(How to abdicate a throne when you don’t rule anything)
I give up.
Here’s what it’s come to. Here’s how weird it’s gotten, just to try and be a guy in America.
I’m in the parking lot at the grocery, right? I see a stranger approaching, a lady, juggling bags and produce and wallets and keys. I analyze her situation, I calculate my options, I react. I lean in to open the strange lady’s car door. Just trying to help, right?
And she nunchucks me with her wrist-collar of plastic “Valued Customer” bonus cards.
Sheesh. I didn’t realize she was that strange.
So I’m making it official.
I give up.
Being an American Guy has just gotten too confusing. I’m going gender-neutral, like Switzerland, or Jimmy Swaggart.
I don’t know when the switch got flipped, but somehow the simple act of holding a door open for a female has morphed from “Why, thank you, polite, well-mannered fellow!” into “What’s up with that freak?” Things were much different when I was growing up, back when there were only three TV channels and two genders. I was taught to stand up when a lady entered the room.
But should you dare to exhibit such psychotic behavior these days, get ready for askance stares – and not just from the acknowledged lady. From the other women in the room, too.
And the men. And the potted plants.
And no, I did not stand up because I considered her weak. No, I did not stand up because I thought she was inferior.
I stood up because I thought she was HOT. (Remember, I was growing up. At that point in my development, I thought the potted plants were hot.)
Now, before I start getting emails from irritated feminists, and offended Schefflera, let me point out that, statistically speaking, guys are idiots.
Yeah, I said it. Many guys are morons. This is a confirmed, repeated, measurable fact. I mean, look at us. Look at our historical record:
Once upon a time, a guy launched a thousand ships because of a woman’s face. This became the first documented practical joke in a long history of maritime pranks spawned by guys, grog, and “Fleet Week.” In the 1500s, an Italian guy named Nat King Cole painted the portrait of Mona Lisa, immortalizing her inscrutably sly smile. This painting would later become all the rage in freshman-level art appreciation classes as being the first example of “perspective,” though hardly the first example of “smirking.” A guy who became a King in England insisted on marrying multiple women … at the same time. After about two weeks of that, the breakfast bickering drove him insane – surprise, surprise – and he had no choice but to “cloister” them in London’s infamous Leaning Tower of Babel. According to legend, a guy named Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pond, even though his reflection was occasionally marred by surfacing turtles. For thousands of years, he was unable to tear himself away from himself, until the year 2008 AD, when he was elected President of the United States. Another bunch of guys, desperate to rout the USC Trojans, redefined military tactics by hiding inside a hollow horse next to Saddam Hussein. Not only did these guys think it was a good idea to carve a giant horse and then hide in it; the Other Evil Bad Guys actually fell for it, which is where we get the term “never look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if you hear guys’ voices and clinking armor coming from inside the horse.”
And this is no recent phenomenon, either. According to some tenured university scientists, the Earth is 4,600 million years old. (This is what is commonly referred to as a SWAG. Floating a SWAG is normal behavior for a guy. Tenure was created so women could do it, too.) But it was only about 15,000 years ago that guys started knuckle-walking across the Bering Straits, en route to Malibu and Laguna Beach, looking for babes with minimal facial hair.
See? Even four thousand million years ago, already guys were sleeping in, showing up late and, as it turns out, not all that picky.
So, to be fair, there is some validity to the “we’re made that way” argument. And, as a matter of scientific objectivity, any time you run across a life form that spray-paints profane graffiti in block capital letters, but uses cursive to “write” its name in the snow, you definitely want to double-check the creature’s DNA.
But, unlike tenured people, you have to check your sources. You can’t just lump all guys into a single, single-celled-organism category. For example, guys in general are expected to know how to make quick, determined decisions, and how to fix stuff. Not true. I once borrowed a friend’s late-model Saab and nearly died of dehydration before I figured out where to insert the ignition key.
And trust me. Somewhere out there, right now, is a guy with a weighty decision to make. Just a guy … perhaps he’s a rugged yet sympathetic high school sports coach, tall, balding, probably sporting a mild limp from a selfless accident during his pool lifeguard days. And every morning, this guy can be found standing in front of his open gym locker, staring at bottles of competing ibuprofen medications.
Should he take two of this one, or eight of that? Or did he already take a handful and forget? If so, which one? What if he took both? According to the TV commercials, either one could cause his heartbeat to stutter, or his ankles to dissolve. Either might cause him to drool, faint, or, according to some double-blind tests, go blind twice. Both might cause skin vomiting, nausea, queasiness or other synonyms. Neither should be taken while sleeping, or while not sleeping, or while scuba diving or not, or while operating monstrous machinery that third-world countries use to gouge out diamond quarries.
Ultimately, the upshot is that guys are expected to be a kind of social shape-shifter. Adaptable to the point of genetic de-differentiation. A set of men for all seasons.
All of whom, it is readily assumed, are bone-banging stupid.
As a guy, I can absolutely assure you of one thing: no guy wakes up of a morning, eager to run outside and compete for “Moron of the Year.” But societal sources are forever at the ready, monitoring guys for any outbreak of Pending Idiot Syndrome … and these sources never sleep. Including the most insidious source of all – television.
When it comes to TV, guys can’t win. In the sports, shows, and specials, guys are depicted as everything from slime to saint; but in the commercials, it’s all about the idiots.
Here’s a partial list of TV commercial concepts that you, as a 21st Century Guy, are expected to do or accept, or tolerate, or embrace and understand, or defend against a Quentin Tarantino-sized squad of Ninja assassins, all while simultaneously flexing your six-pack abs, weeping at a Hugh Grant movie, and killing a spider:
A guy must know how to choose the correct shaving products. Present a nice, close shave and women will go all National Geographic at you; show up stubbly and you get snubbed like Paris Hilton at a eunuch convention. Plus, according to TV, if you don’t dab on the right gel, your entire jaw could catch on fire. As a single guy, you’ve been sleeping in the same bed, on the same mattress, since the War of 1812 (Odds are, on the same sheets, too, but let’s not niggle). But now, your new bride wants a new mattress made out of something called Super Memory Ultra-Enzyme Tushie-Molding Hyper-Foam (not to be confused with shaving gel). It gets worse. She wants you to extend and relax on your side of the bed, posed in your favorite Hugh Hefner silks, while she jumps up and down on the mattress’ eastern hemisphere, grinning like a lapsed eunuch at a Paris Hilton convention, and absolutely fascinated by an obstinate flute of red wine that refuses to spill. A guy might get a phone call from his neighbor, alerting the guy that his pre-teen son, instead of delivering the paper each morning, has been lobbing boxes of whole-grain breakfast cereal onto people’s lawns. What to do? Is his son insane? Is the kid knocking off the local grocery? Could breakfast cereal distribution be a gateway drug leading to unlicensed lemonade stands? As a guy, you will eagerly drop over $300 on a new smart phone, simply because it is 4G, or has 5 Gs, or does whatever it is smart phones do with however many Gs are available in this galaxy, this week. You can rationalize the purchase because, according to the ad, the phone will turn into a lightning bolt that you can throw like a spear from your barn. (some barn assembly required, batteries and thunderbolt not included) To prove that a spray-on product can seal a leaky gutter, a guy will gang-spray a screen door, then replace the bottom of a rowboat with the screen door. As a formerly-single guy, to placate your wife, a nasal shrew who’s beginning to sound more and more like Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched, you will agree on a $3,600 awning to shade a sad slab of concrete that cost nine bucks, a pitiful, 3-by-5 postage stamp of pavement that Gladys refers to as “the lanai.”
So, the next time you see a guy fumbling his way through society, think twice before you judge him. Remember, he’s missed nearly four billion years of charm school.
FOOTNOTE: The parking lot lady didn’t actually hit me. But you already knew that, because you’re reading this column, which I’d have never written if she had actually hit me, because I’d have sued the edgy little shopper right down to her last lime, cleaned up in the personal injury lawsuit, and that’d be the last time you ever heard from me, because I would’ve relocated in mid-sentence to the Island of Tonga, where I would run for King.
Hmm. Wonder if they make a 5G Tushie-Foam throne.