Mr Ernest Bazanye

I thought the reason I was writing this was, well, it is fun to talk down on people who are not as righteous or as clever as you and I. But there is more to it than just mockery for pageviews and shares. 

The truth is I have beef with manliness. It is personal.

I don’t just reject it out of intellectual arrogance as a concept too unintelligent for my subscription. It’s not just that I am too clever to believe bullshit. 

And it’s not just that, well, we on this side should sound off in the common discourse about gender, us on this side,  so that the red pill manosphere is not the dominant voice in the talk of what manhood and manliness and masculinity are.

When I started it was just that. I wanted to say that manliness is a garment we think is a skin, it’s a superficial identifier that we think is an essential quality. It is made up as we go along even though we act as if it is an eternal fact, like it is truth yet it is a fantasy franchise that gets rebooted every generation.

I came here with the intention of being clever with words and entertaining people.

But then, something happened over the past few years. When I wasn’t watching. I grew older. I am now an old writer. I can’t lie to myself and so I won’t lie to you.

So, real talk.

I don’t just reject the social construct of performative masculinity. I am mad at it. I blame it. It’s the fault that things turned out this way. It’s my fault. My manliness was a fault. It was my fault.

I want to attack it, harm it if I can’t destroy it, because I am angry at it.

Being independent, trying to be self-sufficient, standing on my own to, my own man, it cost me. I never learned to ask for help.

I know it seems contradictory to say this sort of thing in an essay about rejection of social constructs but I am a wild writer now and have lost the structural consistency of Bad Idea. I take weird routes to get to the point, but there’s a quota of rejections everyone is supposed to receive for every acceptance. And the more rejections you get, the closer you are to getting them out of the way and reaching the acceptance.

I made that up and then believed it. Still do.

But before that, well, I never took the risks I would have taken if I had known that there was someone who would have my back if I fell. It isn’t just that didn’t leave Vision, it was worse: I didn’t learn to be a great writer. 

I didn’t try to grow to be a great one. I was always just a good one. Because I never learned how to ask you to come with me and let me take you somewhere different and show you something– and all I ever did was come to you, where you already were, to show you what I already knew you liked to see. I served you, humbly and with pleasure, yes, and it was genuinely a pleasure to help you love the things I knew you loved to see. I wrote them for you. I gave them to you.

But I never learned to ask you to give me something, not even your trust. I never learned how to ask you to come with me to see if there was anything beyond these things we thought we knew about manhood, money, Africa, love, life…

The people-pleaser aspect of bad idea, who knew, was its manliest?

Up to this point in this series I have been… safe. I have planned and structured and edited. I have not… 

But I would meet you upon this honestly. Come with me.

Let’s do the rest with some courage, some trust. Come with me and we see what else happens.

I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

-T.S. Eliot, in Gerontion.