Manliness, Metrosexuals, Feminism, and Gender

As you can tell from the title this post is going to be all about Sex and Sexual relations in Modern America, as I see them.

And yeah, I expect it might raise some hackles.

Let me be Blunt, I'm a Man. I love being a Man. In point of Fact every time I see my wife waxing, plucking, manicuring, or trying to walk in a particularly high pair of heels, I thank God Almighty I was born with a pair.

Hell every day starts out with a reminder of why I'm so lucky to be a Man. While my wife wakes up a good 45 minutes before I do, we finish getting ready about the same time. She showers, carefully chooses her clothes, puts on her make-up, changes her clothes, washes off her make-up, changes her clothes again, puts on different make-up, does her hair, etc, etc. Me? I wake up, take care of the three S's, throw on whatever clothes I see first, and go.

It takes her about an hour,while I have my morning routine down to about 7 minutes. Literally. (Shaving, showering and brushing my teeth all at the same time helps)

In most things, I have it good. I'm not expected to care about fashion, or style, I don't have to "look pretty", or wear labels. I don't have to pluck, primp, or in general worry about my appearance beyond not having BO, and running a comb through my hair once a month. Even better, unless I'm at work where I have to wear a suit, I can get away with jeans and a T in damn near every situation.

As you might can tell, I love it. I really really do.

Which is why I have so much trouble understanding the whole "metrosexual" trend. Seriously, why in the hell would a guy even want to keep track of fashions, or use lotions, or pluck his eyebrows, or "accessorise"? What man in his right mind would voluntarily choose to adopt the most time consuming, annoying, expensive, and useless habits of a woman? It just doesn't make no sense y'know?

Now I have heard some say that metrosexuality is the logical reaction to feminism, after all if women can become more like men, then why can't men become more like women? And I guess if a guy really wants to be more feminine in his habits, well that's his God given right as an American. But why would he want to?

See now I understand why women wanted to dress more like men, that made sense. Bras look fairly uncomfortable, and most women look better without them anyway. (The ones still fighting the good fight against gravity anyway.) Dresses are a pain in the butt, as I learned on a trip to Scotland when a friend talked me into wearing a kilt after one too many single malts. High heels look great but can't possible be easy to walk in. I mean you take 90% of "women's clothes" and they all got one thing in common. They look good and hurt like hell.

But whats the payoff for the men? I mean guys lets face it, no matter how hard most of us work, no matter hos much we try, we're never gonna be as pretty as most ugly women, much less the beauties. Now I know there are exceptions, especially in Hollywood where the women are women and so are the men, but unless you're Leonardo DiCaprio you ain't got a chance. So why bother wasting you time looking for the latest fashions, Plucking your eyebrows, or getting a facial when you know damn well you're still going to be the same mutt you before you started? You can take my cousins pitbull, wash its coat, manicure its paws, and put it in a dress, and it'll still be a cross eyed freak of nature. And so will you most likely.

Now before any of you metrosexual fashionistas get your panties in a bunch I'll admit it ain't your fault. Its just the way god made us. Women are beautiful creatures, because they are made that way. They are soft, and feminine, and glow radiantly when they smile. And if you atheists out there need any proof that god exists and that he loves us just remember that those angelic creatures somehow manage to find us beer guzzling, gas passing, butt scratching, booger flicking, competitive belching, man apes attractive.

But men? Well hell, most of us look like a cross between Alley Oop and Frankensteins monster and no amount of primping is gonna change that. Its in our nature. Men are kinda like hammers, we may not be much to look at, but well get the job done. We weren't created to look good, we didn't evolve to be pretty, we evolved to go out and hunt down woolly mammoths with a sharpened stick, while our much prettier and smarter mates stayed home, watched the rug rats, and did the gardening.

Now I know I have probably pissed off a whole horde of feminists by now who are just aching to lecture me about how gender ain't nothing but a "societal construct" designed by the "patriarchy" to enable men to "oppress" the fairer sex. And I know they'll happily ignore millions of years of evolution and the existence of separate roles for each of the sexes in damn near every animal that ever lived to do it. But that's OK, I'm a man, I can take it. Its what we do, we endure, and we get the job done.

The way I see it, the problem is really two fold, on the one hand we got a society that's moving further and further away from accepting, much less admiring anything traditionally thought of as manly, like competition, physicality, violence, stoicism, uncompromising surety,or plain old fashioned will. On the other hand we have a society rewarding the many of the traits traditionally thought of as feminine, like compromise, persuasion, reflection, or simply complaining till you get what you want.

We live in a society where everyone has to be nurtured until they can't deal with adversity, shielded from competition so as not to hurt their self esteem, protected from the consequences of their own actions, guided by the hand so they won't make bad choices, and god forbid anything you say ever offends someone.

Now I don't pretend to have all the answers as to why this is happening, or even the first clue how to reverse it. And its not beyond the realm of possibility that I could be dead wrong in everything I say. But at the end of the day, I can't help but see a correlation between the number of men who go to salons to get their hair done as opposed to Barbers, the number of lawsuits rising like a flood tide for everything under the sun, and the fact that its considered offensive to suggest that maybe, just maybe, men and women ain't quite the same.

But then what the hell do I know, I'm just a caveman who was born a few thousand years too late.