![]() ![]() ![]() We use masculine markers to identify, delineate and locate masculinity. We are just as anxious as Hamlet to find the measures of men, and while we now find these markers in action movies, WWF wrestling, celebrity, western steakhouses, sports bars and sporting clubs, the importance of these signifiers, their necessity in identifying and marking the masculine remains. Today, our markers have not changed so drastically nor do we seek to define a different set of questions. How is a man supposed to act? What should a man believe? How should he face death and what kind of death should a man die? Who does he f*ck? In essence, these are all the same question, reiterated-“What is a real man?” For Hamlet, the answer is found in man’s reason, his apprehension, those ways in which mankind is closest to the gods, in which he is elevated from the beast, his nobility and his action later in the play, the last marker is mankind’s own physicality, specifically the bodies we leave behind us when we die. Hamlet, like every man, seeks the difficult answers to questions that have not lost their significance or currency today. ![]() These markers, have always been used by men to identify themselves, to mark themselves as separate from the realm of beasts and more importantly to take them out of the supposedly inferior realm of the feminine, which has, historically been marked by the absence of these masculine signifiers. They instinctively know that these signifiers must exist like baseball cards, they collect, catalogue, trade and compare them. They nearly hysterically know that there must be something that must alert them to their manliness, to masculinity, something which they can use to take the idea of masculinity outside of the abstract and make it clear, real and actual. Men have always searched for proofs of their manliness, a measure, a marker and even a map to guide them. In fact, as long as there have been men who think and write, this question has been a reoccurring one. In Hamlet, the young Danish student spends the entire play pondering the heavy questions-life, death, and not surprisingly, what it means to be a man. How infinite in faculties, in form and moving howĮxpress and admirable, in action how like an angel, What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, ![]()
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