The Spreading Mismatch

...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...