I am going to start out saying that I love being a woman. I enjoy NOT doing manly things, like fixing broken stuff, fighting off bears and demonstrating my prowess in various manly pursuits. I am not built to do those kind of things. It’s not that I cannot perform these tasks. I have spent enough time with my husband away at work that I have learned to assess a problem and usually fix it myself. But it is not inherently in the nature God gave me. There is some primal joy that I derive from watching my man do manly things. It stirs my inner cave woman at a deep level. It makes me want to cook food over fire and make babies. It is totally hot. Even as I am, uh hmm, of a certain age, I still feel my blood stir by overt acts of real men. Real men and the tasks they perform go from physical displays of splitting wood in their younger days and slowly increases to a larger variety of manly expertise. It includes everything from making that little blinky light go away in my car to building a home with me, literally and figuratively. When a male mans up, it could not be sexier. There is no reason it has to stop as we age. There are so many drugs people take in their latter years just to eke out one more day of an existence that barely counts as living. As soon as the AARP gets word that we have reached the golden number where we deserve their ridiculous junk mailers, it is like people have said “Game Over”.
We are bombarded in our advancing years with magazines full of drug ads from big pharma about our imperfect and quickly deteriorating organs and brains and how they can help make barely existing go on longer. We have been brainwashed that with aging comes physical decline. Immediately. We can’t turn 2 pages without ads for bathtub conversions because we can’t lift our legs high enough to step into a shower. We are made to feel as if we are not good enough, and it will only get worse from here. All these things that we are told we can’t do and all the remedies for things that are wrong with us because the doctors say there is, is blatant brainwashing. Maybe the cure is worse than the ailment? Maybe all those pills prescribed by your physician are what is making you sick? Could it be a diet full of things you can’t pronounce? Run away. Do not let these wonderful years be defined by the world’s expectations of who you should be. I cannot say it any better than John Steinbeck in the book written in 1960 titled “Travels with Charley in Search of America.” He was 58 when he wrote this. His observation about the aging male says it with such eloquence that I will end with his words.
“During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends “Slow down, You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives and it’s such a sweet trap.
Who doesn’t like to be the center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on to so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for the possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, and chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as consequence, not as punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. I knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a truck, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living. I am very fortunate to have a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies.”
John Steinbeck
Oh. My. Gosh. SADIE! This is beautiful. You said it much better and more thoroughly than I did. And I agree, seeing men do manly things is SO sexy.
I remember about 7 years ago I was in a salon getting my hair done. There were four other ladies (clients) in there and The Deadliest Catch was playing on the TVs. I had heard of the show, but never watched it. Anyway, these ladies knew the names of each man on the show and they swooned every time one of them spoke, it seemed. I was interiorly amused and didn’t understand what was sexier about these men than other men. Come to find out they were married to men with desk jobs. Nothing wrong with men like that -- we NEED them! But, apparently their men never labored in the midst of their womanly gazes. Instead, hiring out labor-intensive work. And I get it -- toiling away all week, whether doing road construction or accounting sucks and is exhausting. My own husband is an auto-technician, sometimes working six days a week and often long hours for his pay is connected to how many cars (Maserati & Alfa Romeo) he turns over, and he is (in my view) the sexiest man alive! I love watching him build things and fix things at home. ^swoon^
I haven’t read the Steinbeck book you quoted, but it is PERFECT!