U N L O A D E D

Not that long ago I heard a quick news blurb over the radio that said physical altercations between girls and women were on the rise. They attributed this to a more competitive atmosphere but didn't elaborate except to mention sports and career demands. I take it the sports were pertaining to the young ladies still in school and careers to women out of it. Or is it the other way around? No matter. I'm not here to document the top 10 fist fights ever between women. Rather it got me thinking about the relationships women have with each other.

Competition

From where I sit the "competition" vaguely referenced in the news story I overheard was horribly misguided. Sure it's part of it but I've observed plenty of passive aggression in mundane activities that I never knew could be competitive. An example is when I go over to my friends house who has a well established family and lives in an affluent neighborhood. All the neighbors are in each others faces. The men separate to discuss what they wish to do to the house as in "build a new wall" or "add a recreation room to the basement." Then there are the wives:

Wife 1: You're little Tommy is so full of energy. How old is he now?

Wife 2: He's 8.

Wife 1: Really? He doesn't look a day over 5! I bet he'll age well. Sometimes it helps to be a little...behind...with things.

Wife 2: Well Tommy got a bunch of Os for "outstanding" on his last report card. He almost did our taxes for us last year. He's great with numbers!

Wife 1: Really? Tommy count to 100 by 2s with me.

Wife 2: Yes show her how to count by 2s.....

Tommy: 7.....8.....15....

Wife 2: NO TOMMY! BY 2S!!

Tommy: Pee pee?

Wife 1: I'm sure he's just tuckered out. Oooh, your cake...in the oven...it's burning.

Wife 2: Oh..sh...I've been working on this all day. Now we have no dessert....

Wife 1: Oh, honey that's awful. It looked so good. Was it chocolate? I love chocolate. To bad it's burnt now. How about cutting out the center. I bet that's still...edible..if you spent all day on it after all.

Wife 2: I spent last night on it also.

Wife 1: Well my mother has a recipe that takes a weeks worth of preparation and the cake will just melt in your mouth....

On and on they go, it never ends. It's all hidden behind plastic smiles and strained compliments that are really barbs. This was not an actual conversation that I heard but rather an amalgamation of many discussions I've heard over the years. Wife 1 LOVES the fact that the cake got burnt. But why?

Some of you may think this is just snotty upper class folk being who they are. I thought so until I sat back and listened to the discussions of the common folk; middle class female friends of mine.

Daggers

I sat back one day as me and several female friends of mine had some drinks at the bar. As the women filtered into the establishment the daggers began to fly.

"Fake!"

"Ugly"

"Bad boob job."

"Trim those eyelashes already."

"Stupid hair!!"

"Fish lips!"

"Slut!"

"She doesn't have the body to wear that!!!"

There were glares, stares and resentment. Deep resentment. And the sad thing? None of the women they attacked were unattractive at all. In fact they were all quite beautiful. Clearly the physical appearance was triggering something negative in them. It was almost an innate instinct to beat up and tear down a prime specimen.

In these situations I wait for the right time to throw in my own carefully crafted opinion.

Me: I think she's fucking hot!!

This usually elicits head shaking and lecturing and why I should NOT find these women attractive. Wisely, I use this opportunity to pick their brain with follow up questions. I've come up with a half baked theory which someone else likely thought of but I don't care.

Alpha and Beta

I see 2 categories of women in my travels that can be broken down into many subcategories. Let's start with the alpha female.

The alpha female is the type who can walk into a room and just light it up with her looks or demeanor. She doesn't have to work at it, it all comes naturally. She wields great power over those she comes into contact with not through demands, but a warm smile and the power of suggestion. It need not be sexual at all times but genuine. The sky is the limit for her.

Then we have the beta females. Women in this category are not relegated to it by looks. Quite the contrary. There is a self defeatist attitude that runs through many of them which causes them to lash out instead of reach out. They are defensive and wounded creatures. An enterprising and manipulative beta female will untie the others betas to follow her lead on nights out. She'll make sure the angry fire burns and that none of the women with her speak to men and if they appear to be hitting it off with one, she will cut it short. When they are not out she is the one they all come to talk to for support. However she won't support but rather fuel the flames. Why? It keeps her getting all the juicy gossip and keeps her in a position as the leader.

Beta Superior - A false alpha female who leads by undermining the self confidence of her sister women and keeps true to the concept of misery loving company.

Beta Minor - A woman foolish enough to think they need a beta superior to lead them.

Not all women fall into these categories, obviously, but I've seen many that do.

Cat Fight

Some of this stuff will culminate in a cat fight. I once saw 2 strippers break out into fisticuffs while dancing on stage in my college years. I have no doubt that it tied into some of the concepts I've laid out here. And...OK I went to MANY strip bars back then because...I was in college damn it. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm saying is that perhaps these small jabs are ultimately leading to the physical altercations that were mentioned in that radio story. There is a tremendous pressure on women that I as a man will never fully comprehend. There is an internal pressure they put on each other to be "perfect" and an outward pressure from the media which may or may not be an extension to the self imposed pressure. Does every woman want to be a Wonder Woman? I don't know but I suspect many want to take a Wonder Woman down for the count.




Coming up.....

The Drive...

Also....

Giving the gift of "boob." Is it the gift that keeps on giving?

And later...

The myth of equity.

We've walked the tightrope, shelved our sensitivity, traded in our articulation for aggression....

To be a "man" is to be the idea of a stone warrior who is, in reality, only half a man without the weapons to fight.

Yet fight we do both as "men" and with our significant others if we have them. We love a dog fight. We compete in sports or work, we get cocky if we win and it feeds our very fragile egos. It's an odd for of self nurturing that is not really nurturing but self masturbatory and petty.

Machismo

Within the Latin culture there is great pride taken in a man being a "man." Having been raised by my grandparents you would think that the old world ways would have transferred over to me and, in a way, maybe a bit of it did. But my late Grandfather was not a practitioner of machismo. He was sensitive but silent. The victim of circumstance due to the era he grew up in. He didn't fight or look for one but when it came time to fight back he would. There was an issue with this as you didn't know where the limits of his patience stood. The more he wanted to say something the harder he was to read. He would retreat deep within himself and you could see he wanted to say something but couldn't. Then when he did it he was so raw and angry that he would have to backtrack later and recant many of the things he said. He would do it in a way that he'd never admit to being wrong or even apologize, it was uncanny. He was a wonderful man but I wonder how much greater he would would be if he felt comfortable with self expression. I think he could be superhuman if he mastered this. But for a sensitive man in the old world, this was how to be macho. Appear strong, silent, stoic for as long as you could in spite of yourself.

But Machismo isn't something specific to Latin men, it's something that resides in ALL men and "men." We want to be strong and appealing to women but also don't want to get hurt. We want to be able to kill a grizzly bear with our bare hands and swim the English channel later in the day. We don't want the aid of a doctor when hurt. We want to be able to match the grit of a cowboy in a spaghetti western. We never want to cry or have to get into emotionally messy situations.

But most importantly, we don't want to be reminded of our own weaknesses and limitations.

So being macho is the perfect shield for us. We earn the respect of our fellow men and "men" and we can keep our love interests at arms length so they can't do too much damage. Commitment? That's a compromise to a man's machismo and independence. It says to many a man and "men" that they can't do it alone and they aren't invincible. It also says that the spaghetti western adventure is over.

Possibility

Men and "men" are fascinated by possibility, the "what if." The conquest and legacy. To commit means that the definition of conquering will change or simply go away. Men take pride in winning over women or building something on their own. We like to point at something and say, "Yes, I did that." Of course, not all men are are like this. There are many men that do want to commit and have a family and make that their legacy. But for some of us, the question will always linger on our mind,"Is this as good as it gets?"

We simply don't know the answer and to deprive ourself of opportunity in exchange for what's in front of us, as wonderful as she may be.....it still may not be enough according to our expectations. Are they too high? Too low? That is something we must judge for ourselves as each of our cases are unique.

So if you ladies are wondering why he's taking so long to make up his mind then what I'm saying here could be the reason. It's not immaturity, it's possibility. And the more you try to pin him down the more he'll struggle to escape. Frustrating, but the nature of the beast.

Opening Up

This is where a "man" becomes a man and this is one of the hardest things for us to do. Perhaps it's the testosterone but opening up is awful. I dread it, loathe it with all my being. Yet I do it. I owe it to my background in the arts. I was forced to do it as that was the only way to create an honest artistic work or performance. I had to get comfortable with being emotionally uncomfortable. And while it has become somewhat easier, it's not a picnic.

There's so much on the line here. The man you thought you were is now exposed, a sitting duck, ready to be blown to bits by rejection or indifference. Still, if you find the right woman, you have to show your intelligence, your understanding, your real sensitivity at your core and your dominance at the periphery. All the stars must be aligned but we men can do it. However, this will bring about another problem to the suspicious woman and it's something that will push us back to being "men" quicker than a hiccup....

I will reveal that for you here and much more.......

(siting back in my chair and looking at the clock)

But not tonight......tonight I'm going to bed and thinking about the Playboy bunnies and the Playboy mansion. I will have a "man's" dream and harbor no regrets at my digressions.

Coming up next.....The final installment of why men are "men.

It's not easy being a man these days or any other. I've heard so many women tell me that I'm lucky to be a man because we have not as much to worry about. We get paid more at jobs, we're all part of the "boys club," we don't have "that time of the month," and the alleged simplicity of our emotional intellect is so much less of a burden.

It's not shocking that women would come to this conclusion. We haven't given them much to go on. We put out the fact that we don't worry about some of the things they do and we work so hard to avoid the affairs of being put on the emotional hot seat that we seem utilitarian, mechanical, unfeeling unless it's time to screw of watch the game. Is this truly the depth of the men?

The Uniform

Somewhere along the line, the expectations of what we men should be and do in our daily lives became what the stuff that "men" do. Along with the struggle to properly articulate our feelings, this internal deficiency had to also show externally. In my 20s there was even a uniform that "men" wore. And may still be worn now in suburban hell.

• Hair was to barely be combed or little attention was given to it. This would be concealed by a baseball cap.
• A flannel shirt or some type of button down shirt from Abocrombie & Fitch, the epitome of boring no matter how stylish their catalogs get.
• A T-shirt underneath said button down that promoted some form of hard liquor or lewd activity that I wouldn't mind doing with the right woman but wouldn't care to broadcast it either.
• Ill fitting jeans that haven't been washed and could fit 10 people inside of them.
• And finally, an expression intellectual absence accentuated by having your mouth half open at all times and a blank look in your eyes.
  

And like clockwork these men would attract women desperate for attention and got very little of it because the "man" had turned the wheels off upstairs. A curious realization hit me one night while bar hopping; this isn't what these women really want, it's just the only thing they know.

Mind you this is not a sweeping statement on all women, just a sample of what I saw here in my neck of the woods. They were all Stepford Wives in training, this is Connecticut after all, and you could see the suburban train wrecks that would become of these courtships years later where cookie cutter on the outside would meet the buzz saw on the inside. What horrors would develop behind that picket fence? There's a few book and movie deals that could come from it, I'm quite sure.

WOOT! WOOT! You're Out of Uniform!

I'll never forget this conversation I once had with an attractive young woman who simply could not accept that I was able to match her discussion on things deemed too sophisticated for a typical man to digest.

We got onto the topic of films. Artistic ones.

Me: I'm glad to see the independent film movement coming alive here in the US. There's been so many great films that I've caught down at the York Square. But I still have a soft spot for foreign language films.

Her: Porn films?

Me: No, I said foreign language films.

Her: Yeah, sure. At the York Square Cinema?

Me: Yes, I go once every couple of weeks. I like going alone because I sort of clear my head that way and get ideas for my own writing.

Her: Right, so what did you see there?

Thinking she had me cornered I rattled off a list of films and what I thought of them from pacing, to camera work, to writing. It was as if she was hit by baseball bat over the head.

Her: Well it was nice talking to you...um...see you around?

She staggered off, dazed, confused. What happened is quite clear in hindsight. She thought I was trying to talk film to get into her pants, she got proved wrong and when that happened, she couldn't deal with it.

She was so conditioned to think that men will do and say anything to get laid that when I came to the table with facts, she collapsed right in front of me.

Real men are not supposed to watch these films! They want Chuck Norris or something. WRONG. Mind you I can kick back and enjoy that kind of fare, but I can also indulge in the highbrow as well.

This speaks to a bigger problem that we face when trying to be honest and open with women. When you do show what they want to see, many reject it as a ploy. Why? Because it's too far off from the norm. "The uniform." The very thing me and other men are not, nor do we aspire to be.

The Tightrope

At 24 I was dating a woman that was 32. She was rattled by it at first but she was attracted to the fact that I could be articulate about things that other men could not. Because she was a little older, she could appreciate that that quality and not see it as a "ploy."

I still wasn't fully grown into my skin so to speak. I was hammered by insecurity and a feeling of being lost. It was what you could call a quarter life crisis. It hit me bad but she didn't seem to mind it. One day she opened up and told me something that I thought to be nothing more than lip service.

Her: You can't see it now but once you start being comfortable being the man I see in you, you're going to be very dangerous.

Me: Whatever....

Her: You don't see it yet but I can. You're going to grow into it and you are just going to be amazing.

Me: Grow into what?

Her: Being comfortable with being a real man.

Rest assured, dear readers, that I didn't write that to turn this into an essay declaring me the perfect man, I'm not. I'm VERY far from it. But what I've come to understand from that conversation is something that is slowly happening to me now and moving forward. That is, being comfortable with myself and having a quiet confidence about me that resides just below the surface and is not in your face. Too many men want to flash their fangs to show how strong they are. That shows insecurity. A man comfortable with himself knows when to relax, just be.

Women have become so cynical of us men that to be too open and articulate at first glance will scare them off. You have to know when to use it. You have to honestly convey the sense that you can find beauty in a poem or sunset sometimes and have the strength put an unruly persons head through a window or table (literally and figuratively) at other times. That, in essence is the tightrope that many a man must walk in this world of juxtaposition.

Do women know what they want? Is this even enough?

Maybe not as there is still a host of other issues that arise when women encounter something they find "too good to be true."

I will reveal them here, for your pleasure and feedback..............but not tonight.

Tonight I will indulge in a French film with subtitles while having a glass a wine, then flip on my PS2 and play a few rounds of WWE Smackdown vs. Raw.

I will be both man and "man" in one night.

Coming up next..... Part III of why men are "men."

True story going back to when I was training as an actor. I was going to night classes at a place called The Atlantic Theater Company around the meat packing district in Manhattan. The class was about analyzing a script and performance technique. Each week we had find a partner and perform a scene for the rest of the class to critique. One particular scene that didn't go well for yours truly was from a play called Suburbia by actor and writer Eric Bogosian. It was a wonderful coming of age tale of youngsters who were going nowhere post high school and pissing away their time in front of a convenience store. You've seen these types if you've ever had to go to one to score some milk, candy or sodas in a pinch. They think they have it all figured out and use it as a justification to go nowhere as they wax philosophical about life while they chain smoke.

As a 24 year old with a chip on his shoulder, selecting this work to do scene from seemed to be a perfect fit. I found a partner, a gorgeous female, and we were to do the one scene which I could not pull off. Perhaps the only part of the play that felt like a huge obstacle instead of fun: Opening up and expressing my feelings of fear and vulnerability over my character's girlfriend leaving for college and likely to bigger and better things. The scene commenced. Awkwardly I stumbled through, trying to find my grounding to power through this mess.....but I couldn't. Mercifully it ended and reactions from my fellow actors commenced. The first person to comment was an actress. I'll never forget what she said, "It seems like you had a lot of trouble expressing how much you care for her. But it's probably got nothing to do with your acting ability and more to do with the fact that you're a MAN."

The other actress nodded in a agreement and murmured in a "tell 'em sister" kind of way. I had no rebuttal, she was right.

Weakness

From an early age many of us boys who become "men" were not encouraged to express our feelings in anything that comes close to being articulate. Many, but not all of us, were taught to keep it inside to not dwell on it. Just keep moving on until things work themselves out. But the more we hold it in the more emotionally unavailable we become. We carry the weight with little left for anything else when an intimate relationship comes along.

We're told to be strong. Not flinch, be a man. Tough it out. Talk of feelings is not supposed to be in a man's arsenal of weapons. If we do open up we run the risk of looking weak, wimpy, or the ultimate kiss of death...sensitive.

Sensitive = Dead

Somewhere along the line the big thing for men to be was sensitive. In fact, some years ago all the talk on news programs that did a fluff piece on relationships heralded a "sensitive man" as the model that men should aspire to be. Think Tom Hanks in the film Big. The word sensitive in and of itself is not bad but the distortion of word is. To show understanding of someone else's feelings and your own in a way that's expressive and productive would technically be considered "sensitive." However the pop culture definition of sensitive, and the definition that prevails, is a guy who cries at the end of Little House on the Prairie reruns and pretty much lacks any spine when a confrontation arises. Most men don't want to go there. It betrays the code we're all taught while growing up to be a man. And women, most likely, will appreciate the sensitivity of a man when used at the right time and sparingly. While women may say they want a man that is sensitive, I feel they actually want a man that's dominant with genuine tendencies of sensitivity. There's a difference there, a big one. Unfortunately finding men that can walk this tightrope is difficult and many women wind up dating jerks. Why? They mistake the abusive behavior for dominance. They can't find a guy that can do both because we weren't adequately prepared to handle both while growing up.

So you may notice, ladies, that even the men who do not act like jerks have a sort of wall up. And at first that wall may seem exciting to you as what's behind it is a mystery. Women like to unlock the secrets of their men in due time. There's nothing wrong with this.

But perhaps the word sensitive should be put to rest as men who need to nurture a true sense of it, won't because the distorted definition prevails. And again, what man worth his salt wants to be that? Sensitivity, as we've wrongly come to understand it, is dead!

And it should stay that way.

But is it Feminine?

Another true story. A former best friend and I were at a bar watching a Knicks game and we were waiting for a woman who was interested in me to show up with her friend. As they entered we got to talking about how we were concerned about a mutual friend who was getting mixed up with the wrong woman and was playing all sorts of head games with him. He was in a wretched state and we hated to see him like this. The 2 women were fascinated by the discussion they were overhearing.

Woman #1: I'm really amazed by how feminine of a discussion you 2 can have about your friend. I didn't think men talked this way.

Woman #2: Yeah, it's really great that you 2 can talk like this.

Me: Feminine? What the fuck does that shit mean? We're worried about our friend who's dating a total bitch.

Woman #1: Yes but the way you were talking was not something we see guys do. I mean we women talk this way, but I didn't think men did.

Me: Explain this to me....

Woman #2: Well, we didn't think men really opened up with their feelings like this. My boyfriend and his friends don't.

Actually they probably do but far away from you because they don't want to reveal that part of themselves and be called feminine. Granted, there's nothing wrong with feminine if you're a woman or a very flamboyant man or drag queen. But for the rest of us guys, that word, like "sensitive" is the kiss of death.

Here''s another thing. Expression on feelings is not something exclusive to femininity. It's a human thing. Still it's not surprising that many women feel this way about men. They are going off experience.

There is more to our journey in discovering the difference between the sexes and I will share the rest of my thoughts in full.......

But not tonight. Tonight I will imagine a utopian world where male and female understand each other and make love....not war.

Coming up next.....Part II of why we become "men."