The New Old Man

So, it appears that men are back. I guess they started to lose ground when Elton John became famous and were on the brink of extinction when “I feel” statements came into vogue. The securing (but by no means full acceptance: see below) of Women’s Lib further pushed men to the edges. Real men, that is. They were all but gone for a while in any group born later than 1970. What remained were dudes who hugged, dudes who talked about their inner pain, dudes who made sure she finished, dudes who drank white wine on hot days, dudes who cared. Y’know: sissies.

                It must have been hard for our gun-totin’, tobacco-spittin’, woman-in place puttin’, feelings-quellin’ grandfathers to stand. “We won the war for these pussies?”

                Much to my chagrin, and to the delight of our now-deceased Nazi-crushing forebears, in the past ten years, the man has come back. Well, a version of the man, anywho. It’s like a false front building. With biceps. And extremely tight t-shirts.

                These men coined the terms “hipster” and “metrosexual” because as far as they’re concerned, the only fashion statement you need is ten more bench presses and a five-gallon tub of creatine.

                The new men drive big trucks (usually with some brass balls hanging off the hitch they use to pull the trailer what hauls their garden tractor). They fight and drink and fuck and swear. They own guns. Their idea of a steady girlfriend is one who’s up for round two in the morning before she gets her skinny ass out of my pad.

                Via those social media, I’ve been watching the resurgence of men, and I’m not much for it. They are not specific to a generation, for the older men who once cried about always being picked last in T-ball are also joining the fray, taking advantage of a Brave New World like an RPG-dealer in post-Bush Iraq. However, far too many of these men with the values of my redneck paternal grandfather are half my age. I’ve been trying to figure why so many of our youth have been going backwards on the male scale of evolution, why so many of them feel that they need to buy a $50,000 compensation wagon for their twenty-minute commute, why they feel they need to treat women like masturbatory tools.  

                Now, as all great cultural shifts are, this one looks like a rebellion of sorts. We tell these kids to tell us how “that” makes them feel and look at the girl down the way as an equal in all categories (vive la similarité), and they clam up. Start using “twat” in regular conversation.

                I haven’t swung that way. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm, and drove a $400,000 piece of machinery before I owned my first car. I shot a gun (and killed gophers with it) before I was ten. I have been in fights that involved punching in the face. And yet, I think my mother is the most intelligent person I know, I write poetry, I wear Lululemon, and I drive a minivan. I drive the fuck outta that minivan. I have never felt the need to prove myself as a man. I mean, I think 50 Shades of Grey might be the best book I’ll never read and any dude who thinks otherwise needs to have his head looked into. I think a dude that owns a gun or an unnecessary half-ton seriously needs to know that it’s not the size that counts. Yes, I mean that.

I talk about my feelings with my wife. Feel good about doing it. Better yet, I listen to my wife talk about her feelings.

I saw a movie recently in which a typical Hollywood dude who had misplaced his shirt declared that “the battle of the sexes is over and we [men] won.” Seriously? That’s the corner he turned. I didn’t agree with this bouche-dag, with the writer who wrote that line for him, nor the inspiration of it. At least I wasn’t filled with a need to eat protein or “smack my bitch up.” I was distraught that anyone, ever, felt this sentiment needed to be expressed, that this huge backward step in human evolution needed to be declared, even lauded.

Modern man features absolutely nothing modern. Apparently, one too many viewings of (cause they ain’t reading it) Fight Club have led too many males to doubt themselves as such. Fellas, this is the wrong way to prove you’re a man, but a helluva way to prove you’re still monkeys.