THE WORTH OF A MAN

Oct 19, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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The first testicular guard or “box” was first used in cricket in 1874.  The first helmet was used in 1974.  It took 100 years for men to realize that their brains are also important.  So, is manhood all there is to being a man and, if so, what is the worth of a man for whom manhood is everything?
For some men, manhood is not everything, it is the only thing.  A newspaper in Trinidad recently ran a story about a man who took Cialis, a drug used for erectile dysfunction, had three minutes worth of sex, took in with chest pains, collapsed and later died.  Was it worth it?
Many men have told me that for them a life without sex would be unbearable.  George Burns, the comedian summed it up, “Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.”  Yet, some men persist in the belief that their “manhood” and being a man are one and the same.
There is the story about an old man who went into Tiffany’s late on a Friday afternoon with a beautiful girl on his arm and bought a ring worth $20,000 for the girl.  He paid by cheque and agreed that he would collect the ring on Monday after the cheque had cleared.  On Monday, the Tiffany manager called up the old man to tell him that his cheque had bounced and there was no money in his account.  The old man was totally unperturbed.  “I know,” he replied, “but can you imagine the weekend I had?”
What is the worth of a man who is worth nothing but gets more than his money’s worth from a credulous young lady?  As Shakespeare asked in Hamlet, “What is a man,/ If the chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?  A beast, no more!”
So what, if anything, is the worth of a man? Again the first thing we get is the sexual pre-occupation.  A woman came home and found her husband busily packing a suitcase. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Why are you packing?”  He replied, “I just found out that despite the recession, men are so scarce in Las Vegas that women are paying men four hundred a time for what you get from me for free.”
The woman quickly went to her closet and started to pack too.  “Where are you going?” her husband asked. “To Las Vegas,” she responded. “I want to see how you could live on four-hundred dollars a month.”
Surely, a man must be worth more than a few hundred dollars. Is there anything like an intrinsic worth, something that goes beyond sex?  Rudyard Kipling made a distinction between being of the masculine gender and being a man.  In his poem “If”,  he cited several pre-conditions including keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; meeting with triumph and disaster and treating them the same; talking with crowds and keeping your virtue; walking with kings without losing the common touch; and filling each minute with sixty seconds of meaningful activity.
Only then, he concedes, “Yours is the earth and everything within it/And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.”
For many of us, the Kipling test is far too demanding.  One wit has observed, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…then you probably don’t understand the situation.”
Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, insisted that there is worth in all of us (men included): “The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction…A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.”
Albert Schweitzer, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, added to this, “The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.”
If this is true, the responses by many Americans to the recent news that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 would seem to be more about colour than texture.  It might not add to Obama’s worth but certainly devalues his critics.
Many years ago, while still in Secondary School, I read about a man who went into the Louvre in Paris and had nothing good to say about anything in it.  The comment was that the exhibits in the Louvre had stood the test of time and have proven their worth.  The man’s disparaging remarks were not a genuine reflection of the art in the Louvre so much as of the man himself.  They showed his true worth.
As I grow older I find myself agonising about not just what is the worth of a man but what is my worth.  I own nothing and nobody.   However, I have four children, a wife and a mother to whom I mean something and who mean considerably to me. I have people I consider friends and I wonder if I am worth as much to them as they to me.
And then I tell myself that doesn’t matter. What matters is how I feel about them and how I treated them.  Interestingly, I was put to the test even as I wondered.  I tend to be outspoken about poor service and after complaining to an organisation with which I feel I have a great relationship with and getting a sense that the people I spoke to did not understand where I was coming from, I decided to write an article about it and warned them what I was going to do.  I immediately got a response offering me one of the company’s products to make up for the problems I had experienced and pointing out that if I continued with the article I would have to acknowledge the extent to which the company had sought to rectify the problem.
I was intrigued and decided to see what product would be sent.  Would it be top of the line or where in the price list would it be? Unfortunately for my ego, though good it was not the best. I then did what I intended to do in the first place – pay for the product and thank the Almighty that they held me in such low esteem that I could afford what they sent me.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that Eleanor Roosevelt had said that nobody could make you feel inferior without your consent. To be worth anything, you must never give that consent.

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