Brawny Man -- What Women REALLY want

The Brawny Man

As a post-mortem post, I would like to share my discovery of what it is women really want: a totally acquiescent man in flannel, that you can also use to wipe up spills.

It's been fun being one of the "Real Men". Best of luck to y'all on your finals and final papers.

Radio crackle, buzzing, droning of academia

It was one of those mornings. Someone had stolen my morning, actually, and now I was fucked as far as the rest of the day was concerned. Martina's given me another bunch of books. Before, she said, she'll give me the high-class stuff, the Freud and the Marx I've gotta learn something of the world around me, the world-right-now What a joke. She wants me to get a better understanding of the sometimes Earthlings I mingle with.
My plane leaves at 9. I've got a few hours to waste anyway so I call Fielding cancel our dinner and sit down ironically enough with Martin Amis' "Money", a sad story of Joe Person foundering his way through the bustle and chaos of Toronto. Six pages in when I have to leave for my flight.
They put a fucking kid in the seat next to me. It was about time he learned what a drunk looked like. Little bug eyes watched me all through the night, even after I'd come down from whatever the Stewardess handed me. It was a good experience for him.
The cabbie at Heathrow must have been from New York because I spent twenty minutes teaching him how to get to King's Cross and another fifteen explaining where the Butcher's Arms was. I didn't bother hitching a ride to my sock. Maybe Selina was there, but she probably wasn't. I gotta change that girl, gotta make her work for what she's doing to me. It'll wait till I find her. I could crawl home.

Consumable Literature and Lad Magazines

You read a magazine, then you throw it away (hopefully you recycle it). Can anyone else see the ephemeral beauty in this act? Okay, maybe that is a stretch, but in this review of the Fantastic Four movie, Jason Silverman makes a good similar case for comic books.

"gentleman's Magazines" seems to me to be a rather problematic name for the genre. Would a "gentleman" really pull out a Playboy on a bus? Would ANYONE for that matter? Maxim is more bus-friendly, but not by much -- I still feel somewhat shameful when "reading" it in public, although I'm not frequently faced with this problem, since I don't really find much value in it -- this sounds like a call for an experiment...

Anyhow, "Lad (or Cad) Magazines" seems like a more apt categorization, seeing as that would better describe the target demographic, that being young libertines who don't mind seeming uncouth (correct me if I'm wrong).

Is this stuff similar to any of the lad-lit books that we have read? Do any of our characters seem like Maxim Men? If these magazines and Rob Roy, say, are both teaching me how to be a man, are they really teaching me the same thing?

For a free online Lad Magazine, check out AskMen.com -- some good articles here about how to pick up chicks.

When men go too far in an effort to perform

This is what happens when a need for control reaches fanaticism.
A moment of silence for London, please.

Is a Mitchum Man a Real Man?

I saw an advertisement today that said (more or less):

"If you've rescheduled your anniversary around poker night, you're a Mitchum Man"

Then I found this site.

Is THIS what it means to be a real man? Certainly not what women want... Do they?

I don't even really find this site funny... At least the Coors Light commercials are funny. There's a sort of seriousness here that appalls / offends me.

Also, I notice a link labelled "Not a Man -- Click here!", which takes you to Mitchum for Women products. Would any woman want to be a "Mitchum Woman" after seeing this?

I've heard someone refer to a man's "inner pirate". I think we can apply this idea here and to Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy.

Possible Alternate header graphic? Or atleast a theme to work on:

Real Men's "Rules"

I want to distance myself from this post a bit by saying that I was sent this proposed set of rules (you need MS Powerpoint to run it) by email today and it seemed a little too coincidental not to post it.

While the Rules that we looked at on Monday may have been put forth by a man or a woman, I think you will agree the men's rules were most certainly written by a man... quite possibly this man.

The women's rules seem to assert omnipotent power over their partners, while the men's rules attempt to exempt men from the annoying things that women allegedly do. Do women feel that they have to "train" their men to be more obedient, polite, presentable, sensitive (i.e. less manly)? Do men find that they are always looking for creative (or otherwise) ways to avoid said training / punishment?