Already the alarm bells would be ringing in the sensitive psyche of any Generation Y reader of this blog, given that I would appear to be on the verge of EXTREME SEXISM for implying something negative about a male's feminine side (not to mention the fact that I am judgementally conforming to binary gender norms), were it not for the fact that your average Generation Y reader would have got no further than reading the second sentence above, before his attention span cracked and the lack of any visual stimulus within the text would have sent him thumbing to You Tube to watch a 30 second video of a skateboarding cat. Because reading is long.
Anyway, before even the older readers amongst you start to fear the onset of some derogatory remarks towards womankind that come straight from an episode of On the Buses, let me just state that the whole concept of being 'in touch with one's feminine side' is something to be applauded. But there is a line in my mind. And it is the crossing of that line that prompts me to smile wryly and cast the following aspersions.
The archetypal fashionable young male of today wears no socks. He chooses to parade a trapezium of smooth tanned skin between the hem of his mum's leggings and his slip-on shoes. That smooth tanned skin remains hairless from the bottom of his skinny legs to the top of his overly-toned, gym-sculpted, triangular torso. Onto any shaving cuts on his chest (and, I daresay, that area where he has only recently been able to achieve some piliferous sprouting) he splashes some after-shave. His beard (How DO they manage such bushes at that age? It took me years) and the perimeter of his hair have been meticulously clipped by a barber.... sorry, a tonsorial artist, who spent two hours applying the techniques of pruning competition bonsai trees to the task of giving the lad a fucking hair cut. But that task was tolerable for our young chap, because the beauty parlour's policy is to encourage customers to play on their phones during grooming and turn some shit music up loud, so it feels more like a cocktail bar, especially when the prick spins the clippers and throws a comb into the air behind his back like a BIG, BLOODY PONCE.
(Pauses to calm down)
Like I said, in preparing to denounce all this metrosexual bollocks as being not just a skinny-jeaned leg-step over the line of my tolerance, but a gymnast's back-flip into the gender-beyond far past it, I reflected that I am equally guilty of doing things that compromise my own manliness.
To start with, I sit down to wee FAR too often. Whatever your political sensibilities are, in respect to gender identity, no one can deny that women sit down to piss and men stand up. In my defence, I sit down for the following reasons:
- If it is the middle of the night, I am too sleepy to stand and need to remain half-asleep
- Also, in that semi-soporific state, I am more likely than not to have a wayward aim
- Other times, the risk of needing a poo makes it a safer bet, so I consider sitting down to tinkle no different to putting on a seat belt in the car
Undermining my lavatorial masculinity further is my habit of avoiding urinals in public loos and making for a cubicle. Accusations of self-consciousness and inadequacy fear - should a better man stand aside me - are met with my assertion that urinals create splashback, as I once discovered at work whilst wearing a light grey suit.
For several years now I have ceased to drink beer at home and my Friday and Saturday night-in routines include one G&T followed by several glasses of prosecco. Because I prefer the taste, OK? Not that I'd drink one in a pub, I drink beer in pubs, because I'M NOT A BLOODY PANSY (in public).
The division of labour in my house leaves me with the laundry, dusting, hoovering and washing up /loading of the dishwasher. You'd have to go back a long way for anyone to consider those tasks as a woman's, but I sometimes find that the satisfaction I get from them and the nagging of my wife in respect to having to tidy up after her is just a bit removed from the cinematic action heroes that most boys idolise growing up.
And finally, I hate football. I've given up going in order to paint (pictures, not walls like real men) OK, again, not a key indicator on its own, as it has been years since women were alienated from football and since men who professed not to like it were met with the raised eye-brow that implied suspiciousness of their sexuality; but when you add it all together you get this:
A 48 year old man who sits to pee, who prefers prosecco to beer and who has given up spending his Saturdays following the Arsenal to do housework and paint pictures. So who am I to call our male youth unmanly? (Let's just hope there isn't another war, eh.)
