Man! You look like a woman…
I must admit that in spite of its overt stupidity and more than occasional shallowness I love to read Elle. I have always been driving my ass around in two cars simultaneously for as long as I can remember: I can swear out loud one second and invoke all gods known to man the next, I drool over Hemingway as much as I do over Sandra Brown (yep that was not a typo), I can tango in flats and do grocery shopping in heels, and my Winamp occasionally jumps from Mozart to Fifty Cent bringing about the same reaction of audio-delight. I sometimes feel the need for idiocy. Makes me think: “I may be mentally challenged, but you people are seriously fucked”. Which is always a comforting realization, something in the vein of: “Have I left the gas on?” “No, I don’t have any gas to leave on cause I didn’t pay my bill last month. Thank God!”
So I was reading Elle this weekend. I skimmed through the fashion pages (“Give us today our daily shoes…”), the psychology tests (“Would you cheat on him with your hamster?”), the practical advice stuff (“What to do when he straps on an extra dick and a ballerina skirt and bungee jumps from London Bridge. Reasons to worry?”), the trending section (“This season’s must-have: poop-colored play-doh nails”) and the book recommendations (“Shopping in the Himalayas – The Dalai Lama Comes out of the Closet”). So far, so good. The world still seemed to be a safe place. It was only by the time I reached the Elle Man section that I realized something was definitely wrong.
On a superficial first glance, the article suggestively entitled “Operation Closet” (though it sounded a bit like the ‘Operation Tiger Bomb’ episode in Happy Tree Friends) seemed to be if not entertaining, at least interesting. “OK, so let’s see what the guys are hiding in their closets…” Pretty soon I realized I had come across a skeleton the size of China. The guy allowing us gals a peek into his textile universe was a middle-aged bore sitting on a foot-stool (yes, as in foot stool) the paint of which was slowly starting to wither – most probably for an enhanced vintage effect, wearing a white shirt, black pants, a black tull overcoat (the fabric that ballerina frocks are made of – by this time I was already starting to look out for any bridges falling down) and red socks. Overall, the combination looked like a fauvist mixture of Rhett Butler, Charlie Chaplin, Pinocchio and Mao Tse Dun. “Maybe it’s just my unenlightened traditionalism at work”, I thought, quickly jumping to the text part of the article (still with the haunting image of those red socks screeching down my synapses like chalk on a blackboard). If images fail you, you always have words. Unfortunately, as I was about to discover.
After a brief introduction of the gentleman under scrutiny (born in …, works as …, fucked his dog for the first time when he was …, etc etc ), the article moved on to his Excellency’s dress-code preferences.
“The hairdo of any modern man who knows at least a little something about fashion has to be very well structured. [Fuck! By this time I was starting to freak out. Are we talking about haircuts or semester papers? I thought I could escape that at least when reading Elle!] I personally prefer Nazi-style.” [OK, this did it. Nazy style??? In haircuts? Then I eyed the fashion guru’s picture again, this time more closely. And indeed, his upper department looked like Hitler after riding a rollercoaster in Disney Land. How cool is that? I wondered if he also had a Stalin handshake and a Milosevic walk to go with it. Maybe add a bit of Mussolini charm to the mixture, just for the sake of complexity. An Ausschwitz posture, a Gulag smile, a Warsaw wink, and – voila! The post-modern, anti-thetical, extro-spective and intra-ordinary man is born. Behold him and marvel at the flawless ideological alignment of everything from his convictions to his socks. What a man, what a metaphor!]
Next up were Mr Haute Couture’s role models. I was already mentally prepared for something like Lenin, Pol Pot or Fidel Castro. But Red-Socks had me in for another surprise.
“I have always been fascinated by the fruitful collaboration between Alexander McQueen and Bjork – especially as materialized in her music video ‘Pagan Poetry’.” [For those of you ignorant of such intellectually demanding realities: the first is a designer who just committed suicide a couple of months ago – most probably Harrod’s had run out of red socks, and the second is a songstress from Iceland who showed up for the Oscars wearing a swan costume. Both of them the kind of people you’d not even recommend as role models to the intestinal bacteria of your cat. Still, Mr If-you-got-it-flaunt-it seemed to consider them pillars of human spirituality, right alongside John Lennon and Yoko Ono or Tweetie and Silvester. How could you contradict someone wearing a black tull overcoat and a Nazi haircut? You might just find your Parliament on fire next morning. Not a good idea.]
Tired of the guru’s meditative introspections and not so keen anymore on finding out what guys keep in their closets, I decided that visuals may still be the safer alternative and returned to the pictures. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to decide between spreading poop on your breakfast toast and French kissing the Queen Mother – but if you have, you most probably also have a pretty good idea about the way I felt having to decide between text and graphics in that article.
I can’t help but wonder how we have reached the point where men, the ones supposed to protect, seduce, love, marry, and, yes, dominate us, have grown into a bunch of wannabe Adolf’s with red socks and a missing reality check. Where are the times when a man would still go out into the storm [as in: deluge, thunder, lightning, snow, blizzard, tornado all at once] without his shirt on and come back dripping wet [immediately placing you in an equivalent state of liquefaction], fearless, and sexy with your little kitty on his arm? Where are the men who would lift you from the ground like a feather and French kiss you breathless after you have kicked him and pulled his hair? Those men with a whiskey and cigar voice, which makes you shiver and melt and die and want him to rip off your buttons and undress your soul? I am sick of these metrosexual mommie boys who use your concealer and envy you for your bag. I don’t want to see any more of them teddy bear boys wearing pink, ‘structuring’ their hair into spikes, reading Elle and waxing their legs. Goddamn political correctness! I don’t want my husband to share my eye serum and ask me for advice in where to get a good facial. I want him to kick in a door with his foot if it won’t open, to kiss me without asking for permission, to grab my ass when he’s walking by me in the kitchen, to know how to fix a car engine or change a tire if the need arises, to chop wood (no shirt on if I may be granted the wish) and to say “Fuck you!” in such a way to a tool not listening to his gorgeous hands, as to make me wish it was me he was talking to. A man whose hands could kill you but drive you wild, who makes you obey his will by only looking at you but knows how to be lying helplessly in your arms, who makes you want to lean on his shoulder even when he cries, who makes you wish you had his babies, his ring on your finger, and the key to his heart.
We do not need a Hello Kitty with a penis, walking around our house, checking out our mascaras, complaining about a broken nail or bad skin, and wondering whether he should use spray tan or bronzing pearls. Fuck that shit! We also don’t want him to be a whiney little bitch who cannot stand a paper cut and carries a pocket mirror around to check that his foundation is still in place. If we are late for a dinner with friends, it will be because of MY, not YOUR still being busy with make-up! If we ever set foot in a mall together, I expect you to head for the bookshop or the hardware store, not for the cosmetics department! And if you want to use perfume, which I’d love, I’d prefer myself buying it for you than having you run around perfumeries on sniffing sprees, checking out the differences between amber and ambergris. I expect you to pull the chair for me, open the door, kiss my hand, bring me flowers, roam the corridors with my father smoking while you are waiting for our first child, tell me you have no idea what you should wear for a night out at the theatre [and that you don’t really give a shit either way] and to have had much more women in your past than I men in mine. I want you to be self-reliant and self-sustaining, ultra-brilliant and extra-careful, over-the-top masculine and in-your-face honest, completely reliable, absolutely adorable and wonderfully wonderful.
I just want you to be a MAN. And while you’re at it, maybe you could take that axe you just used on chopping wood and purge the world of a couple of these Barbie doll, Nazi style, red sock, mommie boy man whores. And then come in and kiss me. I’ve been drooling over you fixing the barn in the rain for almost an hour now.
admin
amen, sister.