Got to be so Macho
For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has not, to say the things he truly feels..." sang the recently deceased Frank Sinatra in his "sing pissed" hit My Way. In among these cliched folds of Americanese is a rather strange little truth, yet one so few blokes realise. A man has very little, if he hasn't a clue about himself. Yet despite what all the best women's magazines say, most blokes don't have much of a clue or interest in what's actually going on in their heads. Unlike the female method of getting in touch with their sexuality, the male method is much more of a hands on task. But still we see this increasingly dull trend towards the Blairoid man: sensitive, thoughtful, in touch with himself and a touch camp with everyone else. The greatest attribute any man needs to become a male model is to look like a woman. It's cool to be camp, moronic and prehistoric to show a soupcon of machismo. And all this new pseudo-psychological home counselling, has this helped the aggressive male ego, the potentially violent jealousy streaks and the animal tension that exists between two men in any one room? Nah, not really; it's just moved the goal posts. A bloke is a bloke, even if he knows he should behave more maturely (ie as a woman does). The problem is not that a man does not know himself. It's that blokes are easily threatened. A bloke is the male human animal. In order to keep his territory, he has to mark it out with any bloke he meets, fighting off any intruders, even if unlike the cat, he doesn't spray it with hormone-enriched urine.
Take Derek as a case study. A strapping six foot rugby lad. We meet him in his girlfriend's bedroom. Derek can down fourteen pints of an evening. He can show his bottom to anyone, anywhere. Derek is a man. But, as we meet him with his girlfriend, we see a very different side of Derek. He calls his girlfriend "Jessy pops", "Bunnykins", "Pipsqueak" and "Munchkin". He's even prepared to start talking like a Teletubby if the mood moves him. This seems to be a very different man from the man who sits on twelve people in a ruck, mauls a further fifteen and score three tries on a day so cold that most men's testicles are resembling china marbles.
Now take as a case study Chris. He knows what a woman wants. He knows their spiritual needs, their sexual desire and what a woman wants in a man. Chris may have played rugby at school, but he thought that, as a game, it simply fed the arrogant, aggressive, egotistical male stereotypes. In other words, he couldn't have scored a try if his shorts were on fire and a naked Kelly Brook was going to dry them off with a damp towel. Anyway, that too would be exploiting women. Chris is a nineties man. Chris understands the complex synergies at work in the male/female symbiosis. Derek probably cannot spell synergy and thinks symbiosis is an operation that one has on a knee after too much sport.
Right - time to see how both react under pressure. Chris knows that Derek's girlfriend has been stressing about her up coming job interview and thinks he'll go and cheers her up (and try it on). Inside, Derek is also comforting Jess. "Sweety, you're wubbly and they'll know that as soon as they see you wibbly wobbly bits, you're incy wincy, tiddly widdly nosey wosey". Chris knocks and enters. Immediately, the whole scenario changes. Derek asserts that he has a rival, so stands up and tries to intimidate Chris. Next comes the inevitable reference to sporting events - football, cricket...indeed, any sport that he can think may have taken place lately, apart from croquet or boules, perhaps. Then, a question that highlights their definite drinking habits emerges. Chris doesn't attempt a riposte. He knows that a woman needs her ego stroking. He tells all her best qualities and that she has a right to get the job and should not feel subjugated by an overly aggressive male interviewer, who will no doubt be trying to impose his tribal ego on to her. She smiles.
So there is sensitive man and his rival, macho man. Yet, despite my inadquate and speedy stereotypes, the point is clear. There is under the façade very little difference between bruty and beauty. What is inescapable is that man is part of the animal kingdom when it comes to relationships. He is determined to win a partner, defeat any competition, mark out his category and clear it of any threat. However, men, media or modern ways of thinking try and persuade the female population; man is not that different from his counterparts in the PG Tips adverts. Machismo is just out of fashion, and the sensitive man is an adaptation of the ape, which now seems to have more success. The all-gold sensitive man does not exist. Take the PM. Tony may have read Scripture at Princess Diana's funeral as if he were about to bawl; pained, sentimental, ethereal. Yet under this, he is the man who sanctioned British forces attacking Serbia with inevitable deaths. We cannot escape rivalry between man and man. It is an animal instinct, unfashionable as it is to say so. Next time you're in a club or bar, just watch the prowling, brawling drinking beast and just be thankful that it has learnt how to control and domesticate the removal of detritus from its bowels. Normally.