Manhood

Miami. -- Mike Tyson scowled from behind the iron bars, his face tight with menace. You got the sense that your safety was an illusion, your faith in the power of iron sorely misplaced. ''I'll be back,'' he said. You shuddered and had no doubt that he would.That T-shirt seemed to be selling at a brisk pace when I saw it on a street vendor's table in Harlem a couple of years ago. Most of the buyers, not surprisingly, were young, black and male.Now the T-shirt's prophecy is about to come true.

Mick Benham and his friends were supposed to be roughing it this weekend - just a campfire and a couple of tents high up on a Pennsylvania mountain. "It's testing your manhood, that kind of thing," he says of the yearly winter camping trips. But there's testing your manhood and then there's testing your manhood. Benham can handle no running water and below-freezing temperatures, but missing tonight's Ravens playoff game is one sacrifice that he's not willing to make. "I'll have my Ravens flag flying high upon the mountaintop Saturday," the 29-year-old computer technician promises, even if that means roughing it a little less than tradition would normally dictate.

PLEASE deliver a message from me to all those young men involved in stealing cars," Myra Green said. "Tell them to find something more constructive to do with their time."

Mick Benham and his friends were supposed to be roughing it this weekend -- just a campfire and a couple of tents high up on a Pennsylvania mountain. "It's testing your manhood, that kind of thing," he says of the yearly winter camping trips. But there's testing your manhood and then there's testing your manhood. Benham can handle no running water and below-freezing temperatures, but missing Saturday's Ravens playoff game is one sacrifice that he's not willing to make. Benham is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of Ravens fans tweaking their Saturday night plans so they'll be able to follow the game.

The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family, By Walt Harrington. Atlantic Monthly Press. 192 pages. $23. Walt Harrington was an effete Washington Post reporter shamelessly driven to manicures, Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir, $700 Tallia suits, fine art and antique collectibles. He was an apparent newsroom toady and know-it-all. A man of ample ambitions and certain talent. The story of how he managed to transcend his paltry manhood through rabbit hunting with his working class father-in-law could either be a comic romp or sentimental rubbish.

IT WASN'T that a young man had been killed that made me stop. The unfortunate truth, after all, is that young men are frequently killed. So, in itself, the shooting of 20-year-old Ibrahim Khoury in Coral Gables, Fla., seemed sadly ... ordinary. No, the thing that demanded a double take was the professed reason he was killed. According to a story published Feb. 6 in The Miami Herald, Mr. Khoury was an altar boy and engineering student who dealt pot on the side. Miami-Dade police say he and his cousin, George Khoury, had the misfortune to encounter three prospective customers, all teen-agers, who had no intention of paying.

AMERICAN MANHOOD. E. Anthony Rotundo.Basic Books. 382 pages. $25. When the Declaration of Independence asserted that all men were created equal, it failed to foresee that the new nation it brought into being would also re-create them -- not always equally -- every generation or so, as times changed and new needs arose.Historian E. Anthony Rotundo shows this truth to have been especially self-evident in sexual politics throughout American history. "Manliness is a human invention," he says.

DURHAM, N.C. -- St. Philip's is the type of church where worshipers expect something historic to happen. A narrow, Neo-Gothic sanctuary with lustrous stained glass windows, hard wood pews and outsized stone columns, it's the perfect setting for the proper Episcopal parish.It is here that "Rite 13: A Celebration of the Gift and Challenge of Womanhood and Manhood" has taken place several times. On a warm spring morning, the knowledge of another occasion stirs the sultry air with anticipation.

The president of the United States went to San Antonio last week to talk about winning the war against drugs. Bad move. He should have come to Baltimore to learn how we're losing it.In San Antonio, where the president met with Latin American leaders, he offered much grand talk of stopping drugs at the border and ridding the American cities of this modern plague.Such humor! Such levity!Such empty talk.Did the president of the United States think no one was paying attention?In Baltimore, the president could have sat in Judge John Hargrove's courtroom at the U.S. Court House on Lombard Street, and heard talk of amoral men swallowing heroin in balloons, and imaginary voodoo witch doctors improving your manhood, and he'd have realized a simple truth he has never been frank enough to mention in public:In the great American war on drugs, drugs are winning.

LISTEN, man, killing a man won't cool you off. Crushing a skull or slitting a throat won't make you a man or bring you any cool comfort. Not if you're sane.So listen:Before you commit an act you think makes you a man, an act you think marks you clearly in the minds of those who question your manhood, consider two things. First, you are searching for something you will never be able to identify if you think foolish acts of fear-thickened violence have anything to do with what manhood is about.

It's a safe bet Ta-Nehisi Coates' father no longer thinks he's "a disgrace to the family name." But 16 years ago, that's exactly what Paul Coates told his fourth-oldest son. At the time, Ta-Nehisi was a junior at Polytechnic Institute. It was near the end of the school year. Ta-Nehisi struggled at the elite Baltimore school his first two years there, failing three courses when he was a freshman and three more when he was a sophomore. Ta-Nehisi was given a reprieve - you know, the kind that Baltimore schools Chief Executive Officer Andres Alonso thinks schools like Poly and City College and Western aren't giving to failing students - and allowed to return.

The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family, By Walt Harrington. Atlantic Monthly Press. 192 pages. $23. Walt Harrington was an effete Washington Post reporter shamelessly driven to manicures, Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir, $700 Tallia suits, fine art and antique collectibles. He was an apparent newsroom toady and know-it-all. A man of ample ambitions and certain talent. The story of how he managed to transcend his paltry manhood through rabbit hunting with his working class father-in-law could either be a comic romp or sentimental rubbish.

IT WASN'T that a young man had been killed that made me stop. The unfortunate truth, after all, is that young men are frequently killed. So, in itself, the shooting of 20-year-old Ibrahim Khoury in Coral Gables, Fla., seemed sadly ... ordinary. No, the thing that demanded a double take was the professed reason he was killed. According to a story published Feb. 6 in The Miami Herald, Mr. Khoury was an altar boy and engineering student who dealt pot on the side. Miami-Dade police say he and his cousin, George Khoury, had the misfortune to encounter three prospective customers, all teen-agers, who had no intention of paying.

BOSTON - There is the moment in Kate & Leopold when the 19th-century hero comes galloping after the 21st-century damsel in distress. He is, mind you, mounted on a white charger that had to be unhitched from a horse carriage. Sitting atop this unlikely steed, Leopold, Duke of Albany circa 1876, literally sweeps Kate, marketing researcher circa 2001, off her feet in the middle of Central Park. He then corners the purse-snatcher and returns the prize to the lady as if it were a handkerchief in a tournament.

In recent years, America's culture wars have pivoted significantly on queers. Sept. 11 found Rev. Jerry Falwell, and his compatriot Rev. Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition, lamenting on the nationally televised 700 Club that God's wrath over lesbians and gays and their "alternative lifestyle" had brought about the attacks. Gay men and lesbians may be here and queer, but it's clear from the rise in hate crimes and rush to pass legislation outlawing queer marriages, adoptions and induction into the military, that most Americans simply can't get used to it. A spate of recent books examine the roots of homophobia, explore the queer civil rights movement and elucidate just how much U.S. popular culture has a decidedly queer edge.

Fight Club," David Fincher's explosively violent and compulsively watchable rumination on the emasculated state of modern manhood, wants men to know that it feels their pain.Combining the chicly distressed look and brutality of Fincher's "Seven" with the head trips of his next film, "The Game," "Fight Club" just might be a tentative foray into maturity on the part of the MTV-trained director. He has made a clever and surprisingly nuanced meditation on the clash of economics, consumer fetishism and ritual tribal aggression -- think of Susan Faludi's "Stiffed" on steroids.

Mick Benham and his friends were supposed to be roughing it this weekend -- just a campfire and a couple of tents high up on a Pennsylvania mountain. "It's testing your manhood, that kind of thing," he says of the yearly winter camping trips. But there's testing your manhood and then there's testing your manhood. Benham can handle no running water and below-freezing temperatures, but missing Saturday's Ravens playoff game is one sacrifice that he's not willing to make. Benham is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of Ravens fans tweaking their Saturday night plans so they'll be able to follow the game.

LONDON -- These are tough times for the pride of British manhood.France's new female prime minister thinks men on this side of the Channel are not interested in women. Indeed, she has even suggested that one in four may be gay.This has touched a sensitive nerve in a country whose men endured for years the image-sapping success of one of the London stage's longest-running farces -- "No Sex, Please, We're British."If all this were not enough to make the Englishman's stiff upper lip quiver, the current British edition of Esquire magazine reports that Englishwomen regard their partners' romantic "repertoire" as "hopeless."

The rabbit broke from the clump of scrub at my father's feet -- a scrambling streak of brown against a grassy backdrop of mottled greens and umber. Startled, my 11-year-old heart leaped, and I froze with a shotgun in my hands.In a smooth arc, my dad drew his .22-caliber revolver from its holster and fired a single shot that caught the rabbit on the fly and sent it tumbling into a heap of stew meat. One shot. At a range of 10 yards. With a pistol, no less."Better to miss than not shoot at all," he said, as he holstered the gun. "You think about it too long, and the chance will be gone."

SO WE'RE down the street at a neighbor's backyard barbecue a couple of weeks ago when my wife is asked to leave. It's our son who does the asking.Seems girls are around and, well, you know how it is: No self-respecting guy can make a move on the babes if his mother is watching. So Mom, would you mind going home before someone sees us talking and thinks we're related? Thanks, Mom.Sensitivity even seals the deal with a kiss on the cheek.Behind him, Marilyn looks as if her mouth just sprung a hinge.