Saturday, February 26, 2011

Are we still evolving

Despite what Jabara and Shaffer wrote about in 1979 it is not bloody raining men! For years beyond comprehension men knew their place, there was no sensitive side to get in touch with! Mind you the club & chest beating was replaced with more efficient and reliable tools, easily accessible with a credit card in one hand & a sausage sizzle on the way to purchase the heavily packaged gadget in the other, is it no wonder the biceps are smaller and the brain larger today than for neanderthals.

Confused? join the club & if you think the neurons are not doing their job of making sense of it or that was one too many Merlot you've had, don't go pop another benzo or prozac to ease the confusion, think about the trillions of males wandering aimlessly amongst the club bearing, chest beating feminists who with their new found deep voices felt compelled to speak on behalf of all women of the world when it came to changing our own light bulbs, working full time whilst standing on our heads, budget in one hand & giving birth, raising children in the other. I wonder if 'Mitochondrial Eve' 'mother of us all' could ever have envisaged leaping acacia trees in a single bound, scaling the savannahs for her own food with a baby strapped to her back whilst caveman Jo kicks back on the bear skin rug.

It is true, men are in crisis. Peter McAllister, God (whomever she is) bless him, did little to dispell the fact that men today are weaker, yes physically weaker than neanderthal woman by comparing the upper arm strength of world winning arm wrestling champions to the paleoanthropological evidence. Why is it that Aboriginal men 2000 years ago ran at speeds in excess of our top world record holders for the 100 metres today? It might be a guess.... yet could it be that the rectus femoris requires less effort to locate the remote control and the triceps require more stimulation than moisturising the ego to build, tone and support the evolutionary process? It is damning yet true, the science is painting a Pollack of a modern inadequate male.

Now I don't want you out there thinking i'm referring to nerds, emo's and westies, not on your life. Let's get serious about this, I have no doubt that Homo Erectus never even contemplated Viagra. I'm talking about the metro-centric insensitives who need to pack tissues, baby wipes and shaving rash cream as their essentials on a business trip, no not your office Christmas party, I mean tax funded war and that is just to look after their well carved legs.

Yes ok there are certainly some significant organic matters which have changed slightly; testerone today is still used for the same purpose it was then, flogging the crap out of each other. Only now we have moved from near naked hairy early man in unarmed combat, leader of the pack, save my land, pride and cave dwelling, to booze, gangs, weapons and women (I mean how can any male who flogs someone so vulnerable, call himself a man?), in the name of greed, power, oil and an unconcious need to find control in a world where men seem to have missed the boat here, they no longer have control.

Men are more likely to be retrenched, more likely to suffer depression, more likely to have mental health issues, are quick to anger, have less self control, sperm counts are down, motivation is down and charisma is down, I mean who the hell calls themselves 'Heathcliffe' today? The evidence could be considered humiliating, yet i believe it more apt to describe as devestating. I'm telling you girls, I don't know what fantasy you are living, my backside lifts off the comfort of the mattress at 0445 and doesn't see it again until sometime around 2300! Who needs to prove we can do it all, we know we can, that is why we were given the magic and patience to have our bodies stretched in excess of what is conceivable for 9months and the cognitive ability to take on more than we can naturally handle.
We can juggle, it is what we do. Australopithecus afarensis or Lucy as the Beattles famed her with her diamonds in the sky, had a brain of a female child as would be known today. One could say her diet was to blame, I'd like to think we females knew then what seems to escape us today, whilst we can do it all, why would you want to? Lucy did what she had to do and did it well. Who needs a brain that doesn't sleep, that is so over stimulated with lists, responsibilities and goal orientated tasks that the only way to make room for more processing is to spend less time with the people who need us the most. From the dawn of time through to the well articulated posited hierarchy of needs of Abraham Maslow, human beings need to belong, we need to connect. Our planet is not coming apart, we are. We are more distant from each other today than any other time in history. Medical evidence predicts this will be the first time in our lives where our children will have a life expectancy less than our own, come on gals was the battle to win it all worth it?

I've said it before & happy to point the finger again, too much t.v., mags and networking telling women what they want & what they need, with no bloody explanation as to where men go in all of this. I mean for goodness sake, dresses, yes dresses have been banned from my daughter's school as impractical. So heaven forbid despite NSW Board of Studies reporting gender is identified as a cross curriculum focus, they are allowing the removal of gender orientation choice and decision making. I have a girly girl and a not so girly girl and one goes to school where dresses are banned and the other where they are compulsory, is no bloody wonder children need to inhale more prozac today than adults! I truly don't believe this is what Coco Chanel had in mind when she discovered women could wear the pants if they should choose, I don't remember her saying throw in the steal cap boots, peak cap and drugs to grow hair on your chest.

I've raised two sons and two girls, married a man, have a father, a brother, uncles, nephews; so fair to say I've had my fair share of experience with modern males and that is not including exposing myself to the opposite sex before I chose to settle down. It dawned in the fading of my sarcasm the other day that I am single not because I refuse to date a drug affected, recently incacerated, violent male, I'm single because good men are on the decline at epidemic rates, intimidated by the evolved woman who can do all, be all and is all.

Men need us to step back ladies, step back. There are no lines to draw, the vision ahead is completely a travesty. Men no longer know who they are because they are waiting for women to tell them how they need to be, when, for how long and what to wear whilst they are working it out. Stop raising sons who can't button their own shirts, wipe their own backsides or have a hissy fit when they get dirt under their nails, start looking deep into the abyss we've created and look at the emptiness in our lives as men, true men, are absent. Grab that pendulum by the ball as it swings and hold it still, breathe in and let go of the control ladies, let him be who he was destined to be and celebrate if not with him, in a world you create, where freedom is not a luxury its a human right and that includes males. The freedom to make mistakes, the freedom to have a life outside of you. Having a family is not a colour by number portrait with rules and obligations, and I know some of you will have an unsigned hidden contract in the bedside table of who does what, when and why; family is about belonging, its about connections, if you and he need to give up more than 1% of who you are to be 50% of together, then the cost is too high and whether we want to shout it from the roof tops or not, men are paying the price.

One could say the missing link has the answers that somewhere in between homo sapiens and homer the only thing men retained is their appetite :) We have 'reconsidered' our origins as Richard Leakey documented, yet I suggest you pick up Peter's book, male and female of all walks of life and look at the evidence before as, look around you, stop asking "why can't he just...." and ask yourself how did he get there. In my lifetime alone, the media has sold us Conan, Ben Hur and then super heroes in lycra or martini drinking, tuxedo wearing smoothies and OMG then they gave us Tom Cruise!

Now again don't go over analysising, I can do the hard work for you, i'm somewhere in between a feminist post-structuralist and a hippie. I like a mix of the voice of Manu Fieldel, the charisma of Sean Connery, the brain of Nelson Mandela and Obama, with the maleness of G.I. Joe before the ugly obsession in muscularity, where right under our noses each generation of G.I Joe lovers, never knew his biceps became bigger on every new addition, to fit in with what the plastics believed we wanted to see. So given Barbie had a similar non-discreet increase, is it any wonder we are less connected today when being told we need breasts and biceps that do not allow for human contact when they are basically too damn big!

Stop obsessing, be who you are, love who you are and find someone you can love in their journey of discovering themselves and forging their own path in history. Men it is time to wake up, time to be a MAN, the man Darwin envisaged when he hypothesised the evolutionary process. Adaption did not mean learning from the likes of Jim Carey's 'Yes' man. You may be stronger than the men of 50 years ago and there is no need to go laying the blame for where it all started :), just not stronger than the ones before that and well, I too could have muscles that big what the crap you need to put into your body just to think you are strong.

Just remember Homo neanderthalensis and Homo Erectus sustained doing their thing over 2-3 million years. Real men do not hit women, real men protect their children, real men need to bond with real men, need to to say what they have to say without interruption ladies! When you are thinking the path of the modern male, think Beckham, think, cool, smooth, toned, Calvin wearing underwear and then....... well listen to him talk. Come one ladies we are creating the sissy-boys, you don't need disneyland Dads, we need real men. I'd go for grape feeding, milk bathing, Hercules in a uniform over a metrosexual any day. So that is where I'm leaving it, with an image forged in my mind, as modern life would have us believe, if we can dream it, we can see it, if we can see it than we can be it......well there are always dreams :)

1 comment:

  1. Very well written, could almost be a university dissitation. i wonder where i fit into in the man stakes??

    ReplyDelete