"The Art of Manliness"

Today while researching a bit about fire building, I stumbled upon a very informative and interesting webpage, "The Art of Manliness." Here I found several articles that are applicable to my macro research interests. Things that I knew we probably wouldn't have time to try, but that I still enjoyed reading about them with the possibility of pursuing them in the future. One of the articles I read, '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches,' included several obscure methods that I would've never thought of. My favorite was; filling a condom with water and using it to reflect the light of the sun.

Despite all of the cool things I learned, I thought the website was a bummer because of it's name. "The Art of Manliness" is pretty self explanatory for who it was meant to attract and because of the masculinity of it, it seems to exclude the entire female race. It makes me feel as if I didn't quite belong on the website, and that I was somehow being manly by reading it. I personally don't see myself as a manly girl at all, but rather, as a girl who enjoys adventure and ruggedness which is, unfortunately, stereotyped as a man's role. And just because I also like to wear dresses, doesn't mean that I can't fit into this category as well.