseverance they required. Like my grandfather, I had to teach my fingers to be gentle with wood and metal and not to rush and grab. I realised that this was what I truly admired about my grandfather. Such principles and values helped me be a better man.
(4) Connecting to nature
I learned to step back from the material world of culture and appreciate a deeper connection to nature. Solitude became something to be enjoyed, not frightened of. There’s a great sense of connection to natural cycles that comes from the work of having to fell and chop a tree in order to have a warm fire later that night; as your body tires the sinews in your arms begin to tense and knot like the sinews in the wood. The closer I came to nature the more I realised how artificial society’s stereotypes of being a man are.
(5) There is no one way to be a man
Man points for masculinity are misleading and damaging: they suggest there’s one right way to be a man, a way that is focused on a very narrow definition of machismo, image and physical power. This is to the detriment of a much wider range of values and feelings: of integrity and of connection to nature, to other people and to our own emotions. I don’t believe man points earned for being manly are worth a dime. Instead, let’s award man points to men of all shapes and sizes, abilities, and states of physical and mental health. And let’s give them out for more meaningful things than physical appearance or ability to put up cupboards.
In the end picking up a chainsaw made me a better man, but not because of masculinity. It made me more like my grandfather and taught me the value of the qualities of self-confidence, integrity, honesty and reliability. Man points defined against the benchmark of the life my grandfather has lived have provided me with a pretty good starting point.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Well I’ve never met a man who said – I’m glad I never ran a chainsaw.
“In the end picking up a chainsaw made me a better man, but not because of masculinity. It made me more like my grandfather and taught me the value of the qualities of self-confidence, integrity, honesty and reliability. Man points defined against the benchmark of the life my grandfather has lived have provided me with a pretty good starting point.” Nice article but perhaps you could clarify something for me. I hear many men who credit their dads and grand dads for who they are today and I wonder ….. Were these elders, appropriately recognized, men who lived their lives… Read more »