Recently, while out disc-golfing in a nearby state park, some friends and I came across a guy and his gal being professionally photographed. The couple would walk a few paces, fall into each others' arms, kiss, hug, and lean, generally acting in the manner of drunken fools with smiles plastered on their faces. Then, as we were kicking through the dry leaves trying to find our discs, the man got down on one knee, took the girl's left hand in his, and pretended to slide a ring onto her finger. I have never been married, I do not plan to ever get married, and I don't think much of the ordeal; therefore, I put my head down, kept walking, and ignored the love-fest going on up the hill. Two of my companions, however, an overweight man in his late thirties and his overweight son, upon seeing the man drop to one knee, began to moan and coo and aw, punctuating their girlish behavior by stopping in their tracks and applauding. The love-struck man then stood up and made it clear through a few brief words and hand gestures that he was not in the act of proposing and that he and his betrothed lass were merely having their pictures taken as if they were, which dampened my companions' spirits considerably. When, later, I asked the man and his son why they had applauded the lovers' actions, they said because they thought it was “Nice.”
At sometime in the past, I fell for the lie that I had to express my emotions out loud and show everyone my sensitive side, that my feelings were things that had to be expressed and talked about, that vulnerability was a masculine virtue. I have found the exact opposite to be true: the more I have tried to express my feelings, the less control I've had over them, and the more I've tried to show my sensitive side, the sooner my past girlfriends have left me. In part, I blame modern Western society's lack of manhood rituals for teaching boys how to become men, rituals in which their role in society is explained to them and the dos and don'ts of the self-respecting male are spelled out. I've had to try to figure these rules out for myself, stumbling blindly down one dead-end after the next; I wouldn't have minded being suspended from a tree by hooks looped under my pectoral muscles and beaten with buffalo femurs so long as, afterwards, my uncles had told me what was up. As far as why Western men have begun to act in the manner of women, research points, in part, to our increased exposure to plastics: we eat off them, heat them in microwaves, wear them, sleep in them, and add them to our soaps, poisoning our bodies in subtle yet powerful ways and causing our boy children's genitalia to shrink. In part I also blame our society's obesity rates, with expanding waistlines signaling men's bodies to increase estrogen production, Mother Nature cursing pear-shaped dudes to act as if they were women. (I have no problem with women, or with women acting womanly, only when men do the same.)
Whenever I see couples acting romantically and looking at each other with stars in their eyes, with hands tightly intertwined and cheeks flushing with excitement, I immediately think of Doug Stanhope's bit regarding the ultimate conclusion to every single such instance of foreplay, that being male ejaculation. All the chocolates in the world, and all the bunches of roses, all the time spent talking on the phone, and all the pronouncements such as “I miss you” and “I love you” lead to one thing: the man shooting his sperms into or onto the girl's body. (I am neither gay nor lesbian, and so I cannot really speak to homosexual liaisons.) Since getting in shape, simplifying my life, and putting myself through a number of manhood rituals, I have found it easier to reject the old ways and to replace them with ones that play to my inherent masculine strengths; next time, then, I'll skip the foreplay and go straight to sleep. Mahalo.
mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥
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