A friend recently sent me a story from the New York Times* about “survival
schools” in which men, mostly young and urban, paint themselves in camouflage
and pretend to be soldiers or survivors of plane crashes. These games are a
pursuit of manliness, avowed to be such by the participants. (“Manliness
likes to be unconventional,” [an instructor] added. It likes to disobey
the law. So now we have reality camps.’”)
The woman who wrote the piece made the participants seem fairly ridiculous,
which one would expect of a writer both female and an ornament of a volcanic
vent of conventionality. They also made themselves sound ridiculous. Being interrupted
by one’s cell phone in the midst of a firefight is hard not to smile at.
I once covered Mitch WerBel’s survival school (Cobray) at Powder Springs
in Georgia, in which bored podiatrists came to learn “Advanced Sniping
Techniques,” having learned earlier in the morning “This little
thing is the trigger.” It was absolutely ridiculous.
Ridiculous, until I thought about it. Why were intelligent men (some were engineering
students for example) playing like little boys, I wondered? The answer I think
is that today there are so very few outlets for manliness. Such is the grip
of feminism on the country that the very word sounds faintly silly.
Manliness certainly isn’t in demand. The women of today seem to want
a metrosexual who loves to shop, helps with the housework, and never does anything
that she wouldn’t want to do. He may wear an earring. Modern marriage
sounds like a sort of heterosexual lesbianism. The man should be as little like
a man as possible while having complementary genitals.
This gelding of men, pushed everywhere in the media (note the universal prevalence
of girlish male models with waxed chests and slight figures) can easily be seen
as the desired consequence of female hostility to men; the corresponding de-feminization
of women, as another front in an anti-male war led by hostile feminists. Perhaps.
I have assuredly thought so at times. Yet women seem as unhappy in their mannish
roles as do men in womanish ones. One thing is sure, which is that women do
not understand men—their drives, needs, nature, or inner light.
For example, I would love to set out on horseback across the Great Plains as
they were in say, 1825, with a few friends, a good rifle, and a dog or two.
Why? A woman would call the idea absurd, and say that I was trying to prove
my manhood or regain my youth or something similarly psychotherapeutic. But
that’s not it at all. It has nothing to do with impressing anyone, and
everything to do with a freedom and independence that a man craves, even when
he doesn’t quite know that he does.
I think of huge skies with the occasional buzzard circling in the updrafts,
of towering clouds darkening with distant rain, wind picking up and hissing
through the brush, and nobody there, nobody. For a rifle, I’d like the
Savage thirty-thirty lever-action that a buddy had for a while, not because
it is the best gun for the purpose but just because it was such a sweet weapon.
How do I explain to a woman why I love the wild places of the earth, places
where I can be alone with the jungle or the plains or the mountains? Alone,
and left alone? Where things are not certain, predetermined, and suffocatingly
secure? What meaning can “a sweet rifle” have for her? None. Why
would she want to be uncomfortable and insecure? She does cupboards and rugs.
I put up with them.
A normal woman, bearing no ill-will but simply puzzled, will lapse into “boys
and their toys.” A hairy-chested feminist, more poisonous but equally
uncomprehending, will run on tediously about machismo and phallic symbolism.
Both are clueless.
I have no fantasies about shooting anyone. I have seen enough of that for one
lifetime. I don’t hunt, having no desire to kill anything I don’t
have to kill. I don’t need to pose with a rifle. Having carried one in
the Marine Corps, I do not regard them as exotic. But when you are far from
anywhere, you provide your own security. I am comfortable with the idea. So
are a lot of men. In today’s suburban, mall-ridden world security is what
answers 911.
Somebody said (or if no one did, I will) that women are realists pretending
to be romantics, and men, romantics pretending to be realists. Yes. The male
desire is to explore, to fly higher and higher, to invent and dare and go and
see. The Apollo landings were not inspired by a desire to know the nature of
lunar rocks. A man does not get on a rice-burning crotch-rocket on a desert
road in Arizona and scream through the hot vastness, wap-wap-wap through the
gears, 95, 105, 120…125 (go baby, get it on, do it for me), because it
is particularly practical. It is the sheer glory of the thing, the speed and
power, controlled but on the edge.
And now he wakes at five-thirty for the two-hour commute from Fredericksburg
to Washington in crawling traffic, then to his cubicle at Agriculture where
he tracks soybean yields in North Carolina. For his entire life.
It is not what men are wired to do. We just do not domesticate well. While
male behavior is perhaps no more inherently absurd than female, it has little
application to the suburbs and bureaucratic salt mines.
The world today, the modern parts anyway, is very much a woman’s world.
It will become more so. The economy values orderliness, routine, and avoidance
of waves. It needs patient people who will do the assembly-line work of huge
offices whirring with air-conditioning. Women are better at this. I’m
not sure that they really like it, but they handle it well.
Women want security, comfort, nice houses and nice cars. Men eventually feel
cramped by them. Of course there are exceptions. The old social order, in which
women were shy and retiring and stayed in the house, was to a considerable extent
artificial. You now see women on the long mountain trails, sometimes solo, and
diving the deep walls in the Caribbean. But they are exceptions.
And so you get a young engineer who knows that something is wrong but may not
know what. He’s bright. Engineers are. He is working on some detail of
the hot section of a big new high-efficiency turbo-fan. It is interesting work
and well paid. After work every day he goes to the local hangout to check out
the babes, though somehow they aren’t quite what he’s looking for,
and his buddies come by with their new Lexuses, and they drink beer and talk
about the market. Every night. Another birthday rolls around. He asks the overarching
question for a lot of young males today in a world that isn’t theirs:
“Is this all?”
Maybe he gets a motorcycle, or skydives, but it’s still the controlled
world, artificial adventure. Or, just maybe, he goes to some silly survival
school, an answer arguably ridiculous to a question that isn’t.
"Despicable. Without redeeming features":
New York Preview of Books "Fred be discriminate!":
Al Sharpton "Fred--that ugh!man--is the ideological
equivalent of the Hillside Strangler": The American Feminist
"Fred deserves his own entry in the DSM V": Psychology
Today
Note:
If emailing, do not remove the slashes that appear in the subject
line as otherwise, to avoid spam, your email will be heartlessly auto-deleted.
Other
Note: I try to read all letters, but simply cannot
respond to hundreds of emails. Neither rudeness nor delusional self-importance
is involved. Just can't do it. My apologies.
See?
You are not alone.
Which
may or may not be a good thing. At any rate, there are other twisted,
brain-fried wackos out there who have too much time on their hands
and read this stuff, probably while cleaning their guns. But don't
worry. This site wraps its IP packets in plain brown envelopes marked
"Kinky Books" so your neighbors won't know. Anyway, to the
extent that counters mean any thing, which isn't much of an extent,
this sucker gives the number of columns read, not counting subscribers,
since Monday, October 8, 2002. Whoopee-do. More or less.
Nekkid
in Austin
Buy Fred's new reprehensible
book, Nekkid In Austin! Barnes and Noble has the beast. Another collection
of outrages, irresponsible ravings, and curmudgeonry from Fred On Everything
and some innocent magazines that foolishly published him. Put Fred Reed
in the search at thingy at B&N and the book will pop up like mushrooms
on a decaying stump. Tell everyone you came to the site by mistake while
searching for articles on cannibalism. Your childhood made you do it.
We're all victims nowadays.
The Great
Possum-Squashing
and Beer Storm of 1962
Stock up. Christmas will
eventually come again, if it isn't outlawed.Possum-Squashingis a better present than an ugly tie. At least as good anyway.
