Squashed

Joan Rivers

“They also find smart and ambitious women threatening.” - neurosophy

I’ll let you in on a little secret.  There are very few worthwhile things women can do that don’t threaten men’s masculinity.  In fairness, masculinity is one of those BS societal constructions that is only valuable to the extent that it is amusing or serves as some sort of relational heuristic.  Back in prehistoric times the day the man with the largest genitalia got the right of way when it came to narrow cave entrances and got the first laugh so the other cavemen would know if a joke was funny.  In exchange, if a saber-tooth tiger attacked the group, it was Mr. Kielbasa’s job to chase it away, or, more likely, get eaten by it.  Then the dubious honor passed on to the next-best-endowed.  (It wasn’t a very well thought out system.)

Then one day the nerdy guy who sat in the corner of the cave invented both pants and bluffing.  Nobody knew who got to sit on the shiny rock and who got stuck with the mud puddle.  So they invented a series of stupid indicators to serve as a proxy.  They called the whole thing masculinity.  Who can burp the loudest?  Who can break rocks on their foreheads?  Who can drink the most fermented goats milk without dying?  Some of these traditions are still around.  The point is that men have a very complex and somewhat stupid system to determine who does what and when.  If a group of single guys sees an attractive girl at the bar, the most masculine of them approaches her.  You might think this is a hold over of the right-of-way-laughs-first part.  It’s not.  It has more to do with the sabertoothed tiger.

I actually had a serious point, but I got sidetracked.  It involved that ultimate insult, “You play ball like a girl.”  The truth is, most guys don’t play ball any better than many girls.  And it’s not just playing ball.  By and large we know that girls are a match for us at pretty much anything.  Thus the reality of equality in everything meets the cultivated image of superiority in everything (when other guys are looking) and men feel threatened.  In fact, things that don’t make men feel threatened (including anything pink and fuzzy,  impractically tiny dogs, excessively objectifying clothing, half-sweaters, and those sort of puffy, sort of pleated skirts that were in style a few years back) are only unthreatening because they are confusing.  How do you compete with a pink pom-pom at the back of a pen?  Do you get a bigger pink pompom or do you get a pen without a pink pom-pom?  Do you want a brighter pink or a paler pink?  We don’t even have the metric.  We understand things like bigger, louder, sharper, faster, taller, and more expensive.  Froofier?  Not as much.

As I was saying, I was going somewhere with this, but I’ve long since lost the scent.  Next time somebody posts something about men being intimidated by something, I’ll give it another shot.