Snuggle Futures

"Jordan: Some people like reliability.

Cox: In a sedan, it turns out it's terrific."

Scrubs - My Last Day

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“He said, ‘I am a man,’ It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman’s soul knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god"

 

John Steinbeck - The Pearl

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"Look I'm standing naked before you

Don't you want more than my sex?"

 

Tori Amos - Leather

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Ummm... do you actually have more to offer than your sex?

 

I've been blogging here for almost a decade now and this blog has never had any subscribers. In terms of regular visitors (people who probably have it bookmarked or whatnot) it's hovered between twenty and five. Even fewer now because I badmouthed Star Wars. Granted, while it's not my goal to drive people away, I frequently take action to that effect. I ramble, I insult you, I never stick to a schedule or a single narrative or even topic from post to post, and I just recently decided to look up how to remove the social media "share" buttons. This is anti-social media, thank you. Still, if after a decade I've garnered no wider readership than your average gas station toilet graffiti, I should probably jump to the conclusion that I'm a transcendent literary genius beyond the ken of mortal linguistics just a boring writer. (Not that it'll stop me from continuing to howl into the void.)

So here's my question to any / all / everywoman: have you considered that you may be a boring person?

I ask because last week I ran across some article or another by a man bemoaning and apologizing on behalf of all males for the unspeakable crime of being "emotionally distant" or "emotionally unavailable" toward the females yanking their sexual leash and not showing enough interest in a woman's day-to-day life. Damned if I can find it now, but simply substitute any of the million articles over the past half-century by men self-flagellating or women condemning them for being born the wrong sex and you've got the gist of it. The world's hardly short on checkout magazine questionnaires to the effect "ten sure-fire reasons why you're a perfect angel and he's a filthy pig deserving of your abuse" - but I digress.

It reminded me of the movie Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a woman's moral punching bag for a hundred minutes while his CGI childhood stuffed toy repeatedly and garishly illustrates the dogmatic presumption that all interaction between men and all of men's interests are mere destructive childish folly to be overcome by subsuming a man's imperfect existence to a woman's greater wisdom. Half a billion dollars in profit for a piece of abject propaganda which, genders flipped, would've never made it past the elevator pitch.

In fact you can't take a step in the modern world without being beaten over the head by this tired old precept of women's moral imperative to "civilize" men, the any-color-woman's burden. Concomitantly, if any man should find immersion in female interests akin to a rancid, stagnant, stifling bog, he himself is blamed for not seeing the transcendent brilliance of her splendiferous soul. Hey, maybe he's not showing an interest because you're not interesting? I mean, one Hugh Grant movie is bad enough but there is never just one Hugh Grant movie... and while we're at it: unholy mother of crap woman, what in the multiverse makes you think I want to hear about the valiant exploits of your knitting circle?

Now, I'm perfectly aware that an amazing critical hit in a video game can sound equally irrelevant. Let this blog's unpopularity stand as evidence. But overall, men tend to have more active interests, a wider gamut and more driving passion than women do, and it can safely be chalked up to the overall greater variability in male genetics. To deliberately over-simplify: we're nature's gamble; you're the safe investment. We're the crazy ones. You're the boring ones.

This is not actually good for men. It lands a lot of us bleeding in the gutter, and it's become a running gag that the Darwin Awards predominantly go to dudebro attempts at ridiculous stunts. Men do some stupid shit, and I'll gladly argue against men's desperation to assume Steinbeck's mantle of demidivinity* for their own benefit, but the fact remains a man's interests are his own. "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" has fueled half the comedy in the world's history, but as feminism rewrote it to "men are from Hell, women are from Heaven" we've also tacitly accepted that anything men enjoy by extension must also somehow be broken, defective, evil or just plain wrong by definition. So of course any man who refuses to concede the intellectual pinnacle of watching The View gets blamed by default as shallow and closeminded.

In the interest of time, let's gloss over the instinctive underpinnings of all this, the courtship displays of material devotion in perpetuity, to sexual relationships as interactions between supposed equals. In any other context, the presumption that condescending to one activity entitles one party to the other's participation in a hundred others would easily be recognizable as slavishness, narcissism or a host of other psychological disorders... except when we're faced with women's presumed right to control their mates.

 

Why exactly should I want more than your sex? If you think I should want your "sitting on a bench at sunset" then by all means, gimme your best elevator pitch for the activity in itself. If you want to sell me on the high concept of "wandering the aisles at Pier One for five hours on a quest for the knickest of knacks" I will give it due consideration on its own merits. Maybe your literary critiques are less insightful, your singing less melodic than you assume. Female hobbies, more often than not, are so incredibly dull because they're just pretexts to talk regardless of having a topic or not. The stereotypical courtship ritual dinner date provides a quintessential example. Sex itself, however, mandates nothing other than sex and we're long past due to deny women their most fundamental and undeserved entitlement: sex as an act of condescension to be remunerated by indefinite service. **

Finally, per my usual distaste for dishonesty, I have to point out:

"and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man"

Men's willingness and even eagerness to throw themselves into activities beyond the sphere of female interest has greatly increased their value as work-horses for women to yoke throughout history. Being the quiet guy in the back of the room does not get you laid. (Trust me.) The desperation with which men peddle their hobbies (as opposed to passive interests) on dating websites*** can't help but call into question the Kafkaesque sadism of females seeking out this trait in potential mates only to immediately condemn, vilify and smother it for the sake of control.

 

 

 

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* As might Steinbeck if that book's ending is any indication. Apropos of nothing, I'll get around to the ever-useful insult "faggot" some other time.

** Yes, I do realize it is completely unrealistic for men to pull a reverse Lysistrata. For as long as humans are human, men will continue to throw themselves on women's questionable mercy.

*** Seriously, I barely graced them with my presence years ago, but I'm guessing you can still visit any dating site and count the "dude with fish" or "dude with musical instrument" pictures.