She went on to list her reasons of what real men don't do, including wearing shorts in public, while she pointed at my knees. I was starting to feel like Eddie Kardashian, though with better buns. Maybe I should sue for defamation. But I'm old and I suffer from empathy, and this frankly was the devil tempting my soul. When she was done, she was like, "Anyway, do you, boo."
Her benediction was, a man is not supposed to be happy. Or enjoy fruits. She was acting like I was deep throating a banana. For the record, I wasn't. According to her, real men don't read. Real men don't smile. Real men don't drink tea, especially white tea. What happened to bile juice? She listed so many reasons a real man isn't, that I started to wonder who a real man is. Maybe a real man is so manly that he can only date another man, because only another alpha can balance his testosterone. A co-alpha, if you will. But this subsumes a very traditional white male masculinity to still stand as a monument of what manhood is supposed to look like. Since we are unsure of what is desirable or undesirable, acceptable or unacceptable, what's in and what's out, not being "manly" gets you singled out or scapegoated, humanity's time-tested mechanism to achieve social cohesion through exclusion. God, straight men just cannot win.