Anima

Man up. Be a real man. Boys don’t cry. These instructions have been encoded in our very flesh as young boys. We learn quite early to bury our more compassionate, feeling, and sensitive natures beneath layers of bodily postures, attitudes, and exaggerated personalities that emphasize and augment the characteristics that will win as approval as men. We create personas that dominate our lives, a mixture of fantasy and flesh, built overtop of our incredibly delicate vulnerabilities. We offer these personas to our sex partners, exchanging them in the form of pictures, and brute dialogues on dating apps. We fuck as if these personas are, indeed, who we are. The problem lies not in our personas, themselves. Truly, we may contain some of the very attributes of maleness that are highly prized: stature, strength, a stern ability to remain calm under pressure, a gruff exterior that is fun to desire. The real problem lies in what we are not allowing to be felt within our depths--the characteristics that might reveal our fixed personas to be a charade, a bulwark against the delicate little boys that live within us.