Abstract: Day by day grows importance of learning foreign languages in Uzbekistan. This article reveals role and place of a foreign language in live of youth of the XXI century. Keywords: Century, globalization, cultures, foreign language, social networks, modern techniques, language specialist, future, scope of thought, public policy.
At present, it is very important for everyone to know foreign languages. The process of globalization is increasingly taking place in the world, bilingualism is not just an interest, but also a demand of time. Even in state politics, the more languages the representative of that state knows, the faster and they are able to go on the path of perfect progress.
To what extent a foreign language is an important matter of reflection and what does it give us? This is how we can answer this question. First of all, it makes a person broadminded and has an influence on his external mind. Language plays an important role in the life of every person. You can travel freely if you know a foreign language. You will be in communication with people in a foreign state and you will receive insights into their thoughts. Knowing the language will be a great benefit if you also go out to a country. In addition, knowledge of a foreign language facilitates the use of modern techniques and social networks of the present day.
English is also a technical language. Almost 80% of social, remote networks are covered and explained in English. If the young people of the 21st century are able to speak a foreign language and speak perfectly, then our state will achieve its progress only to a certain extent. In conclusion, I would like to say that English and also knowledge of the Russian language is the key to a new opportunity for representatives of each field.
To communicate with people of different nationalities and from different countries in the world, several international languages are used. Among them, the most popular language was English and not by chance. After all, English is not just a language spoken in the US and the UK. Firstly, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, many African countries and individual Asian states can be added here.
Secondly, it is more than just the language of individual countries. English has been designated as the language of negotiation in international organizations such as the UN General Assembly, the European Security Alliance, UNESCO, NATO, the European Union and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Society has repeatedly tried to find an alternative to the English language. This was done in order to equalize the chances of representatives of different nations in learning a foreign language. These attempts led to the creation of several new languages, among which Esperanto became the most popular.
The author of “Esperanto” is Lazer Markovich Zamenhof, a linguist from Warsaw. The language was created in 1887, it took the author 10 years to develop it. However, at a certain point, development and popularization slowed down significantly. Presumably, the reason for this was that the artificially created language has no history, while English has a rich history and deep roots. After all, it was spoken, sung and written by great musicians, poets, philosophers. That is why today international summits and negotiations are held in English, the study of the world experience of colleagues in various fields and areas, important state documents are signed, meetings of presidents of different countries. International trade relations are conducted in English, the work of the financial and transport systems is carried out.
The role of the English language in the modern world is really great. It is studied in schools, universities, specialized English courses online and offline. Thanks to the progress in the field of digital technologies, everyone can learn an international language without leaving home. And such an approach in modern society is considered not just the norm, but a necessity. And this is despite the sufficient grammatical, morphological and lexical complexity of English for us.
After all, compared with the Russian language, English implies strict observance of the order of words when compiling sentences, and the structure of the language itself, although similar (unlike the same Chinese), still has many differences.
English belongs to the group of Germanic languages of the Indo-European language family. The number of people (native speakers) for whom English is native is about 600 million people. The number of people who speak English is over 1.5 billion.
Summing up the role, importance and relevance of the English language in the modern world, it is worth noting the following. Knowing an international language allows you to get more valuable information. Content on the Internet, films, music – all this is produced for the most part in English. Knowledge of the language will eliminate the distortion that may be present in the translation. In the modern world, not knowing English literally cuts you off from many achievements of civilization. You limit yourself to a relatively small dome of information and language instead of thinking more globally.
Again, most of the information on the Internet is in English (more than 54%). An international language allows you to get a decent education at a prestigious university, a dream job and full communication with foreigners from any corner of the planet. If the young people of the 21st century are able to speak a foreign language and do it perfectly, then our state will achieve its progress only to a certain extent.
In conclusion, I would like to say that English language is the key to a new opportunity for representatives of each field.
References: 1. https: //en.wikipediyaorf/wiki/List^of_language_proficieney_test. 2. https://ielts.org. 3. Expanc.ru. 4. UzNE.The first volume. Toshkent, 2000
The day he exit
It was a black day void of emotions yet filled with nothingness.
Father called with a loving tone and son comes ingest with daddy
Buddies and loved ones assembled the table
Feasting in different numbers as one.
He had gone to lay down his body
But suddenly a scream knocked everyone to shock
Doctors ran their ways, in and out, biting their fingers
As to be compared to when a hunter misses his target.
I bashed in unannounced like a security guard
And watched how his glowing eyes turned pale.
Mummy, palleted in grief, sighed deeply,
She began to drown the hospital in an ocean of tears
Thoughts shuffled my heart, plights ran in search of solution
And I sprinkled prayers at the visage of God
But he was too busy to grant my wish, too busy to save my man.
Soon daddy went on peaceful ride from the struggles of existence
His gentle soul waved at me as he departed to meet his own.
Hopes left me stranded, swallowing darkness. I became an empty body!
Mark Morris Dance Group in “Via Dolorosa” (Photo: Chris Hardy)
Calvary and a Prison in Athens
Socrates and Via Dolorosa Mark Morris Dance Group Cal Performances Berkeley, California
Western civilization. Two words that seem to enrage one half the world while blinding the other with a misguided sense of aggrieved loyalty. The so-called progressive left lays the blame for most, if not all of today’s evils at its doorstep. The alt-right and other so-called conservatives claim to be its sole defenders in a world gone mad with resentment and ingratitude.
“Slavery, capitalism, climate change, nuclear war, toxic synthetics, dying seas, the collapsing of wildlife and the sixth extinction,” the left claims, “including our own under the weight of a catastrophic success – these are the legacy of Western civilization.” “Freedom, unsurpassed prosperity, knowledge without equal, human creativity unleashed and human power without limit,” claims the right, “righteousness, grace and God: these are the gifts and the triumph of Western civilization.”
But today there is no longer such a thing as “Western civilization.” Long after Europe lost its empires and its political and economic dominance, its intellectual and spiritual domination of the world is complete. Now “Western civilization” is world civilization: free markets, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of human rights and the political authority of the people (in theory when not in practice), the imperative of human creativity, technology, critical reason and the scientific method in addressing our problems – these Western definitions of the good are unchallenged by anyone – though the right seems hardly to understand them and the left pretends to forget them. The right defends a grotesque caricature of “the West” that has its roots in the barbarians that brought down an empire and sacked Rome – their founding fathers are Alaric and Attila, the Vandals and Ostrogoths who gaped at the cities they burned.
The left attacks an equally grotesque simulacrum: a “West” that began in 1619, or 1492, or 1605 – when the Atlantic slave trade began, or Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, or the first stock exchange was founded in Amsterdam and what had been an efficient series of trading markets across the continent turned into the many-headed Hydra that now feasts on the globe.
At the heart of our dominant civilization stand two figures whose shadows have been cast down the millennia; the greatest rebels and martyrs of their times – doubters, skeptics, revolutionists. Each stood for his (for they were both men) convictions regarding reality, truth and the good, and each paid the ultimate price: they were summarily killed by the people and powers of their time, with the assumption their ideas and influence would die with them. They did not. Those two individuals also stood for the two poles on which what was, eventually, called “the West” has revolved for centuries. Their names? Socrates and Jesus.
Socrates embedded the dialectics of doubt and reasoned argument into the heart of the West. Jesus embedded the imperative of faith and love. Both stood for truth – though their conceptions of it were not always congruent, and much of Western history has been a long-undecided conflict, sometimes war, between them, one essentially spiritual, the other material – “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” as Matthew Arnold defined them two centuries ago.
Or, as we might say today, alt-right and progressive – neither side seeming to realize that both they and their opponents are Western to the core.
What civilization first placed its own self-criticism as one of its fundamental values? Western – and late Western at that. In most other cultures and civilizations, including earlier versions of Europe, the critic, dissident, rebel would have been imprisoned, executed or dismissed as mad.
What civilization places the idea of moral universals and absolutes at its beating heart? Again, Western. Most, if not all, other cultures enforced loyalty to their own and only their own; anyone outside “the tribe” was not considered entirely “human,” and certainly had no “rights.”
This is not to romanticize the West. Being human, it is imperfect – often floridly so. It has blood on its hands, as does every other culture and civilization since humanity broke off from its simian ancestors. And its virtues were not always intentional; they exist at least partly because there has been in fact no single “Western culture” but rather a cauldron of “Western cultures,” dozens of cultures, ethnicities, religions, races, in perpetual war with each other for millennia. But that discussion must be pursued elsewhere.
The Mark Morris Dance Group brought two dances, balancing these Western, and now world-dominating presences, one intellectual and heroic, the other spiritual and sanctified, to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater during a recent weekend; performances that could not help but stimulate these thoughts.
The first was a revival of Mark Morris’s celebrated “Socrates,” an intriguing work set to the music of Eric Satie and a libretto taken from three of Plato’s dialogues. Based on designs to be found in Grecian pottery, and at times curiously reminiscent of Nijinsky’s notorious choreography for Debussy’s “Prelude to ‘L’aprés-midi d’un faune,’” the dance moves in smoothly hieratic poses, sometimes childlike, sometimes serenely adolescent, across a landscape of classical purity and grace.
The dance has a libretto, performed gracefully by tenor Brian Giebler and accompanied by pianist Colin Fowler. The libretto’s first part is taken from The Symposium, the celebrated dialogue on the nature of love. Alicibiades describes Socrates as like a Selenus, a grotesque figurine containing, hiddenly, the figure of a god, and also like Marsyas, a satyr and flute player for the gods – though those who remember their mythology will remember his tragic end when he makes the mistake of challenging Apollo, god of the lyre, to a competition: he loses, predictably, and is skinned alive for his hubris. The second part describes an idyllic passage in Phaedrus in which Socrates and his young eponymous friend seek a place on the banks of a lovely stream where they will conduct a conversation in search of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
The third is taken from Phaedo, narrating the last moments of Socrates’ life, surrounded by his mourning friends in an Athens prison, when he drinks the hemlock to which he has been condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the youth of the city when, in truth, he was liberating them from the very illusions that led, ironically, tragically, to the greatest of ironist’s own martyrdom. Eric Satie’s music, famously cool and detached, makes little attempt to express the libretto; Morris’s choreography spends almost all of its time following the music and ignoring the words: there is almost no attempt, for example, to express the pathos of the closing pages until the very end, when, one by one, each of the dancers slips gracefully to the floor, expressing the death, perhaps not only of Socrates, but of the Greek ideal itself.
The second half of the program was a world premiere, awaited with much anticipation: “Via Dolorosa,” set to the music of Nico Muhly, performed on solo harp, with formidable virtuosity, by Parker Ramsay. The dance follows the Stations of the Cross, from Jesus’ condemnation to his crucifixion, death and entombment. Interestingly, it distributes the role of Jesus to dancers of various genders, ethnicities and races, appropriate for the universal humanity of the Good Shepherd. Muhly’s music is, for the most part, as detached as Satie’s, though it occasionally gives way to the harrowing drama of the moment. The stunning stage set – a blowup of a searingly beautiful patch of abstract brushwork, whose colors changed depending on how they were lit – was by Howard Hodgkin.
For this dance, too, there’s a libretto, in this case somewhat overwrought, by Alice Goodman, though in this performance it was neither spoken nor sung (as, it seems, might occur at some performances). Which was just as well, as it is, to be frank, a poor substitute for the simple descriptions in the gospel.
The dance was a little disappointing. Though there were moments of genuine originality and the childlike grace and warm humanity one associates with Morris’s dances, there just was not enough inventiveness and too much reliance on mannerisms one has also come to expect. It seemed just a little tired. There was also a strange attempt to take the edge off the final moments of the entombment, at the very end of the dance, to anticipate the coming resurrection, that felt contrived and forced. After all, even in Giotto’s frescoes, the angels are allowed to weep and lament as if there will be no resurrection to come, not take what looked like a not very unconvincing victory lap.
It was perhaps a more thought-provoking evening than one that was entirely satisfying aesthetically, but it was certainly worth the visit. And the audience gave it a standing ovation. _____ Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
Before My Friend Got Killed
The sky actually was blue
The streets were more spacious
Women were sitting on the thresholds of their houses in the afternoon
Telling amazing stories to each other
The cafes were full of men’s laughter
My father smiles as he tells her:
Don’t take Faleeha to the hair salon
Give your hair the color of the sun
And leave the glamour of night to my daughter’s hair
She smiles back and says
Her name is not poetic
If it were me, I would change it
We all laugh
My mother was more compassionate
She would say
Eat from one plate so your emotions will not be lost
And like ants on a candy bar, we would gather together
Oh, my friend
After your death
The world wore a garment of dust
The war had swept away the thresholds of our homes
Women now wear worries
Permanent sadness
Cafes are bustling with the songs of false victory
Men’s voices are hoarse from smoke
And from drinking scorching defeats
Oh, my friend
Your death spread the snow colour on my hair
If you had stayed a little bit longer
You would have seen how my name was won
But death betrayed you
As it did my mother
And my father as well
All their advice fell on stone ears
Our lives filled up with wars, poverty, and exile
When I shout
Oh father ,
Mother,
Brother,
Sister,
There is no echo coming back
And regret bites my heart
Oh, my friend
Can you stop your Specter from dancing in my memory
Give me ten minutes to sleep
The smoke from the plane that killed you
Suffocates my days
……………
(Dedicated to my friend Mason Hassan Kamuna which she was killed during the Iraq-Iran war)
She is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now
lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq.
She received her master's degree in Arabic literature, and has now published 26 books, her
poems have been translated into English, Turkmen, Bosnian, Indian, French, Italian, German,
Kurdish, Spain, Korean, Greek, Serbia, Albanian, Pakistani, Romanian, Malayalam, Chinese,
ODIA, Nepali and Macedonian language. She is the Pulitzer Prize Nomination 2018,
PushCaret Prize Nomination 2019.
Member of International Writers and Artists Association.
Winner of the Women of Excellence Inspiration award from SJ magazine 2020,
Winner of the Grand Jury Award (the Sahitto International Award for Literature 2021)
One of the Women of Excellence selection committees 2023
Winner of women the arts award 2023
Member of Whos’ Who in America 2023
SAHITTO AWARD, JUDGING PANEL 2023
Cultural Ambassador - Iraq, USA
Email : d.fh88@yahoo.com
SWEET MEMORIES I REMEMBER
THE REMAINING MEMORY
WHEN HAPPY JOY WAS WALKING,
I CAN'T FORGET THIS IS A WONDERFUL MEMORY
I MISS YOU WHEN I THINK ABOUT IT,
THE FIELD OF MEMORIES IS ONE BIG OCEAN
WHEN I REMEMBER I CAN'T FORGET IT
IT WOULD BE A LIE TO SAY I DON'T REMEMBER
IT'S TOO BAD IF I DON'T REMEMBER
THINGS I COULDN'T DO BEFORE
I WISH MY DREAMS CAME NOW
MY LIFE IS FULL OF WORK ALL THE TIME,
IT WILL BE UNFORGETTABLE,
I HAVE A POSSIBILITY TO FIT FOR FUTURE DESTINY,
ONE DAY, THE FUTURE WILL BE FOR US TOO,
THE PAST IS THE PAST
Nurmuhamedova Gulmira Jahongir’s daughter was born on September 9, 2006 in Orta Chichchik district of Tashkent region.
In 2022, she solemnly graduated from the “Yosh Journalists” school, and on May 25, 2022, she received a certificate of completion of the 9-month course of “Family Nurse” in “Barkamol Avlod” extracurricular education, “Confectioner and Chef” 7- completed monthly courses with excellent grades and a red diploma.
In 2023, she will attend a vocational school in the direction of Designer and Tailor, she has a certificate with 100-75 points in English-language tests, and she is the owner of more than 30 international certificates, and in September 2023, she will be awarded the “Jewel of the Heart” which is awarded with a certificate for her participation in the collection of creators with her wonderful creation.
She is a graduate of the MNEMONICS course. Also, in 2024, she was awarded a Diploma for participating in the “Blue Sky Stars” Artists’ Row with her creative poem. Currently, she is studying in a Tailoring course.
Member of the 2024 Spring Girl team,
Member of the Young Leaders Club. I am the coordinator girl of “Makolashunos”.
I am a young volunteer, young Tourism Ambassador, PR ambassador, owner of My_kanal
The Raven
He’s spending
Some time
At the Raven,
This could be
DC’s finest dive,
Three Budweisers in
And he’s wondering
If he should
Start coming here
More regularly.
Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, is due out this month.
“Black men struggle with masculinity so much. The idea that we must always be strong really presses us all down – it keeps us from growing.” –Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover
TOUGH: Exploring the Contentious Issue of Masculinityin Contemporary Society
[Originally published in Spare Change News & Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self]
As a child, my mother often painted my fingernails and sent me to school with glossy lips and lavishly perfumed hands. So began my confusing journey in discovering my gender identity and tipping along the jagged edges of sexual non-conformity.
Gender, as defined in Down to Earth Sociology, is “The social expectations attached to a person on account of that person’s sex. Sex is biological while gender is social.”
It has occurred to me that sexual and gender identity has been a hot-tempered issue most recently. People are quick to use labels like Gay, Straight, and Bisexual, Queer, Transgender, Feminine, Masculine, Macho, Tough Guy and Snowflake. Essentially, if you’re labeled gay then, you’re thought of as feminine and if considered straight, then you’re thought of as masculine. Well, if only it was all that simple.
Eli Coleman, in his book Integrated Identities for Gay Men and Lesbians states that “The dichotomous or trichotomous categories of sexual orientation (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual) are a massive over simplification of our current understanding of sexual orientation.”
He goes on to day that “…conflicts within or between individuals over sexual orientation are quite commonly seen in many cases of individual psychopathology. These conflicts contribute to psychosexual dysfunctions, relational problems, career indecision …existential crisis and so forth.”
I remember the anxiety I experienced when I decided to become a male nurse; I worried about the implications of working in a field typically dominated by women. But as we know today, there are many male nurses whose sexual identities are exclusively heterosexual, even though they have taken on a mostly feminine role and ignored the gender (masculine or feminine) role expectations of society.
Coleman also quoted Alfred Kinsey—a pioneer in the area of human sexuality research, whose 1948 publication Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was one of the first recorded works that saw science address sexual behavior and who invented the “Kinsey Scale” that rates levels of sexual preference from 1 (absolutely straight) to 6 (absolutely gay)—as saying “The world is not divided into sheep and goats. Not all are black nor all are white. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sounder understanding of the realities of sex.”
“Masculinity is what you believe it to be. I think masculinity and femininity is something that’s very old-fashioned. There’s a whole new generation of people who aren’t defined by their sex or race or who they like to sleep with.” Asserted gay Olympic Gold Medalist Johnny Weir and rightfully so…. In the grand scheme of things, I think that new age sexuality borders on being more contextual than it is biological.
There have been times when one can feel attracted to someone based on the situation of which they find themselves and the feelings that develop during that time; taking into consideration that they may still have more feelings of physical attract toward one sex over the other. Attraction can be more than just wanting to have intercourse with someone. It can be a combination of things that one deems valuable when it comes to finding the right mate. Things like karma, aura, emotional chemistry, intellectual and spiritual compatibility and socioeconomic components; all can affect attraction among individuals.
As a matter of fact, when I was growing up with my male cousin Bob in Haiti, definitive distinctions were made between us in relation to our disparate levels of gender role conformity.
Growing up, I was extremely close to my mother and had limited contact with my father being that he was a traveling businessman who lived in the second floor living quarters of his retail store in the middle of the city of Port-au-Prince. I was seen as the soft spoken, non-aggressive, overly sensitive and not terribly athletic mama’s boy. Whereas my cousin Bob was perceived to be the more tough talking, boisterous, athletic, and insensitive man’s man.
So they invented names to “label” us. I was “Temou” (Creole for soft core) and he was “Tedi” (Creole for hard core). Those labels began to shape how I perceived myself in the early stages of my psychological development. The idea that to be masculine you must be boisterous, not soft spoken is part of the pathology behind the idea of masculinity. “Violence has always been unfortunately embedded in masculinity, this alpha thing.” Said Captain America star Sebastian Stan.
Robert J. Stoller, M.D., in his book Presentations of Gender talks about the issue of femininity and masculinity in boys and girls within the context of family dynamics. He states that “One might hypothesize that if an excessively close mother child symbiosis and a distant and passive father produce extreme femininity in males, [then] too little symbiosis with the mother and too much symbiosis with the father would produce very masculine females.”
Which brings me to pose this question: Why are we as men so afraid to be associated with acting or thinking “like a girl”? What’s wrong with acting or thinking like a girl? We are all made of both male and female chromosomes, right? Sometimes the female chromosomes (a female karyotype is 46 XX) can be more dominant in males and the male chromosomes (a male karyotype is 46 XY) can be more dominant in females and vice versa.
Speaking from the point of view of someone who grew up with about five dominant women who exhibited both feminine and masculine characteristics in Haiti, I’ve grown to have immense respect for women and their abilities to communicate, empathize, endure and thrive over hardships. Why are those qualities recognized as a source of weakness if exhibited in males?
Women tend to allow themselves to be emotionally vulnerable, whereas men tend to perceive vulnerability as a weakness. But why is that? It seems to me that it takes courage and strength to be vulnerable whereas it takes fear and weakness to be invulnerable. In Haiti, women are objectified and are made to be subservient to men.
So the strong women I grew up with, had to mask their strengths or what was perceived to be masculine traits in order to appease the men, or risked being labeled a lesbian and lose their breadwinner. As for me, at times I had to act like the typically stoic masculine male when I really felt like sobbing uncontrollably, in order to avoid being labeled a sissy.
In The Homosexualities: Reality, Fantasy, and the Arts, Shirley Panken, Ph.D. writes “In Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf …[discredits] the usual definition of masculinity and femininity, and synchronizes the two into an androgynous (genderless) vision.” She goes on to say that in Wolf’s other work Orlando, she “depicts Orlando’s profound confusion about the diversity of his/her different selves.” Woolf writes that the indecision “from one sex to another is universal, that clothing may depict male or female likeness, but that underneath the sex, is opposite of what is above. She also dwells on the multiplicity of the self…”
Consequently, I want all the “feminine” or non-stereotypically “masculine” men out there to unite and claim their gender bending rights! Roy Simmons, a former offensive lineman with the New York Giants and with the Super Bowl winning Washington Redskins in the 1980s and the second NFL player to come out as gay, in a book about him called Out of Bounds had this to say: “To me, I am and always have been Roy Simmons. Labels are for people trying to define me—that’s their problem. The only insight I can offer into my sexuality is that I did exactly what everybody else around me did when I was growing up: when I came into my sexual maturity, I went with the flow, and for me the flow moved naturally to boys and girls. I found out soon that I like dick and pussy in almost equal measure—you don’t need a label to enjoy either one. A label is for the outside trying to look in.”
Recently, a large number of stereotypically “masculine” men have come out as Gay, Bisexual or Transgender, like former Gold Medal Winning decathlete Caitlyn Jenner, born Bruce Jenner. During his last 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer back on April 24th, 2015 before he transitioned to Caitlyn Jenner, Sawyer asked him about his sexuality and to which he replied, “Sexuality is who you go to bed with, gender is who you go to bed as…”
Among other high profile “masculine” athletes who have come out as gay or bisexual to challenge the contentious ideologies of masculinity are:
Carl Nassib, who became the first active National Football League (NFL) player to come out as gay. Luke Prokop, who became the first NHL player to come out as gay. Michael Sam was the first openly gay man drafted into the NFL. Ryan Russell became the first openly bisexual person in the NFL and in any major professional league. Ryan O’Callaghan who came out as gay after retiring from the NFL. John Amaechi who came out as gay in 2007, four years after retiring from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Glenn Burke became the first gay man in the Major League Baseball (MLB). Robbie Rogers was the first openly gay soccer player in a professional league. Jason Collins was the NBA’s first openly gay player. Meanwhile, Orlando Cruz became the first openly gay man in boxing and Darren Young in wrestling.
The list goes on and on…see it in full with this link: https://www.insider.com/professional-athletes-who-are-lgbt
In contemporary society, it is becoming increasingly unacceptable for men to objectify women. The days of “cat calling” (e.g. Wolf whistle, “Hey baby, can I get your number?”, “Nice ass!” etc…) is becoming passé. In addition, when it comes to having sexual freedom, the double standard of toadying men and shaming women has also been exposed and reassessed.
All of this and more are part of the concepts of masculinity: what it means to be a “real man.”
Today, a plethora of men are redefining their own manhood and not simply acquiescing to pre- established and progressively antiquated prototypes of masculinity. Terminologies like “house husbands” and “stay-at-home dads” are part of newfangled lexicon. Today’s men tend to be more expressive about their feelings and famous men like the comedian and actor Chris Rock have admitted to going to therapy.
In a People Magazine article by Eric Todisco titled: “Chris Rock Reveals He Does Seven Hours of Therapy a Week Since Onset of COVID-19 Pandemic” published on Dec. 10, 2020. Todesco writes that Rock unbosomed himself to the Hollywood Reporter about his therapy, revealing that he has been focusing on rectifying “childhood traumas”.
“I thought I was actually dealing with it, and the reality is I never dealt with it…” Rock stated.
Hence as you can see, it is becoming incrementally acceptable for men to find ways to cope with their feelings, which most of them (me included) were told they should not have or must not show. Alternatively, it is no longer acceptable to use coping patterns like drinking, drugging, physical violence and abusing women and children. To do so now will result in official consequences due to new and better-implemented domestic violence laws.
Today, you need not behave like a galoot with a “cave man” mentality to affirm your masculinity. Violence and intimidation—both archetypally associated with masculinity—are not “strengths”; they are personal weaknesses. As Argentinian revolutionary writer George Louis Borges once said, “Violence is the last resort of the weak.”
Some of the strongest men in history did not use force and fear to exert their masculinity. Iconoclasts like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. changed the world through non-violent means. It is easier to react violently like an unruly toddler than it is to respond thoughtfully like a mature man.
Therefore, for those of you who are questioning your gender identity (masculinity, femininity) and sexuality (lesbian, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersexed, asexual and questioning), know that the only one who can define you is you. Do not allow external forces keep you from experiencing internal freedom, whether you identify as masculine, feminine or both! After all, what is more divine than knowing both masculine and feminine energies?
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Author, Educator and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest book “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming , The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him here: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.
