Brian Explains: Being Macho

Soap operas are the down-fall of women. I’m not saying that men don’t watch them, but most men find the melodramatic events in soap operas a tad too emotional to take. I’m not one of those men. I cry all the time. Gossip is one of my favorite hobbies, along side knitting and doing the dishes. (Pause) Okay, I’m lying. I rarely cry, hate soap operas and gossiping, and buy into most ideas of what “macho” men are supposed to do. There are a few “macho” things in which I don’t participate. One would be “hanging out with the guys.” I usually have one or two good friends (now that I am married, I have a good friend and wife in one). Getting together with a bunch of guys and drinking beer (another “macho” activity I avoid), talking about women, and complaining about your job is not what I was put on this earth to do. I was put here to hand out pamphlets that say “What?” on them.

A large activity of the macho set is watching sports. I myself can't really imagine anything more boring than watching a sporting event. I don't care what kind of sport, they are all boring. The one sport I can stand to watch, basketball, still denigrates into a boxing match every now and then. Hockey denigrates into a boxing match every other quarter or whatever time frame hockey operates under. If you love football, I am sorry for this next sentence, but you had to be told at some point. Football is the single most boring, idiotic, and cruel sport ever invented. It preys on the stupid and suckers them into thinking that a future in getting hurt makes sense. Boxing is the ultimate in stupid cruelties that they call a sport, but football disguises itself with strategy in order to make itself look like a sport with skill. One person has skill on the field and he is not actually on the field. He is on the side lines and calls himself the coach. It is as if he is a chess player who is playing with real people who really get hurt. What does he care? They are just pawns in his chess game.

The final “macho” item, though not the final of a complete list of machoisms of which I do not participate, is that being a man means not being able to control his want for sex, their rage, or their mouths. I have control over my body and my mind. A man that rapes a woman and says he just couldn’t control himself long enough to hear her saying “no” or a man that beats his wife and says that he just couldn’t control himself belongs in jail. On a smaller scale, the man who says whatever he pleases even when he knows it hurts or offends the women around him needs to live life in the shoes of a woman some time to appreciate their world. I realized long ago that women’s lives are much more in control and much more difficult than that of a man (except that whole getting beat up and ridiculed thing by other boys when you are younger). Women are more sophisticated than men, they live longer than men, and they deserve more respect than men. I have more to say on this issue (and probably will say more in my speech to the League of Women Voters), but not a lot of space left in this paragraph so I will stop the paragraph here. Well, on second thought, maybe I will stop it here.

Being macho seems more about proving to yourself that you are macho than actually about being macho. All the things that make up being “macho” are in your mind. I am sure many people considered the Village People macho and they may have been. They were all the male stereotypes of what being macho was all about. “YMCA” is sung at just about every sporting event and so is “We are the Champions” by Queen. I guess being “macho” is the new gay. “Macho pride” will be the new chant of the macho people. Who am I to judge? If they want to be loud and proud to be “happy” and macho, I say more power to them. Don’t expect me to march in the Macho Pride Parade, though. It’s just not my thing.