Prisoner of the Manbox

The manbox does not give up its captives lightly.  Consider Andrew O'Hagan, who wrote this tragic piece for the NY Times magazine a couple weeks ago.  O'Hagan has got the weepies, he's got 'em bad.  He's not allowed to smoke or absorb other carcinogens or eat bags of doughnuts anymore.  He sits in his Ford F-Series truck and cries.  Why?  Because his friends who are actors care if they look good.  After all, it's not like that matters, for an actor! Vanity and grooming are neutering men, he tells us.  I guess he means that men are literally being castrated in the interest of looking nice.  You'd think there'd be more news coverage of something like that.  As for me, I've decided to hang on to mine; I guess that means I will go on looking like a troll.

Obviously only women should care about their looks, or cleanliness, or health.  Because, isn't it by their looks that we evaluate women?  (hint: It is)  The last thing we need to be doing is feminizing men by considering anything that matters to a woman might also matter to a man.

No, O'Hagan bemoans the fact that he's not waking up daily with a hangover, and this is causing him to lose his "masculine solidity."  Whatever that is.  He senses "...an explicit pressure on men to impersonate the women in their lives, and that is arguably becoming true of straight men in a way that it formerly wasn’t."  Because grooming should be a more reliable marker of homosexuality?  Is that how he knows which guys are not going to hit on him... by the earwax?

All snark aside, I find it increasingly  difficult to deal with people like this, whose entire sense of self and premise for reacting to everyone around them is coming from such a pit of Victorian-grade sexism.

Disclaimer: if O'Hagan's column was a Poe, it got me.

via The-Toast