Saturday, June 05, 2010

The Menaissance Festival!

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has outdone herself this time:
The chicks today, they get to do so many things! Why, they can vote, and attend colleges, and even drink and smoke in public! These chicks: An alarming number of them have jobs! And, like, financial autonomy, from the jobs, and hence a socially assured position of power from which to negotiate the terms of their relationships and lives, thereby making them not entirely dependent on the funding and/or goodwill of men for their continued survival and status, and so they're all able to make decisions and expect fair treatment and… dude, it's a mess, I tell you. Because it turns out, after like fifty-some years of this business, none of these chicks is impressed enough by your penis!

"Excuse me, madam, I happen to have a penis," you say. (Because you do. A trans variety of gentleman has no place within the Menaissance!) "Would you, perchance, like to hear about all of my thoughts and feelings as they relate to this penis, and also how important it makes me, and furthermore how it qualifies me to boss you around?" And the chicks today, they don't particularly care to listen! They used to listen. They used to have to. It was, like, their job.

Hence, the Menaissance: From "Men," meaning dudes, and "aissance," meaning "making asses out of themselves." What happens, apparently, is that a dude watches a few too many episodes of Mad Men and reads one too many Raymond Carver stories and takes at least one beer commercial just a bit too seriously, and then he decides to engage in some HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENTING, buying books with titles like The Retrosexual Manual: How to Be A Real Man, and playing dress-up in his special Don Draper costume that he got at Banana Republic, and getting his hair did at special man-focused man-salons which ensure their manliness by putting Elvis memorabilia all over the place (because women HATED Elvis, duh), and also probably pretending that he likes how scotch tastes and that cigars don’t make him want to barf his rare steaks back up onto his pseudo-vintage-trouser-encased lap, and in all other ways attempting to embody some wacky vision of pre-feminist manhood that, unless he is actually ninety-seven years old, he has only ever seen on TV.