The Male Intuition

Back in the old days there used to be a lot of talk about the so-called "female intuition."  The idea was that women had this mystical insight that transcended that gosh darn logic men insisted on using.  The whole thing conjures up an image in my mind of a comic strip panel where some square-jawed scientist wearing a lab coat and glasses is gritting his teeth in frustration amid his beakers and burners because he can't figure out the answer.  Meanwhile, Sally's in the background watching him with a sly grin because the silly man doesn't realize that the answer is "love."  Yep, you don't hear much about it these days.  I think most people have come to realize that the idea is pretty insulting to everyone involved.  It makes men look like near-sighted imbeciles, completely insensitive to human emotions, and it makes women look like dizzy-headed moon children who leave all that "big brain stuff" to the fellas.  It's the product of a different era.  

Yet, however defunct the concept of "female intuition" may be, I believe that there is another intuition, a male intuition, that never gets mentioned and it seems no one is even aware it exists.  At least, no one is consciously aware that exists.  I believe that all men are sub-consciously aware of it.  It's just never been given a name or brought to their attention, but I'm willing to bet that any man reading this will recognize what I'm talking about immediately.  It's just never discussed openly.  It would have been just as alien and incomprehensible to speak of it sixty years ago as it is to speak of female intuition today.  But times have changed.  Women are no longer considered scatter-brained, silly little creatures, and men are no longer considered computers made of meat.   It's not as inconceivable as it once was to think that men may have an intuition of their own.

So what is this male intuition?  I believe that all men, within minutes of encountering another man, are able to immediately sense whether that man is more or less of a man than they are.  It's hard to precisely define what I mean by "more or less of a man."  It's a complex sum of strength, courage, intelligence, maturity, success, and so on, and yet the sense the man gets is not based on any direct evidence of any of these things in particular.  Before any of these facts are in, the man just somehow knows whether he's dealing with his superior or his inferior.  It is truly an intuition, and I know that I'm not the only one who senses it.  Once my eyes were open and I became consciously aware of it, I could see it all around me.  There is a subtext in all men's interactions with one another, that clearly implies that they sense it too.  They just aren't aware of it, and no one ever talks about it.  

Now, it would be easy to mistake what I'm talking about for simple macho posturing.  It's true that macho posturing may be involved, and men often resort to it when they're uncomfortable with their place in the system and with what their intuition is telling them.  They struggle in vain to prove to everyone that they're a man, but the other men aren't fooled because their intuition tells them otherwise.  In the end, macho posturing is only the most farcical and pathetic reaction to the intuition, and nearly all men are guilty of it at one moment or another in their lives.  However, the posturing is only a reaction to and by-product of the intuition.  The two are not one in the same.  Because of the spectacle it creates, people focus on it as though it were the exclusive modus operandi of male relations.  But the intuition shouldn't be blamed for the posturing.  The posturing is only one possible reaction among countless other more subtle shades of interaction.

No, it's not all about proving you're the biggest man in the room.  Some men have wised up and grown beyond these sort of schoolyard shenanigans.  They've come to implicitly realize that there is always going to be a bigger pond with a bigger fish in it, and they've come to accept that.  And yet, the intuition is still there, but these wiser men are willing to respect their superiors when they encounter them, rather than feeling the need to constantly challenge them for the rule of the cave.  Their response in far more sober and reasonable, but if you look closely, you can see they sense it too.

It seems that this stratified order of things is hard-wired into us.  Institutions such as the military openly use as it as model for rank and the chain of command.  Of course, it's hard to say whether we're conditioned to relate to each other this way by the institutions, or whether the institutions are designed around something primal and innate in our manner of relating.  I tend to think it's the latter.  This male intuition seems to be such a universal thing.  It cuts across all levels of society.  You can see it clearly at work in men who have absolutely no use for the concept of rank, but they still respond and relate through this intuition.  It disregards issues of age, race, or creed.  It is a sense, larger than ourselves, and though you see men struggle with it, fight it, and try their hardest to deny it, they still just seem to know.  There is a long, thin line of manhood.  Some men stand ahead of you in that line, and some are behind, and somehow you just know where you stand in that line.