Whither Men?

My wife is apolitical. That’s good, I suppose, because it’s not a source of conflict. She’s simply not interested in politics, and I’m passionately interested. We seldom discuss it but when we do, she can offer insights I cannot see. Once in a while, I’ll call her into the room when someone is speaking on television. I’ll ask her to watch him or her for a few minutes and then tell me what she thinks. I’m not so interested in her thoughts on what the person is saying as much as what she thinks of the man or woman as a person. That’s one of the things my wife is good at: getting clues about what people are like. Never having seen the person before, she’ll suggest personality traits he or she possesses which later turn out to be right on the money. I’ve learned to trust my wife’s instincts about these things. She’s seldom wrong.

Today’s politics is tomorrow’s history. I watch what’s happening now and study what’s occurred throughout the ages. I want to understand it all. I never will, of course, but I won’t give up trying.

I’m the one who picks the movies we rent from Netflix and they include many documentaries and historical fiction because I’m a history teacher. War movies and westerns don’t interest her, but sometimes she’ll watch a film made from an historical novel if it shows good character development. During battle scenes, she’ll often comment about how brutal men are, saying things like, “They’re the ones who start wars. Women don’t do that.”

She’s right, of course, but it bothers me to hear it. Sometimes I take it personally as a representative of manhood, especially if I identify with the character who is fighting in whatever film we’re watching. I think, what choice does he have? The guy finds himself living in a certain time and place, and circumstances pull him into conflict. He’s faced with choices ranging from bad to worse and does what he thinks is right, or whatever is the least wrong. Most often, a man uses violence after another man or group of men crowd him in some way or threaten his family, or his community, or his way of life, or his principles, and he’s forced to do brutal things. Even if he was a gentle, sensitive person beforehand, the circumstances he must work through change him.

Those are my rationalizations at least. Men are brutal, or at least capable of brutality if it becomes necessary. Maybe it’s testosterone. Maybe it’s that Y chromosome. Maybe there’s something wrong with us. Maybe. It has to be considered. If we believe we evolved into the kind of men we are, should we be trying to evolve into some other form of male human who isn’t as prone to violence? Or would that go against our nature and precipitate even more problems? I see western culture attempting to shift away from a martial approach to aggression and toward a conciliatory one and it makes me uneasy. My instinct tells me, strongly, that this is not the way to be. We don’t need any more metrosexuals. We need more warriors. We need a citizenry which recognizes that our country needs warriors and values them.

For example, I’m seeing more “War is not the answer” bumper stickers. I’d like to ask drivers of cars adorned thus: “What is the question?” For some questions, war is most definitely the answer. If the question is: What should we do about several million Radical Muslims who want to make the world Muslim and force us all to live under Sharia law? My answer is: Are you kidding? What if they’re dying to kill us the way they did on September 11th? My reaction is: Kick Radical Muslim ass. Don’t stop kicking until they surrender unconditionally. Root them out from wherever they’re hiding and kill them. After London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, Gaza, why is anyone still asking the question?

Over Christmas break, I spent time with several young American warriors. They’re former students, sons of friends, and relatives. They know who our enemy is, they know what has to be done, and they’re willing to risk their lives to do it - all for our sake. It troubles me that we’re becoming a country that doesn’t appreciate them enough. A majority of Americans like this just elected a new president who is about to take over as commander-in-chief. He’s a great talker, but talk is cheap. Does he have what it takes to lead these marvelous young men and thousands of others like them? I’m not confident that he does.

Vice president-elect Joe Biden told us Barack Obama will be tested by our enemies in the first six months. I have little doubt about that. Then he said: “[W]e're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.”

Based on what I’ve heard those two guys say on the campaign trail, I believe him. It hasn’t ever been apparent to me that they’re right, and I don’t really expect that to change, but I’ll wait and see.

Old Clothes

“Don’t go outside until you put on your old clothes,” my mother would say to me each day after school. I would take off my school uniform of navy-blue pants, white shirt and blue tie with the letters “SWS” for Saint William’s School arranged diagonally on it, then put on my “old clothes.” New clothes were for school and for church. Old clothes were for playing and there was a special transformation to be felt putting them on. I would cease being a student who had to say, “Yes, sister,” and “No, sister,” and became just a kid who could say or do anything that came to mind. The old clothes fit better because they had worn into my body over time. If I got them dirty, that was okay. If I got a little tear in a shirt or some pants, no one would get excited. They could be easily patched or sewn up.

It’s much the same today. If I get home from school early enough and still have time to do something, I love to get into my old clothes. On weekends and on days off, I don’t have to dress up at all. Except for an awkward period of time as a teenager, fashion hasn’t been important to me. I never cared much what I looked like so long as I was warm and dry, and it’s the same today. Occasionally it has annoyed my wife, since she has to be seen in public with me. She tries sometimes to buy me new clothes hoping I would give up the old, comfortable ones, but that doesn’t work. I don’t want to embarrass her when we go out, so I’ll usually change if she asks me to. I’ve had to learn that the hard way though because, if I wore an old shirt too much or an old pair of boots, she might try to throw them out when I wasn’t looking. More than once I found them in the trash just in time to salvage them. It’s a good thing it’s my job to go to the dump.

Starting out with a young family, I had to do my own mechanical work and the vehicles I drove often needed it. I always had a tool box with me and if I had on teacher clothes or socializing clothes when something broke, it added to the stress when I had to open the hood to pull on some linkage or slide underneath and wire up an exhaust pipe. I had to not only fix whatever it was, but I had to avoid getting grease on my clothes while doing it. I also had projects to work on nearly every day after getting home from my regular job, and it took extra time to change first before going outside and climbing a ladder or working on the woodpile, or whatever else needed doing.

You won’t see them too often around Lovell in the wintertime, but I’ve known some “metrosexual” types. That’s a relatively new word for males who are heterosexual, but like homosexuals, they are inordinately concerned about their appearance. You can spot them once in a while on the weekends or during the summer. They try to blend in, but can be easy to pick out by their haircuts or their new LL Bean outfits. They’re what novelist Robert Parker would call “rural chick.” They’re scarce in Oxford County, Maine but quite numerous in the Portland area or in North Conway.

Here in Oxford County, the native men are mostly what you might call the “hickosexual” type. That’s a brand-new word because I just made it up. They’re difficult to describe exactly, but you know them when you see them. Hickosexuals might pay attention to the appearance of their pickup trucks or their motorcycles or snowmobiles, but not to their clothing or their haircuts. They’re especially solicitous of their tools, their hunting rifles, fishing equipment, bass boats, or their televisions sets, but not their clothing or their personal appearance. In that sense, they’re the antithesis of the metrosexuals who visit the region periodically.

Hickosexuals are interested in how things work. They know how to make things and fix things and they’re seldom very far away from the tools needed to do so. Their clothes - especially the pants - bear evidence of past jobs, like traces of paint or stubborn stains which remain after repeated washings. They’re clean in the mind of the hickosexual, though they may not appear so to an objective observer. If they’ve been washed and they smell clean, they are clean, even if they’re stained. No article of clothing is discarded until it’s badly ripped and the fabric is so thin that repair is not longer possible, and neither the Salvation Army nor the Goodwill will accept it.

Surprisingly, the hickosexual look has become fashionable. Stores patronized by metrosexuals are marketing hickosexual styles like partially worn pants and hats, and lately even pre-stained jeans. They’re new clothes, but they’re made to look like they’re old clothes. They’re carefully designed to make the metrosexual wearer appear as though, like the hickosexual, he doesn’t care about his appearance.

First published January, 2005