The Hamlet Project

This is how men beat each other with words
Making manhood a kind of box
That gets smaller and smaller
Until the actions that fit within it
Are reduced to grunting and chest thumping.
Surely a man is a man
No matter what he is feeling
Or saying
Surely we want our men to have the breadth of human experience
Not to be consigned to a definition
That leads them into wars and cancers, where despair eats away at an organ
Where it cannot find its way out of the body
We say “Be a man” as if it were something outside of the self
A woman just is – she never needs to “Be a woman.”
We might tell her her anger or fury are unfeminine
But we’d never tell her to be a woman about it
We’d simply tell a man to stop being a woman about it.