WHAT IS MAN? By Esther Vilar

A man is a human being who works. By working, he supports himself, his wife, and
his wife's children. A woman, on the other hand, is a human being who does not work
or at least only temporarily. Most of her life she supports neither herself nor her
children, let alone her husband.

Any qualities in a man that a woman finds useful, she calls masculine; all others, of
no use to her or to anyone else for that matter, she chooses to call efeminate. A
man's appearance has to be masculine if he wants to have success with women, and
that means it will have to be geared to his one and only raison d'etre - work. His
appearance must conform to each and every task put to him, and he must always be
able to fulfil it.

Except at night when the majority of men wear striped pajamas with at most two pairs
of pockets, men wear a kind of uniform made of durable, stain-resistant material in
brown, blue or gray These uniforms, or `suits,' have up to ten pockets, in which men
carry instruments and tools indispensable for their work. Since a woman does not
work, her night or day clothes rarely have pockets.
For social events men are permitted to wear black, a color that shows marks and
stains, since on those occasions men are less likely to dirty themselves. Moreover,
the bright colors worn by women show to advantage against it. The occasional red or
green evening jackets worn by men are acceptable, since, by contrast, all the real
men present seem so much more masculine.

The rest of a man's appearance is also adapted to his situation. His hair style
requires only fifteen minutes at the barber every two or three weeks. Curls, waves,
and tints are not encouraged as they might hinder his work. Men often work in the
open air or spend a considerable amount of time in it, hence complicated styles
would be a nuisance. Furthermore, it is improbable that such styles would make a hit
with women since, unlike men, they never judge the opposite sex from an aesthetic
point of view. So most men, after one or two attempts at individuality, realize thatwomen are indifferent to their efforts and revert to a standard style, short or long. The
same is true of beards. Only oversensitive men - usually ones with intellectual
pretensions - who want to appear mentally tough by letting their facial hair grow
indiscriminately wear a full beard for any length of time. It will be tolerated by women,
however, for a beard is an important indication of a man's character and therefore of
the way in which he might be most easily exploited. (His field of work will usually be
that of the neurotic intellectual.)

Generally a man uses an electric razor for about three minutes every morning to
keep his beard in check. For his skin, soap and water are considered good enough.
All that is required is cleanliness and an absence of make-up so that everyone can
see what he is like. As for his fingernails, they should be as short as possible for work.
Apart from a wedding ring - worn to show that he is being used by a particular
woman for a particular purpose - a proper man wears no ornaments. His clumsy,
functional watch, worn on the wrist, is hardly decorative. Heavy in design, waterproof,
shock-resistant and showing the correct date, it cannot possibly be called an
ornament. Usually it was given to him by the woman for whom he works.
Shirts, underwear, and socks for real men are so standardized that their only
difference is one of size. They can be bought in any shop without difficulty or loss of
time. Only as far as ties are concerned is there any degree of freedom - and then a
man is usually so unused to choosing that he lets the woman buy them for him.

Anyone visiting this Earth from another planet would think it is each man's goal to
look as much like the next as possible. Yet, to fulfill woman's purposes, masculinity
and male usefulness vary to a considerable degree: necessarily, because women,
who hardly ever work, need men for everything.
There are men who carefully manoeuvre a large limousine out of the garage at eight
o'clock every morning. Others leave an hour earlier, traveling in a middle-class
sedan. Still others leave when it is not yet light, wearing overalls and carrying lunch
boxes, to catch buses, subways, or trains to factories or building sites. By a trick of
fate, it is always the latter, the poorest, who are exploited by the least attractive
women. For, unlike women (who have an eye for money), men notice only woman's
external appearance. Therefore, the more desirable women in their own class are
always being snatched away from under their noses by men who happen to earn
more.

No matter what a particular man does or how he spends his day, he has one thing in
common with all other men - he spends it in a degrading manner. And he himself
does not gain by it. It is not his own livelihood that matters: he would have to struggle
far less for that, since luxuries do not mean anything to him anyway it is the fact that
he does it for others that makes him so tremendously proud. He will undoubtedly
have a photograph of his wife and children on his desk, and will miss no opportunity
to hand it around.

No matter what a man's job may be - bookkeeper, doctor, bus driver, or managing
director - every moment of his life will be spent as a cog in a huge and pitiless
system - a system designed to exploit him to the utmost, to his dying day.
It may be interesting to add up figures and make them tally - but surely not year in,
year out? How exciting it must be to drive a bus through a busy town! But always the
same route, at the same time, in the same town, day after day, year after year? What a
magnificent feeling of power to know that countless workers obey one's command!But how would one feel if one suddenly realized one was their prisoner and not their
master?

We have long ceased to play the games of childhood. As children, we became bored
quickly and changed from one game to another. A man is like a child who is
condemned to play the same game for the rest of his life. The reason is obvious: as soon as he is
discovered to have a gift for one thing, he is made to specialize. Then, because he
can earn more money in that field than another, he is forced to do it forever. If he was
good at maths in school, if he had a 'head for figures,' he will be sentenced to a
lifetime of figure work as bookkeeper, mathematician, or computer operator, for there
lies his maximum work potential. Therefore, he will add up figures, press buttons and
add up more figures, but he will never be able to say, `I'm bored. I want to do
something else!' The woman who is exploiting him will never permit him to look for
something else. Driven by this woman, he may engage in a desperate struggle
against competitors to improve his position, and perhaps even become head clerk or
managing director of a bank. But isn't the price he is paying for his improved salary
rather too high?

A man who changes his way of life, or rather his profession (for life and profession
are synonymous to him), is considered unreliable. If he does it more than once, he
becomes a social outcast and remains alone.
The fear of being rejected by society must be considerable. Why else will a doctor
(who as a child liked to observe tadpoles in jam jars) spend his life opening up
nauseating growths, examining and pronouncing on human excretions? Why else
does he busy himself night and day with people of such repulsiveness that everyone
else is driven away? Does a pianist who, as a child, liked to tinkle on the piano really
enjoy playing the same Chopin nocturne over and over again all his life? Why else
does a politician who as a schoolboy discovered the techniques of manipulating
people successfully continue as an adult, mouthing words and phrases as a minor
government functionary? Does he actually enjoy contorting his face and playing the
fool and listening to the idiotic chatter of other politicians? Surely he must once have
dreamed of a different kind of life. Even if he became President of the United States,
wouldn't the price be too high?

No, one can hardly assume men do all this for pleasure and without feeling a desire
for change. They do it because they have been manipulated into doing it: their whole
life is nothing but a series of conditioned reflexes, a series of animal acts. A man who
is no longer able to perform these acts, whose earning capacity is lessened, is
considered a failure. He stands to lose everything - wife, family, home, his whole
purpose in life - all the things, in fact, which give him security.
Of course one might say that a man who has lost his capacity for earning money is
automatically freed from his burden and should be glad about this happy ending - but
freedom is the last thing he wants. He functions, as we shall see, according to the
principle of pleasure in non freedom. To be sentenced to life-long freedom is a worse
fate than life-long slavery.

To put it another way: a man is always searching for someone or something to
enslave him, for only as a slave does he feel secure - and, as a rule, his choice falls
on a woman. Who or what is this creature who is responsible for his lowly existence
and who, moreover, exploits him in such a way that he only feels safe as her slave,
and her slave alone?

Source: The Manipulated Man (1971)
https://www.amazon.com/Manipulated-Man-Esther-Vilar/dp/1905177178
by Esther Vilar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manipulated_Man