I was in a community college business law class with a near-senile, grouchy old professor of a woman. She could barely control the class, and in one of our fits of gab, we got into one of the most memorable discussions of my life: what being a man has traditionally meant for the last 1500+ years in western society versus what being a man means today.

Nearly everyone had an opinion on this. You had your liberal females and males (betas, as many here would call them) saying that men have improved, even evolved since the archaic days of the 1950s pinstriped Company Man. You had hardliners stirring the pot as well, with hard-hitting lines like "Feminism castrated men" and "women need to accept that we are not equal in function". Beyond them, a conspiracy theorist or two in the room, blaming fast food, preservatives and technology for capping our testosterone production and raising our estrogen output.

A unique example has stayed with me until this day, though. A burly gentleman with a backwards baseball cap clears his throat and says, "After the Second World War, soldiers were clamoring to be sent to Korea, ready to leave their newborns and marriages to fight for America again. Thirty years later, the vets that returned from Vietnam could barely hold themselves together in everyday life, let alone think about fighting again."

For you history buffs out there, the sociopolitical context explaining this is not lost on me. What captured my mind is not the statement itself, but rather the expectation and standard at its core: Men must rise to the occasion and do regardless of what they feel.

There it is: Feelings. The first chapter in man's search for masculinity.

There was a memorable scene in Mad Men where the dapper Don Draper and his boss, Roger Sterling are having a midday drink with one another. Roger pours a drink and complains about the generation he was born into. "Our fathers used to drink because it was fun," he said. "They weren't licking at wounds that weren't there."

"Yeah," Draper quips, "That was a generation of shaky hands, though."

At some point between then and now, the inhibition men had in talking about their feelings vanished. It became acceptable after a few beers late at night for two best buds to talk over cigarettes about how the wife was acting up, or how the old man was sick, or even how money may have been tight.

Vietnam played its part: it was one of the first mass-scale encounters the American public had with mental illness. People realized that repressed feelings and trauma changed something in a man, and that he needed to talk about it instead of drinking himself sick over it.

Soon the tolerance spread from vets to men and children in general. Every 70s and 80s sitcom examined how a man felt - how Charles felt while being in charge, how Sam felt after his pitching career while he ran his bar, how Archie felt about his draft-dodging son in law and the state of masculinity in decay around him.

TV taught us men having and exploring feelings was a desirable thing, that it was what every woman longed for with every fiber of her being.

American prosperity in the 1990s allowed most men to have jobs, raise families, and let the wife decide whether or not she wanted to work (more on that another day).

Today, men share enough to give our forebears a collective heart attack. "You're talking to other men about how your dick doesn't stay hard? You sissy!"

A man can cry in public and not go home and contemplate a bullet through the temple.

Have we become less manly for talking about feelings? Or were our ancestors narrow-minded and ignorant, concerned so much with image and perception that they hurt themselves with self-denial?

At what point does sharing your feelings make you a weak, deplorable sissy half-man or an enlightened 21st century alpha?

It's time that men stop being afraid to ask these questions and start working them out on a grand scale. We need to collectively nod in agreeement to what being a man is all about; where the sissy ends and the man begins.

Let's not let the noise around us, whether it's feminism or social justice campaigns, guilt us into shrinking away from reclaiming masculinity so that our boys can grow into strong, self-aware and principled men.