When Men Were Men

I know I haven't blogged in a while but I found this on a hard drive. I threw it together a few weeks ago and I think it's high time I posted it.

I have one of the great men of the world by my side. When something goes cosmically wrong, he’s there to do what I need him to. In the spirit of candor and not making me seem like a release crazed fangirl, it seems necessary to say that he is still a man and the very nature of that provides that he doesn’t always say just the right things and that, from time to time, what I need may be neglected in the onslaught of day to day living or major crisis, but what makes him one of the great men of the world is that the minute I can scrounge up the courage to say something about it, my woes end – at least, those one’s about the whole “neglected/abandoned” issue, anyway.

So why the post? Well, because I’m worried about the small furry creatures from Alpha-Centauri, that’s why. Can they be small furry creatures from Alpha-Centauri when the men of the good earth have forgotten what they’re doing?

I have a friend who shall remain nameless but whom, I suspect, agrees with me wholeheartedly when I wander into the local Kohl’s department store to find a pair of floral – floral – shorts hanging, not in the 95 year old woman’s petite department, but in the men’s department. And not only are they floral –they are not that big kitschy Hawaiian floral, they are a tiny, minute, country nursery wallpaper floral. And – they’re purple. Well, not he whole shorts, but the flowers are. It should be noted that, at this point, I made my real man get his cell phone out and capture the images with his camera for all the ages to see so that, someday, when my brother’s children’s children ask where babies come from and I can legitimately say “laboratories,” I have some explanation as to why.

I don’t like my men all Brokeback Mountain-y. I never have, I probably never will. True, the notion of having a man who doesn’t put on navy pants, black shoes, white socks and a brown belt does appeal to me on some level but women have, for years, guided their husbands, significant others, children and passers by on the street to the right tie, the right shoes, and thrown away or hidden more bad clothing combinations than the human mind can comprehend. I’m all for progress, don’t get me wrong, but is the progress really leading us toward an amorphous semi-gay male society that requires them to get manicures.

You’re laughing right now like you think I’m kidding.

I’m not.

In the ultimate of ironies, as I sit in a room with a truly sensitive individual, I’m forced to admit that the traditional TV notion of a sensitive man – a Prince Charming – doesn’t appeal to me on any level. I don’t want a man who cries at the drop of a hat, though, I don’t mind if he does when something is really really wrong. While, yes, it is nice to get an articulate response rather than a grunt in response to the perfectly reasonable question of “What’s eating you, Gilbert?” I wouldn’t trade it at the expense of some neo-sexy man who never wears gym socks with dress shoes, knows how to make salmon puffs and cries at chick flicks.

If women are still attracted to all of the wrong men, why, then, do these ultra-sensitive males flourish in so much as they do. So help me god I’d leave a man in a pink shirt unless he was wearing it in an ironic sense and I may not be in the Milwaukee’s Best Beer Commercial demographic of males between the age of 30 and 45 but, fuck it, I would like to see a giant metal can squash the next man I see dressed in matching gay-ass outfits with his supposed girlfriend/wife. Once in a while, you’re both bound to wear the same color – or he wears a tie that has a hint of the color that appears in your dress – but fuck it, I went to a wedding the other day (don’t even get me started on that unholy union) and the groom was wearing a lavender bow tie. Now, I know it was the wedding he never thought he’d have and his bride-to-be was probably drunk seeing as she just reached legal drinking age, but have some balls and put your foot down on Tinky-Winky accessories.

Is it possible that we’ve castrated our own men by our inability to define what it is that we, as women, really want? Men are and always have been notoriously unable to read our minds – pesky thing, that is, isn’t it? And yet women around the world screamed for 15 years on television, in print and at their book club meetings that all they wanted was a more sensitive man and now they’re falling down all around you and no one wants them for long. Sure, women play with them. They get out of their 6 month, on again off again relationship with the local unavailable asshole and they fall into the arms of some would-be gay man who, I sincerely hope, is just a real man in disguise because he gets all of the rebound play and after 6 months with him, they throw him aside, crushing his spirit and turning him off to relationships for years (or turning him into afor mentioned unavailable asshole) because a similarly “wrong” guy walked by looking like he could snap you in half with sheer force of will.

Before I go any further, I have to insert a miniature tirade called “stop sleeping with the crazy girl.” There are women out there who I cannot figure out. Yes, I am a woman, I have tits and a vagina and I don’t understand them. There are women who don’t find it laughable when a man pulls out a chair, but rather, would melt. Alternately, there are women who would hit you for it, rather than chuckle quietly to themselves and find you adorable. Most generally, the former are delusional and the latter have low self-esteem and just don’t know it yet. So now that I’ve imparted just how much I don’t know what I’m talking about :P

To this conclusion I come – men, we don’t know what we want. Well, okay, some of us are pretty sure we do but, for the most part, we don’t. My theory is that what women want resides somewhere in the middle. We want you to be a man – even the crazy feminist, future bull dykes of the world want you to be a man – we want you to take the heavy grocery bags out of our hands once in a while and we like it when you open jars during the football game (or, in my case, shuttle launch) without being asked or grumbling about it. Personally, I find it cheesy beyond repair when someone offers to pull out a chair for me – even if he is the waiter – and I swear should any man ever write me a song I will puncture my own ear drums because I have excellent self-preservation instincts, but we really like the jar thing.

Women want to feel cared for – they want to feel like they’re loved, appreciated and important – yes, that’s right, more important than your sporting event and, most crucially, more important than your mother – because she’s probably really mean to us when you’re not looking. But while we want to feel loved and cared for, deep down, and no matter how much we may protest publicly, most women like to be objectified once in a while as well – some, somewhat more than others.

Relationships are a give and take thing and the notion that you should only give as good as you get is unfair and ill-advised. Men aren’t as easy as women say they are – at least, not the ones they really want. Men are a puzzle to us as much as we are to them. Yes, in a lot of cases, you can fix any problem, at least temporarily, with a blowjob – but get yourself the right woman and you can fix most of her problems with an orgasm as well. (Get yourself the perfect woman and you can probably fix her problems with a blowjob too :P) We would like to fantasize about men being simple creatures that you can pat on the head and send out the door and sometimes they are, but the notion that the man in your life doesn’t need some emotional care as well is dead wrong. True, the care they need might not come in a form you recognize. They probably don’t need you to listen quite as often as you need them to, but once in a while, they may need someone to listen – and maybe it isn’t to their problems, maybe it’s to their successes. I’m not saying watch a football game and pretend to be interested every Sunday afternoon – I’m saying, don’t sit in the house and bitch about the fact that he’s watching it, and don’t be mad at him for not loving all of the things you’re into. So you’re an actress on the weekends, probably a bad one, but what the hell – there’s nothing wrong with expecting your man to come to the milestone evenings – opening night, the day the guy from the New York Times is there and the closing show and, you know what, if he bitches about it to you, he’s probably being a bit of a jerk and, if it bothers you, you should tell him so…just, not quite like that. It’s just not fair to expect that if you don’t expect yourself to treat him and his interests the same way.