I think most of you will have read Hemingway or have heard of him. He was a great writer in the 20th century, and he was a man. His main characters always lived by the "code"; which revolved around strength, courage, independence and grace under pressure. He followed the code in his own life as well. At the time, he was a celebrated author, but over the last few decades people have been trying to bury his works by ruining his image. Women and weak men are afraid of the truly masculine man, and want to convince themselves and young men who may have some ambition that there is no such thing as masculinity.

I just read this article on the Washington Post trying to paint Hemingway in a ridiculously negative light. Here it is. A journalist is giving a review of a book about Hemingway written by some woman. The book attempts to mock Hemingway and make him look like an insecure pussy, and the journalist fully agrees with her. I really want you guys to read the article as it's not long, but I'll quote some of it:

"To encounter Hemingway as an adult was to be faced with a man whose appetite for supposedly masculine pursuits was so assiduously cultivated as to border on parody. He liked to shadowbox while walking down the street. He would routinely chivy his friends into the ring in order to engage in tests of strength. He developed obsessions with bullfighting, hunting, heroism, warfare, bodily exudations (blood being a particular favorite). He nursed a lifelong fear of being thought gay. He could be cruel and violent to women."

"She quotes Zelda Fitzgerald to the effect that everybody regarded him as self-evidently "bogus." "Nobody," said Zelda, "is as male as all that." And she was right. In private, as Dearborn shows, Hemingway would talk with his wives about his desire to transgress conventional gender boundaries — about his wish to be their girls. And they would sometimes allow him to explore the impulse"

What they are trying to do is ruin Hemingway's image as a masculine icon, and therefore, make masculinity seem silly and fake in our eyes. They are saying that Hemingway was a weak man just like everybody else, and that all his masculine behaviour and courage were just a mask he wore to hide how weak he was. This makes women feel better, because a man that is truly masculine ruins their idea of gender equality. It also makes weak men feel better, because now they know that masculinity doesn't exist and they no longer have to feel inferior at men who are better than them. Instead, they can feel smugly superior in thinking that all masculine men are really just insecure pussies.

I'm not saying that Hemingway was the ideal man or anything like that. I never knew him and couldn't tell you whether or not he was always worried about being thought gay. The important thing is that people are worried that men will try to emulate his code and become masculine themselves, which poses a huge threat to modern society.