As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.” This tension—the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman—is ongoing and pervasive.

To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down an orchestra to one instrument.

Women are expected to smile no matter where they line up on the social, cultural, or economic ladder: College pro­fessors are criticized for not smiling, political spouses are pilloried for being too serious, and women's roles in films have historically been smiling ones. It's little wonder that men on the street still call out, "Hey, baby, smile! Life's not that bad, is it?" to women passing by, lost in thought.

By declaring ourselves non-­threatening, our smiles provide an extremely versatile means of protection.

Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered the words ENTER SMILING on little samplers, and then hung their handiwork on doors by golden chains. Translation: "Your real emotions aren't welcome here."

the Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly American archetype

We don't have to feel threatened by the gains girls have made. We need to study them, to use them as a model for boys.

letting boys be boys

The point is always to make the other guy fall or hurt, bleed or flip over, lose. Boys do this. They knock one another down. They hurt one another. Then they laugh and shake it off.

recognition that they must be accountable for their actions

Eleven percent more women graduate than men, consistent across the major racial and ethnic groups. It's a huge number. That's a lot of kids."

Men who seemed to have an answer for every question. Men who didn't listen. Men who radiated indifference.

OVERRATED: BIG BALLSBoys are born with huge ones. Literally and figuratively. Literally because they’re filled with fluid and look disturbingly like ripe plum tomatoes. Figuratively because they have yet to learn fear.

But I wrote about some things my sons have taught me. Namely, which male values are overrated and which are underrated.

We'll forget it by year's end except when we tell stories about what we have seen.It hasn't happened yet. You know it will. We are men.

I told him I had a bowling ball back home in my closet. He said we could shoot it up.

Women — single, college-educated, unmarried, childless women living in major metropolitan areas — had started earning more than their male counterparts. Somehow, this was supposed to be bad news for men. Thus deepened the mancession.

People don't want to see a man naked.

People don't want to see a man naked.

It's important to remind yourself that you can't generalize when it comes to men. But I'm going to from here on out.

There is nothing inherently admirable about that, nothing particularly laudatory.

I am a man.

I put my hands on my hips, and looked up at the moon, and thought what men get to think when they stand and piss in a great open space with a great open view — rightly, wrongly, often, or only once in a while — they think: I'm a man, and this is a pleasure of those darkling nights.

I am a man. And in this way I was made man.

But that was the fascism of the man in me, the insistent belief that limitations are weaknesses.

I fell out of my patterns: interrupted less often, watched her eyes to see if she had more to say, stopped trying to grab the last word.

I gave people room to talk. But all it did was make people look at me longer, make strangers think I was genuinely interested in their opinion

Cars stopped, rides were offered. People pulled me aside to say I had lost weight and to ask my opinion on something.

"If what you need is actionable behavior," he said, "you could smile more. Look around. You'll see it: Men very rarely default to a smile."

Every once in a while I see a young research psychologist from the university going over his notes for class. One morning I asked, "If you were trying to give up being a man, what's one thing you would stop doing?""I don't know," he said. "There are a lot more commonalities than there are differences. Gender isn't all that simple."

Still, I discovered that all around me, the people in my life got on with things. Nothing stopped happening when I stopped playing my part. Sometimes I felt as if I had disappeared.

male costume

"You gotta be kidding me," she hissed as she leaned in to hold the door.

There's no in-the-marrow instinct to hold a door, stand up, or step aside for women.

with or without sports, I am indubitably a man

Standing up to pee," she said. "Without that, what do you guys really have?"

Ashley Merryman

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