Slightly in the same way that Jerry Seinfeld (the nominal one from the show and not the real guy) once prevaricated to disabuse his girlfriend of suspicion that he was an unwilling addict of Melrose Place, so too do I find myself a private slave to the masculine arrogance that you mostly only notice once you relocate to Seattle. I feel at times, here, like an ape in a suit. Here is a city to make a nearly lifelong liberal feel strangely conservative in a circus of pussyhats and reverence of the organic.
Why is it that I should harbor this inner beast when it appears I have done much to define myself apart from camouflage baseball caps and the truculent inhalation of red meat, or at least the kind of unironically bearded boy who might trumpet these aspects of his disposition via bumper sticker beneath a layer of mud on his pickup?
I have spent formative years in such a conservative and traditional haven as Spokane, Washington, where a swelling and unabashed trend in public endorsement of country music was drawing a vulgar down-home pants tent over the northern side just as my wife and I made our escape.
Anyone will think themselves liberal in the midst of that, don't you think? Not that I'm not a lefty, but I can't be the only one who has noticed that the queer community's ell-jee-bee initialism is steadily approaching the full syllabic time stamp of the words it now struggles to abbreviate. Last I heard, there is talk of an I and an A, just in case there is anyone who didn't get a turn with the baby turtle before it went back in the tank. Matters such as these conjure my most philistine internal counsel.
I amuse myself to imagine the “country boy” of many an eHarmony search making a character study of Capitol Hill’s denizens, and though I am mostly in ideological agreement with the provision of safe spaces, that phrase cannot fail to make me cringe inside, as though I can't help but think of these things in terms of their harshest straw man versions. I once escorted an old Spokane chum through Ballard during a farmer's market. He wanted to know, “Why did you choose a place with so many freaks?”
I'm afraid it was embedded in my friend and me to reflexively gag at rainbows. I endeavor to overstep the bounds of this feeble traditionalism, but I don't begrudge him. Brusque manhood was, excuse this, drilled into us. You didn't misread - this is one way to really f*** somebody at a young age. There is a masculine bridge off of which you had better not tip and you'll learn it in the schoolyard or otherwise.
It is my loss that I suffer a poisonous inner view of being a man, consisting of a Viking’s sensibilities. My wife bickers righteously with my puerile whining that certain accessories are too effeminate for the privilege of my modeling. A mopey Viking then.
Justin Timberlake once dumbly advised that “real men like big booty bitches,” and though I can't protest the object of infatuation, it is one rendition of the affirmation that true masculinity is gladly and even mandatorily met by feminine strength. I have to wonder in declarations such as these, who needs convincing?
It is certainly worse when you run this line of thought in reverse to find if you prefer a slender or submissive female that you must be a fox in the henhouse, as though light, docile women didn't deserve love. (Says the stout bird woman to the fox: try me on for size, big boy.)
Men everywhere are running private calculations against the prowess of their rivals, taking the measure of their own status. Or maybe I am doing this while they are busy with more emotionally healthy projects. It will be a continuous process of tut-tutting my silent knee-jerk jibes toward many things progressive and sentimental, not to say gently. I can maybe start by using verbs like “tut-tutting.”
And what should trigger my resentment at the maternal volume of Seattle's recycling options? It is an effort to care for the planet, so do I rail against the femininity of concern? Whose male identity prescribes destruction only? Judith Merril’s short story That Only a Mother (a 1948 piece now accessible mainly through Creepypasta - Sorry, Judith) sees the etiolation of a happy momma's nursery illusion when the distant working father finally holds his own anomalously precocious offspring. Only he could see the child for what it was.
An idol of mine, late journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, remarked that “most men are pretty hopeless when newborn bundles arrive...and then they think, well I'll go off and do extra work and make some money and they justify it in that way.” This at least is not hostile to care though and can function as a father's coping mechanism in the face of the softest possible care. But if we're talking Earth, it is not enough to stand by while others take the extra odd second in front of three bins to configure their blueprint for trash dispensation - a complexity that is comparably scarce in Eastern Washington, mind you.
And if masculinity can be thought of as a general toughening up, there is nothing tougher for some men than learning to care for a little one (Earth is a paltry little thing in the wide universe). Now I wonder who I'm convincing. But let me dispense with this agonizing gender scrutiny - what is wrong about commiserating freely with the lesser privileged? My home is a safe space and you may pronounce as many syllables as you like, though I may be lifting weights in the other room to boost my testosterone.
It just makes me feel better, alright?
