Are you in the Manbox?

Are you in the man box?

I was at a Hot Mama’s pizza on capitol hill.

While I was inside enjoying my food, a guy who was hanging out with his rowdy group of friends handed me a bottle and told me, “You gotta put this shit on your pizza.”

It was some weird combination of olive oil and red pepper.  It sounded good, so I tried some.

“No no, dude.  Don’t be a pussy, just drench your pizza with it our else your not in the man box!”

I had to ask.  Apperantly this is a set of ways you must think and behave, or else you are not a man because you are not being “manbox.”

To get a sense, I started probing.

“If I wake up at 4 am completely hung over with a terrible headache and heartburn from drinking too much beer, and I go to my medicine cabinet to grab antacids, is that manbox?”

“Thats totally man box!”

“If I slap my girlfriend and say, ‘bitch, go in the kitchen and get me some pie,’ is that manbox?”

“Dude, only if you make her do it naked and wearing pumps.”

Appearantly being miserable is a requirement for the manbox as well.  I think I got the concept, so I asked him one last question.

“How about when I find myself naked in bed with four other men.  I go to jack off but I miss and end up getting the guy next to me.  Its okay though, because everybody reaches one over and we are all taken care of. Nobody looks one another in the eye, and nobody says ‘I love you.’  Is that still manbox?”

The guy got up out of his seat, with a vein buldging out of his forehead and screamed, “Thats fucking sick dude.  What the fuck are you doing in bed with four other guys!”

Screaming about how disgusting gayness is in a restaurant on capitol hill is not the best idea.  He and his friends were promply kicked off the premises.

Manbox has been a term that my friends now use to describe a certain dogmatic caricature of masculinity.

Outside of the cops and cowboys, soldiers and ninjas sort of ideal fantasy of what men are supposed to be, it seems to me that I am part of a generation of men that are struggling to find a concept of what real, honest to goodness men are supposed to be within the framework of an information hunter/gatherer society.

It is almost as if it is up to guys my age to start defining it and building it ourselves.

The John wayne Alpha male archetype doesn’t seem to be able to cut the mustard.  Look what happened the last time people decided that “manbox” is what we need: