Man Up

Not that he could have ever been mistaken for a lumberjack. This is a man who likes tarting up now and again. A man who sings about Jesus and screaming angels. This is also a man who sings about a beautifully agonizing blowjob. He’s polished and raw. He’s lewd and sappy. He drinks Jack Daniels and begs the heavens to quench his thirst. His heart bleeds down his sleeve like a river and he aches for peace, now, motherfucker. He is a perfectly delicious blend of pheromones and feelings; and that’s why I cried when Bono waxed his chest.

I don’t know this firsthand, mind you. I’m just a diligent fan with too much time to browse images on the Internet. That’s where I found this picture of him, in a tub full of bubbles, sipping champagne and sporting fly shades. It’s a great picture. Know why? Because he looks like he’d fuck your brains out if you so much as set foot in that bathroom. I don’t mean take you tenderly in his arms and lie you on a bed of rose petals. I mean grab you by the hair, pull you in the tub and go down on you underwater. I mean climb on top of you and ram your hips into the porcelain. Part of that, not all of it, but part of it; is purely animalistic - he was hairy. If the video running on VH1 is any indication, he’s now succumbed to the wave of metrosexuality sweeping Testosterone-Land like a bad comb-over. And the scale has been tipped.

I say these things not just because I have no sense of decorum or propriety; I say them to illustrate a point, and that is this – Man Up Out There.

If you really want to wear that sweater vest then go ahead, but how about a tattoo under the oxford cloth? You know who you are. You are the Fabios, the Alan Aldas, the Kevin Costners. You heard that you were from Mars and assumed that was bad, so you burned the space ship when you landed on Venus. Serious mistake, guys. If you want to journal and sip Chai tea lattes and watch romantic comedies with us that’s fine, but every once in a while you might want to backtrack to the homeland to get in touch with your roots. Start a fire, build something, piss on a tree. If Bono can pull off the heart-on-the-sleeve thing, it’s because he’s just as likely to tell you to suck his dick as he is his heart is breaking.

There was a man, considered by some the classic romantic; all wine, candlelight, and soft music. Standard stuff; clichéd and unimaginative. Typically not my scene. But…
He was fiercely shrewd in business. His voice was the stuff of Harlequins; soft and smooth as melted butter. But it could also command attention and fill a room like rough-hewn wood. It made me sit up straight. That breadth, that yin and yang of tender and Alpha, is heady stuff. I’ll grant that it’s a catwalk of a line. And truth be told, I’m not always sure myself where it falls. But as the man with the buttery voice liked to say, “I know it when I see it.”

I know we told you we want communication, we want friendship and support and understanding. That’s true. But this is also true – and best articulated by a wife and mother who traded sexual favors with anal beads for an SUV with leather interior – sometimes you just want to fuck. We have girlfriends and shrinks and cats. We don’t want to fuck them; at least I don’t – I’m sure there are some personal ads that read to the contrary. We want to fuck our lovers. We choose our lovers by attraction. Attraction is primal. Get primal. Man the fuck up.

I’ll get shit for saying this because it’s offensive, unenlightened, sexist and maybe even misogynistic. It’s also true. We all know it. We all feel it; we’re hardwired to. We just don’t say it out loud. I don’t understand the shame in owning up to our nature. We’re animals. Evolved more than some, but a tree monkey could say the same.

I need a man. We all need a man, collectively speaking. The species depends on it. You may not need him to survive or to love, but if you’re passing out DNA parcels you’ve got to have sperm, and that sperm’s gotta come from somewhere. If you’re with another woman, groovy; knock yourself out, and I mean that sincerely. We’ve got your back on the repopulating thing.

That being said, if I’m driven to replicate my genes, and that’s what the sex drive is; the shrieking din of recombinant DNA, it stands to reason that I’m driven to do so by pairing up with hearty stock. Strong pairing makes for a strong finish, big picture-wise. I want the strongest, smartest, most virile, sperm-producing specimen I can get a hand on. You can dress that up with big words from cultural anthropology tests; you can try to hide it to gain some leverage, humanitarily speaking. But you can’t deny it and you can’t get rid of it.

If I tell you I’d love to teach you to knit, it might be a lovely opportunity for you to get in touch with your feminine side and spend some quality time sharing your feelings with me. And it might be a good time to show me that you can wrestle down a bison and kill it with your bare hands and the knitting needles, thus providing food throughout the long winter. Do you see how this works?

I’m in no-man’s land here. I feel the scorn of women who think it’s crude and archaic; the envy from the women who want the house in the suburbs and the sedate, doting husband. But maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe a man who is strong and powerful doesn't need to use that power to dominate me. Maybe my strength grows not because of his or within his, but alongside his.
Man up already. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll be man enough to handle the woman I am.