Sometimes I want to drop everything and throw all my eggs into producing a reality TV show called The Ultimate American Man, which pits multi-millionaires against each other in to-the-death cage fights. This would combine America's two main measures of manliness—money and violence—into a single competition.

Of course I'd have to figure out a way to throw sex in there, too. Who can get laid most, by the greatest number of women. Or should it be by the most desirable women? The contestants would have to start a business from scratch, get laid as many times as possible and/or by the hottest women, and then beat the shit out of each other to see who was a real man.

 
Don't worry, this fantasy show doesn't consume my imagination. But every once in a while, when I think about how manliness is measured in my country, I take things to their logical extreme to make myself laugh. It's no joke, though. We're constantly measured as men, and it starts long before puberty. 

By the measures I see before me, I've never once in my life felt man enough. Too poor, not tough enough, lacking the sexual energy of a porn star. Shouldn't a man be at least one of these things? My father was poor, but he could beat the shit out of people. (He may have had many sexual conquests outside of his marriage, for all I know.) He had something to hang his masculinity on. 

Me? I've got nothing. Started sex too late and never got into sport fucking. Barely breaking 50K a year. So broken down in the body that I can't even play hockey anymore. 

How I wish that, growing up, I'd had somebody to tell me other ways to measure myself as a man. Where were you, dad? Why did you go away, and leave me with the defaults?