Manwich

A reflection on what it means to be a man in today's world

This is the first of a new series of weekly dispatches that will only be available to paid subscribers. You can upgrade your subscription for as little as $5/month to access these shorter essays as well as my full archive of previous stories and early drafts from a forthcoming novella.

After Elio came home from the hospital in September, I developed the habit of going to the Starbucks inside Food City in Halls most mornings to pick up Haley’s pumpkin-spiced, vanilla-swirl, iced nitroglycerin machi-something.

At first, I did it because she couldn’t drive herself, and if I didn’t swoop in and pick up her expensive iced beverage, the consequences for our household were too grave to consider. But even after she got behind the wheel, we continued the routine. She’d wake and dress the kids, and I’d grab her drink before picking up the children and taking them with me to the YMCA or the zoo or somewhere else to give her time alone with the baby. Many months later, on the days I work from home, I text Haley before leaving the gym, asking if she needs me to grab her order on the way back, and she rarely says no.

In most grocery stores, as soon as you walk in, you’ll notice bins, boxes, or shelves full of products sold on special. I typically ignore these items, like I do Facebook ads, unsolicited emails, and Jehovah’s Witnesses on Saturday mornings. But today, as I walked out with Haley’s drink, I noticed cases of stacked Manwich cans on the shelves. They sold 2 for $3, and I can’t tell you whether that’s a good deal or not because I don’t think I’ve ever cut open a can of the stuff before.

I do like a good portmanteau, however. And this one is simple and effective: a man-sandwich. Grammatically, it may imply that the product consists of smashed-up human parts, but it’s easy enough to figure out that the creator’s intention is really to tell you that real men use this. You’d know this, if you were a real man.  If not, the dairy-free yogurt is on the back right. Good luck with that, Nancy. 

Seeing those cans didn’t make me think of eating Sloppy Joes. But it did trigger another strain of thought. What does it mean to be a man in today’s society? 

I think about this question a lot. I possess few of the ingredients traditionally associated with masculinity. All the power tools I own today were donated by either my brother, an electrician, or my dad, a plumber. Besides the power drill barely strong enough to screw through drywall, I’m not sure I could figure out how to use any of them without the aid of a YouTube tutorial. 

I am 35 years old (today, actually—happy birthday to me!). And yet, I don’t know how to build or fix anything on my own. A few months ago, when the PVC pipe attached to the garbage disposal came loose, gushing water and mangled pieces of Cuties clementines all over the sink bottom, I had to FaceTime my dad—who is a real man—so that he could instruct me how to put it back together without paying somebody.

If anything else goes wrong in the house—the runoff from the furnace leaks into the garage, the water line to the refrigerator busts, an electrical outlet goes dead—I either call my father-in-law and wait for him to come over to help me fix, or put on a list for my dad and brother to help with when they visit. I must ask my mother-in-law to hang picture frames in any area of the house besides the downstairs den or office—spaces Haley has leased out to me because they are already in rough enough exterior shape I couldn’t do any more severe damage to the paint or walls.

The manliest I’ve ever been was probably between 2015 and 2017, when I trained at a mixed martial arts gym in South Knoxville and showed up to the office with the occasional black eye. Even though I still spent my work days in front of a computer drafting social media posts or figuring out how to use WordPress, getting kneed in the groin or elbowed in the forehead each evening made me feel like I was finally cultivating the masculine traits my dad sought to instill in me from birth. One sparring night, a 16-year-old kickboxer from Morristown launched a roundhouse I didn’t see coming. The kick landed right on the button, twisting my nose far enough to the left I wasn’t sure it was still attached to my face. We stopped, and I went over to Joey, the kickboxing coach, and asked what to do. Blood was pouring from my face. “Grab it, push it back to the middle, and finish the round,” he instructed, dumbfounded that I’d consider any other alternative. I did so—I remember the crunching sound my cartilage made as I shifted it back in place—and not a minute later, the kickboxer again kicked me in the face, shifting my nose in the other direction. This time, Joey told me to grab a roll of paper towel and shove pieces of it up my nose while using the rest to wipe my blood off the mat. 

I was delighted at the sight of my own blood, just like I’d be a year or so later at the sight of the calluses on my hands once I started doing CrossFit, sure I’d have better luck meeting hot single babes in possession of all their front teeth than doing MMA. Lifting heavy things revealed muscles hidden beneath my flesh that had been dormant since I was an infant, the last time my body wasn’t encased in at least one layer of blubber. Muscles, torn hands, and a back squat heavier than all the women at the CrossFit Games that year meant I was at least part man.

When I drive by a construction site, I sometimes stare out at the laborers building and destroying things. “That’s work that matters,” I think to myself. “That’s what men were made to do.” They use their bodies to create and extract, not to sit in a computer chair reorganizing their Google Drives and attending Zoom meetings about content strategy. 

It’s especially hard for me to reconcile the traditional traits of masculinity I was inoculated with at home, where every man is or was a laborer, with my sedentary life doing work that’s only possible because of the internet. What’s also hard to reconcile is the monetary value assigned to the different kinds of work. Last fall, Haley and I hiked up to Max Patch with the three kids. At the start of the trail, I struck up a conversation with a park worker who was waiting at the gate for a co-worker so they could haul down a piece of heavy equipment. I thought of how much money this man earns compared to, let’s say, any of the thousands of people I met at a sales conference in September who run AI marketing programs or scrape the internet for people they can bombard with emails selling them software they don’t need.

I think of my grandfather working until he was 77 years old at an auto body shop in Newark,never earning more than $60k, and the next image that flashes into my head is the Instagram influencer talking about how they make thousands of dollars in passive income every month using affiliate links. I don’t understand much about business or economics, but I’m flabbergasted by what jobs we consider most valuable in America. How is it possible for a person to package online courses with surveys and endorsements and triple the earnings of the zookeepers who take care of the chimpanzees my children are obsessed with every time we visit the zoo?

I don’t have the answer to this question. But every time I see Manwich cans or dudes in business shirts parking Ford F-350s in the space beside me at the university, I think about masculinity. What it is, whether it matters. I’m not sure of the answer. But I am grateful that, rather than ask for me to upgrade the bathroom fixtures or learn how to rip up the linoleum floors and replace them with real hardwood, Haley is satisfied for me to bring her a $10 cup of Starbucks coffee-water every morning. I’m kenough man-sandwich for her—at least for now.