As I’ve confessed previously, I have this masochistic habit of listening to sports talk radio. In part, I just like to hear voices besides the ones in my head while I drive alone, and I sometimes tire of the Cory Flintoff and the rest of the NPR crowd and their doom and gloom, or most of the sad, sad excuses for radio personalities on Air America, which leaves me either Rush Limbaugh cracking on Michael J. Fox for slowly dying, Dr. Laura, or sports.
Recently I’ve been listening to a morning show hosted by a jock and a journalist, an oft-employed sports-radio buddy pairing. Of course the jock always teases the journalist for being a wimpy little girlie writerman. Said journalist is invariably either a.) an Irishman of the smaller variety, b.) an Italian of the smaller variety, or, c.) a Jew. The small writer is always a New Yorker or acts like one, and is “humorously” whiney. Actually, I suppose you could just the journalist the “Jew” – scrawny (or pudgy) but feisty, funny, neurotic, the clown, if you will, in this scenario. No person of color ever plays the "Jew." (I claim the dubious but generally accepted entitlement to stereotype “my own” here, fyi.) Anywho, the big-mouthed little-bodied, pale-skinned guy on this one show – I think it might be called “Mike and Mike in the Morning” on ESPN, if you must know – has been talking a lot lately about his efforts to “man up,” which, in context, I’ve taken to mean that he’s been hitting the gymnasium, in all likelihood more to bulk up by lifting than slim down via aerobics. The jock on the show, we’ll call him Mike, condescendingly encourages little Mike to indeed, go for it: “Man up, dood!” Of course, the chuckled assumption is that the little putz could never become an actual man, shouldn’t even try but for the awesome hilarity of it all. Makes for great great radio.
(The men I’m talking about are both white, by the way. A much more heinous example of the jock-and-Jew genre can be found when a large black man and a small "ethnic" white one are paired and are thus somehow entitled to indulge heavily in both black and Jewish stereotyping, and, because of their ethnic-ness, also get to crack on women, "Arabs," Asians, and pretty much anyone else they feel like. The other day I heard a sports-talk guy call an Arab-American fan a "terrorist," I kid you not. Especially concerning people from the Middle East, on sports talk radio, anything goes these days.)
But what I’m interested in here is the term itself, which until recently I had only heard in terms of basketball – when playing man-to-man rather than zone defense, or when one is playing shoddy defense in general, coaches and/or teammates sometimes scream the reminder to “man up!” (A version of “Get your man!” or “Stick your man!”)
The current faddish use of “Man up” strikes me as an especially yucky version of jock machismo. I googled it, of course, and found a plethora of definitions on urbandictionary.com, a site with a decidedly wiki-pedic flair (seemingly sans editors), that offered several definitions and examples for “manning” or “man” “up” submitted by posters, among them (bracketed comments mine):
-Don’t be a pussy [of course, one wouldn’t want to be one of those], brave it, be daring.
-A reminder, usually to a man, to maintain or resume his assigned place within the patriarcy. A reminder to a man never to show uncertainty, express feelings or emotion, display lack of skill, give any indication of empathy, give voice to pain or suffering, or otherwise act like a human being rather than an automaton.
-When a grown man is crying and moaning about something out of his control and someone tells him to knock it off or "man up":
Worker 1: Man, i hate diging ditches. Why do we have to do this all the time? This sucks. I need a break. My feet hurt. The boss hates me.
Worker 2: Quit acting like a little girl and "Man up"!-Getting ready to go fight or do something daring, preparing for a tough siutaion most times a fight, Everyone man up, we gotta rumble tonight.
-Derived from the phrase "cowboy up", meaning "be tough, be strong, act like a real cowboy,” in use in rodeo circles at least since the mid-1970’s. "Man up" means, similarly, "be tough, be a man, do what a man should do." Other derivations, such as "woman up," are common [Your humble blogger has never heard any such usage.]. Stop complaining and man up!
-To work through impediments and obstacles without whining.
Men “man up” when they stifle emotions, don’t complain, and kick ass. “Man up” is positive like pussy is pejorative – pussies don’t man up. Which reminds of the old Greek saying (That’s Greek, as in those big houses on the edge of campus that always have a couch, some golf clubs, a wiffleball bat and a kiddie pool on the front lawn): “Don’t ever call it a frat. You wouldn’t call your country a cunt!” (Of course, this only makes sense aurally – in print, why would one abbreviate a word and take out an extra vowel in the middle, “country” to “cunt,” so maybe I should’ve used some other example, but I rather like the idea of nicknaming the U.S.of A. Dracula or Chocula or Basie or even Monte Cristo. Call your country a count today! Make your vote, er, count! Mwahahahahahah! [evil Sesame Street count laugh])
So person up, people! Speaking of which: dear female readers, if you’re reading, we’d love to hear from you – woman up, pony up a post some time, if you’re so inspired. That last bit, “if you’re so inspired,” is a perfect example of yours truly failing to man up, softening his demand on women readers into a tepid request.
