MetalFortress
Master Don Juan
SOURCE: http://www.t-mag.com/nation_articles/276tc.jsp
Very nice article courtesy of Testosterone Magazine...ATOMIC DOG
Queer Eye for the Extinct Guy
by TC
The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.
Whenever a 'gator crawls out of a Florida swamp and eats something it shouldn't, like a kid or someone's schnauzer, humans usually run out and shoot it and turn it into luggage.
If you ask me, this is just another example of anthropomorphizing—giving human characteristics to an animal.
These gun-totin' dispensers of justice figure that the animal's bad, even evil, and had malevolent intent and that it deserves to be plugged in its scaly butt. The truth is, the 'gator ate little Billy-Bob because he was hungry and no one ever told him that the pink, hairless fleshbags were off limits.
No malice, just a gnawing pain in the gut that told his primitive brain that it was lunch time.
Of course, I suppose another reason that people shoot child-eating gators is that the parents can't stomach the idea of junior passing through the reptile's digestive tract and being turned into gator **** that ultimately fertilizes a mangrove tree.
"Junior might notta' been much, Sheriff, but he deserves better than to be turned into a floating turd. As such I'd 'preciate it if you'd shoot that gator in the haid so's we could retrieve what's left of Junior."
It doesn't take David Attenborough to figure out that animals like gators—often called alpha predators—don't mix well with humans. After all, if you plunk down a couple of thousand grand for a new house that overlooks the Okeefenokee Swamp, you want to be able to wash your car on Labor Day without having your leg chomped off. Similarly, it's just plain embarrassing if you live in South America and during a dinner party a 20-foot python swallows your boss' wife.
As such, humans are knocking off these beasties, one by one.
And this is going on all around the world. The alpha predators—the great white sharks, crocodiles, leopards, pythons, and lions and tigers and bears, oh my—are in danger of being rubbed out. Aside from them being dangerous to humans, we'd much rather turn the wilderness areas that are homes to these beasts into Walmart parking lots.
Maybe you're thinking that it's not that big a deal and that I'm just a member of PETA and like Kim Basinger and those other loonies, an ad showing me nude with nothing but a extraordinarily large gourd strategically placed in front of my manhood with the words, "I'd rather wear nothing than wear fur," will soon appear in the pages of Variety.
No, there's more to it than that. According to David Quammen, author of "Monster of God—the Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind," the big meat-eaters are collectively called "keystone species" and they stabilize the food chain. Once you kill off the alpha predators, you start what Quammen calls a "trophic cascade."
Since there's no one around to eat them, you get a population explosion of herbivores—things that eat seeds and vegetation. These things eat everything in sight, which screws up the renewal cycles of forests. Pretty soon you're left with a barren world that looks much like T-mag contributor Lonnie Lowery's scalp. We'll all be fighting over one last grub-infested corncob that was found under someone's sofa cushion.
If this mass alpha predator genocide continues, Quammen believes that all of the big meat eaters will be gone by about the year 2150.
One meat eater whose possible extinction Quammen failed to address is man. And no, I'm not squawking about the apocalypse or mutual thermonuclear destruction or even plague or pestilence; I'm not even talking about the extinction of the species of man. Instead, I'm talking about the extinction of human males, or more precisely, maleness. Its presence, like that of gators or grizzlies, just doesn't fit in with the ways of the world.
Maleness is considered, I don't know, rude, boorish. It's an anachronism. It's okay if it shows up sporadically, like in times of war or when the lid won't come off the peanut butter jar, but otherwise, let's put it in the garage until the company leaves—no need for them to see something distasteful like that.
Our educational system teaches kids that being male is bad. The book, The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Summers describes assemblies at University High School in Pacific Heights, California, where boys are blamed for all the misfortunes of the world. Similarly, a school in San Franciso makes boys "enjoy" quilting while girls verbally piss on the male species.
But the biggest yank on our collective scrote is that some schools employ the Bem Androgyny Scale which measures how well masculine traits have been eradicated from boys.
Likewise, Testosterone is reviled each day in the popular press as the cause of all the evils of the world. The mass agricultural conglomerates toil to get large quantities of the Testosterone-killing protein, soy, sprinkled into our foods, starting at childhood. And on television, the estrogenic Dr. Phil tells his congregation of stay-at-home moms how they can psychologically castrate their mates just a little bit more.
Our gut reaction? Instead of letting loose a throaty battle cry, cupping what's left of our balls, and shouting, "These are mine! If you want them, you'll have to kill me," we stand passively by, like a hiker paralyzed from a fall watching a coyote eat his foot.
We don't fight to preserve our maleness, all we can seemingly do is come up with parodies of manhood like The Man Show, or Maxim magazine. The best that Spike TV, the new network dedicated to men, can do is offer up shows like Stripperella or reruns of American Gladiator. God help us.
If that's all we are, maybe we deserve to be squeezed out of existence.
And then there's the most recent assault on maleness, the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The premise of the show is that five homosexual men—the Fab 5—pick out some poor, pathetic, heterosexual loser and turn him into a metrosexual.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a metrosexual is a new marketing term that describes men who are in touch with their feminine side; men who love shopping, having manicures, romance, and probably even douching.
Anyhow, the Fab 5, after finding their candidate, instruct him on the finer points of shaving, cooking, dressing, body language, and ear-hair pruning. As they transform into gabardine-slack wearing, moussed-up hair, carbon copies of themselves, they poke fun at his lifestyle, his manner of dress, his untidiness, and anything else that might be considered traditionally male.
But the awful part of this, the insidious part of it is that it further muddles up a man's concept of what a male should be in today's world. Are all those things inherent to my nature bad? Am I evil because I don't give a **** about the feng shui in my apartment? Am I just vermin that women should squash with their shoes?
It's common for mothers around the country to raise Holy Hell about the networks showing stuff like the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in primetime TV. That, and all that gratuitous flesh on television is bound to turn Junior into, into…a hairy man. Mercy! But no one complains about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a show whose effects are far more insidious.
Sex on TV isn't the problem. Momma, sex is what makes the world go round. It's at the heart of maleness. If not for sex or the promise of eventual sex, most of us wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Sex has been the driving force behind most of man's achievements, whether most of us realize it or not. It's the little gear that drives competitiveness, ambition, and even the creative force.
And you women who secretly want your men to learn from the Fab 5, you're just as bad as those Puritanical mothers who want their boys to tidy up their rooms and squat when they pee and not to see, smell, hear, or touch sex until they're 30 years old and married.
Ironically, the Fab 5 don't have a problem with sexuality; they believe they're helping their straight protégés get laid, but if getting laid requires that we first turn into metrosexuals, then maybe we should all move some place where women like traditional maleness; where the sight of a pair of socks that hasn’t been picked up doesn't cause them to slide their panties back up and run out of the apartment.
If I had a kid, I'd let him watch the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show but not Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Why reinforce what the country is already trying to tell him, that maleness is bad? No, better to let Junior have at least a fighting chance of growing up with a modicum of confidence in who or what he is.
If that isn't possible, I'd rather a gator eat him.
