UPDATE: The oh-so-long-awaited new-look print MISC will finally, knock on Formica, be out starting this Tuesday at select sales outlets around town. Subscribers should get it by the end of the week.
SOME MAGAZINES are so desperate to fill their pages with sex-related texts, they end up hyping alleged “trends,” sometimes contradictory, sometimes in the same issue.
Case in point: New York mag, which in a recent issue declares NYC young-marrieds to be a stress-defeated “Generation Sexless,” yet also proclaims a new upsurge in casual sex thanks to online dating services giving women more anonymity and power within such situations.
OK OK, less married sex and more unmarried sex aren’t contradictory. Except another story in the mag claims more NY-ers now want to marry and are having less casual sex.
Meanwhile, USA Today claims to have discovered a vast trend of listless middle-aged husbands, incapable of satisfying wives who came of age in the sex-lib ’70s and who still want it as often as possible.
Confused? Hey, it’s an innately confusing topic to begin with. Live w/it.
Or maybe it’s not so confusing, if you try to wrap it all into a meta-trend.
Say, a grossly overgeneralized meta-trend of Women Who Want It All, or at least as much of It as can fit around other weekly tasks; facing dudes who can’t be the Sole Breadwinner anymore (and are often not winning any bread right now), who don’t know what role to play opposite assertive women, and some of whom (particularly in art-and-media cities) might feel intimidated by some of the “cute” and “funny” wholesale male bashing in contemporary pop-cult.
This ties in, tangentally, with this site’s “Peepees for Peace” campaign, advocating the deployment of passionate male energy in the quest toward a better world for all. This call for a metaphoric rebalancing in the public sphere can easily equate with a need for more literal rebalancing in the private sphere.
I’m not advocating male superiority but male equality. As John Cusak’s platonic ladyfriend says in Say Anything, “There are millions of guys. Be a man.”
This country needs men.
Not the prepubescent schoolyard bullies of the political right.
Not the self-emasculated gender-guilt trippers of the political left.
Not the bumbling dads and incompetent husbands of the sitcoms.
Not the Pavlovian dorks of Maxim and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.
We need men who are equally eager to learn how to rebuild a dying economy and to learn how to lick clit. Who can create both new opportunities and new fantasy-role games.
We need more of the positive masculine qualities of bravery, responsibility, zeal, intelligence, and perserverence; at home and in the outside world. (The fact that juxtaposing the words “positive” and “masculine” is so rare in alt-culture, even a seeming oxymoron, is but another symptom of our problem.)
We need men who are confident enough to work and live alongside strong women, neither as master nor as slave. Men who can give women the kind of attentive, soul-meshing love neither vibrators nor blue pills can give by themselves.
Such men are made, not born. How to make them? I wish I knew.
