The Shoe Fits

You Can Leave Your Hat On - Joe Cocker (mp3)
Make Me Bad - Korn with Robert Smith (mp3)

Twenty percent of 18 & 19 year-old girls -- one out of every five “young women” -- have already had anal sex. Before they reach 30, that number more than doubles to 46 percent. These numbers have skyrocketed compared to a similar 1992 study. This is just one of the many titillating slash disturbing factoids available for your curious eyes in “Hard Core,” a painfully honest look at our modern culture and its connection to modern pornography in The Atlantic.

If you’re too prudish to go see for yourself, you should be ashamed, because this article is an unflinchingly honest perspective on the very real world in which we all live, whether we want to or not, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

It’s written by a woman, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, and her particular take on it is unflinching and unapologetic. I don’t go around reading lots of feminist screeds on men or pornography, so it’s possible nothing Ms. Vargas-Cooper writes here is original. Some of it is either regrettably obvious or difficult to deny, but she brings an argument to the table that is ultimately fatalistic. Here’s her basic premises as best I can tell:

1. The notion of sexual equality is and has always been a ruse, because women and men rarely want the same thing from a sexual encounter.
2. The sex of long-term relationships is not the kind of sex  craved for in fantasies. It is, however, the kind of sex a woman ultimately wants. Because fantasy sex takes the experience “outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control." Which is a nice place to visit, but a terrible place to live.
3. Men cannot separate their aggression from their sexual appetite or fantasies.
4. The omnipresence of pornography in the 21st Century has mainstreamed unhealthy attitudes that used to be in the margins.
5. Almost all pornography is about what a woman will do, the lengths she will go, to please a man. The man is the simple, predictable piledriver; the woman is the Gumby doll bent a million ways.

The reason a man doesn’t write a blog about an article like this should be painfully obvious. I cannot possibly opine without the risk of revealing more of myself than anyone should care to know. Or, perhaps worse, the reader could misread or misinterpret, leaving me vulnerable to unfair judgment.

Suffice it to say that, when I personalize Ms. Vargas-Cooper’s observations, I strongly disagree with her. To be fair to me and her, she admits she’s generalizing. She's not talking ALL men, just most of 'em. And what I cannot deny is that her generalizations are accurate. Men, in general, are pigs. Men, in general, are aroused by their own aggression, their need to dominate, their need to debase another person to some degree. This was true in Medieval Times (the era, not necessarily the restaurant), and it’s true with the omnipresence of pornography.

Ultimately, we're all bigger pigs than we think we are. But guys like me can bask in our relative midget piglet status.

And then comes her kicker:

“Even the crudest of online porn captures only a slice of the less-than-uplifting aspects of the sexual experience, because porn not only eschews but actively conceals the singular truth: the most brutalizing aspects of sex are not physical.”

The often incomprehensible emotional stew underneath, a broth men seem much less interested in or willing to investigate, is where the real destruction boils and bubbles, toils and troubles.

Her concluding summary of Last Tango In Paris, a film I’ve only heard discussed but never got around to watching, left me grateful I’ve never watched it. But the metamorphosis of the Last Tango relationship as she describes it sounds powerfully similar to the relationship in 9 ½ Weeks, a movie I first watched when I was an utterly-clueless, virtually-unkissed 16-year-old.

That movie was my generation’s version of porn. It was the dirtiest naughtiest thing most of us could get our hands on with any regularity. I recorded it on on the back end of a VHS tape one night and titled the tape “A Clockwork Orange” because I knew neither of my parents would ever check that one out. I never made it to the end of that movie after the first viewing, because it got so dark, so uncomfortable, so wrong. It’s my memory of the last 20 minutes, seen only that one time, that keeps me from going back to rewatch it.

Even the Joe Cocker song "You Can Leave Your Hat On" -- a song I adored and still do -- is, ultimately, a song about a dude giving a gal lots of very specific orders and how to undress herself. Yeah, he's being fun and playful about it, but he's still giving the orders, and she's still taking them.


I suspect both movies ultimately get at the same point: men are pitiful pigs, clueless to the swill in which their heads swim, undeserving of any woman, much less the ones they somehow seduce.

Not all men, mind you. Just the ones who don’t read blogs.

[NOTE: I understand if no one wants to comment on this whole thing. God knows I'm sitting here wondering why I wrote any of this out in the first place. Or, if commenting under total anonymity makes things easier, then you have my blessing (although I'd like to know your gender).]

The Penis Mightier, Alex

Wild Man - Galactic (mp3)
Jackie Collins Existential Question Time - Manic Street Preachers (mp3)

I am a Man.

Statistically speaking, there seems to be a correlation between the power and prevalence of that thought in my mind and the likelihood I’m engaged or tempted to engage in behavior that is unwise or “bad.” And when I say “me,” I really mean “people with penises.”

Equally problematic is that my masculine self-awareness also correlates frequently with a higher sense of joy. And when I say “me,” well, you know.

Importantly, as I learned in high school, correlation does not mean causation.

A fascinating cover story in Newsweek, “Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity,” kinda forces me to think about and accept that I am a Man. (That they named Brad Pitt as the Paragon of 2010 Masculinity leaves me cold.)

In my job, I have read and studied hundreds of articles and books about gender differences, mostly surrounding issues of education, but not always. This might not make me an Expert on it, but I feel confident I’ve read and had the opportunity to study as much on these matters in the last 20 years as most masters and doctors specializing in the area.

Yet, in spite of all the knowledge and information crammed into my tiny male brain, at times I’m pretty sure I don’t know a damn thing about gender, about masculinity, about femininity, or about humanity.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with being A Man. What I mean is, were I the last man on earth, I would change the name so that I wasn’t required to become some Paragon of Manhood. It’s when I think about my masculinity that I am most sympathetic to black kids who are asked questions about race in class, as if they can knowledgeably and ably speak for their entire race of people merely from their own personal experience.

Am I a Bad Man? No. Well, mostly no.

Am I Bad at Being a Man? Hmm. That answer doesn’t come as easily.

The good news seems to be that masculinity works a lot like wisdom. Shakespeare said “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Or, if you prefer Lao Tzu: “The wise man knows he doesn't know. the fool doesn't know he doesn't know.”

When it comes to Being a Man, it seems to me that the more certain a man is that he is some paragon of manhood, some lighthouse of manhood showing the way for the rest of us, the less likely he’s the kind of man we as a society should aspire to clone or value too highly.

When I’m insecure, more often than not the issue of masculinity is at the core.

But my sense of my own masculinity is also central to many of the biggest highlights of my life, the moments about which I am most proud or meant the most to me. Wedding and becoming a father are the most obvious, but examples go much farther than that.

However, if I were splitting hairs, masculinity for me falls closer to the heart of insecurity than the heart of success.

This doesn’t make me some gender-neutral proponent. Yes, males and females are more similar than they are different, and by a big stretch, but certain differences are too stubborn and consistently present to fight or ignore, and I'm not just talking NooNoos and PeePees and BumBums. (Let the war of cited contradictory studies begin!)

Since anecdotes are more fun and ultimately more useless... my son fell in love with throwing, hitting, and tractors almost at birth, and anyone who knows me now or knew me at any time in my past can attest that these interests were not pushed on him by me through some orchestrated Make a Man Outta My Son agenda. Whereas both of my daughters would as infants fall asleep when I put them on my chest and rocked them, my son has only once in his entire life fallen asleep on my chest. My touch and presence soothed my daughters; it electrifies my son and always has.

What’s a lot more fun is to play along with Newsweek’s breakdown of current advertising campaigns and how they manipulate our perceptions of manhood. I might not agree with every last sentence, but Steve Tuttle is right on far more than he’s wrong! (Right: Everything he says about the highly disturbing Stayfree Internet videos; the Most Interesting Man in the World.... Wrong: Posting links to the Stayfree Internet videos.)



UPDATE: There is talk of colleges starting "Male Studies" departments to assist with the disenfranchisement of the apparently new-weaker sex in higher education and the workforce, according to a Newsweek update in their education section.

Bringin' The Wood

Bill Morrissey--"Birches" (mp3)
Neil Finn--"Weather With You (live)" (mp3)

I bought a load of wood yesterday, half a rick. It's one of the things that I like to do best--you know, stand outside on a cold, slightly rainy day, shooting the shit with the guy at the fruit stand who is both selling the wood and living the life that involves selling that wood.

For half a rick, I get to live that life briefly.

Bringing home the wood is among the manliest of endeavors, and that's probably why it's such a special event to those of us with suburban sensibilities.

Of course, I could just sit in your SUV and minivan and let him load the wood, but how pathetic. I've got to do it all.

"How much wood you want?"

"As much as can fit in there," you say, pointing the vast cargo space of your vehicle with the back seat down.

"Looks like she'll take about a half a rick."

"Sound good." And with that, you're in, cheerfully engaged in manual labor that you would dread if you had to do it alone in your own yard. Hmm, let's see, I need load this stack of heavy shit into my car, drive it over there, and then unload it again? Not how I'd typically want to spend my Saturday.

But here there's two of us, and, like the men we are, we take turns loading our own piles of wood into our own arms, maybe trying to outdo the other guy every once in awhile, maybe me adjusting the stack inside the car, just because it is my car. And of course we don't worry about the dirt, leaves, wood chips that fall all over the car.

What I really like is when I get home. I like to pull the car right up in front of the house so that the back of the car is right in front of the porch. And I like to stack up all of my wood, as slowly as I want, a couple of logs at a time, placing each piece strategically so that I slowly build a kind of wood puzzle that is tightly-packed, solid and level, inside the brick porch wall.

The cats, who like all things that are new, are very happy with this new perch.

And, this is just the beginning. Because then I get to carry inside the perfect pieces of wood as the first step in one of man's most primal duties: firestarter.

FOOTNOTE: Not only a great story song, "Birches" also captures the conflict between passion and sensibility in a marriage better than anything I've ever heard (or read). All using a wood-burning metaphor.

"Weather With You" comes from Finn's 7 Worlds Collide; "Birches" is on Bill Morrissey's Night Train. Both are available at Itunes.