That's men for you - Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: Are you a man or a mouse? Personally, I tend towards the mouse end of the scale. With a few exceptions, I like to approach confrontation very slowly and preferably from a long way off. In some part of my mind I feel a bit guilty about this.
I'd quite like to be the John Wayne character who can take on anybody and anything and who, with the strength of his personality, let alone his six-shooter, can face down the enemy in double-quick time.
Why would I like to be that character? Because I would get my way more often? That's not it. I am quite convinced that having a good relationship with people will get you far more of what you want than throwing your weight around, unless you're in a weight-throwing competition.
I think it's because somewhere along the line I got, or was given, the impression that to be a real man you have to be a bit of a John Wayne and if you're not a bit of a John Wayne then you're not a real man. What are the characteristics of a real man? Well, if you are a real man:
You talk in a loud, manly voice.
You can drink a lot and it doesn't affect your judgment.
You make all the important decisions in the home.
You never let women boss you around.
You never let other men boss you around either unless they are also real men.
You boss your kids around.
You refuse to go to the doctor when you're sick.
If anybody wants a fight, you'll fight 'em, by God.
You never discuss your feelings unless you've been fatally wounded by the Apaches and are about to expire in the dust.
Your main emotional state is anger, though you'd never use a girlie word like emotional.
There's a gazillion other characteristics I could list but I still arrive at the sad fact that I am not a real man. Are you a real man? You know, I don't think you are because, to be honest, I don't think real men read articles like this. Worse, this whole page does not contain a single race card, football result or news item about boxing.
Actually, look around you. How many John Waynes do you see out there? Oh, there are some but I'll bet they are in a tiny minority. Most of the men out there are not real men at all. They're going to work and trying to get along with their wives and kids or their girlfriends and they'd rather not get into a fight than get into one.
And I bet some of them feel a little twinge of guilt about it all, now and then. They see the guy swaggering around with the baseball cap, the number two haircut, the T-shirt and the beer belly and they suddenly feel inadequate.
If I may digress, where do these guys learn to swagger? Is there some kind of course you can take where they teach you how to do that? Is it the same course where real girls learn to sashay along the street?
It's all a con, isn't it? Real men, as portrayed over many decades by Hollywood, are not representative of their gender at all. Instead they are representative of an idea about men that got passed down to us but was actually never true.
And who knows, maybe some of the real men would like to be able to drop the act, walk normally and let someone else be strong some of the time. After all, even the real man's real man, Tony Soprano, is going to a counsellor.
So perhaps those of us, ie the majority, who are not real men, should shrug off all this nonsense and assert our right to be as we are without feeling a need to be John Wayne or Tony Soprano or Desperate Dan.
Right, that's it, I'm outta here. Gotta go wrestle a steer to the ground.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.