What does being a man mean to you?

[anonymous]

To answer your question more directly, it means embracing his differences, emphasizing chivalry, courage, honor and trustworthiness.

There are few if any role models left these days and it is up to fathers to teach and inculcate these values in America's youth. The Boy Scouts try, but fail.

On the other hand, you asked what manhood means to ME.

To ME, it means a lifetime of enslavement, repression, misery, loneliness, sadness and tears. A prison from which I will in all likelihood never escape.

Manhood is as much a societal construct as it is a state of being.

Defining manhood is a difficult thing, any more than defining womanhood is. Manhood means more than the mere possession of a penis and testicles. It is a state of mind as well as being.

Ask any veteran who has lost his to a land mine if HE'S still a man or not. Cancer causes many men every year to lose their testicles. Are they any less a man than an intact one is? What about accident victims? Burn victims?

For that matter, is a woman any less a woman for undergoing a hysterectomy? Or Bilateral masectomy?

Is it the package, which can be altered? Or the state of mind, the personal identity that defines one's gender?