Wednesday, April 11, 2001
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Wednesday, April 11, 2001 |
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Lost: 1 more 'man thing' By BILLY MURPHY I feel as though I am in a meat market, being sized up and down. I shouldn't feel this insecure, yet it is shocking as I walk past and all the women seem to stare and secretly glance at what I have. I feel so cheap and disrespected as a person as I wander my way through. Are we not human beings anymore? As I stand shyly, some woman makes eye contact with me and starts to approach. I start to play with my wedding band, hoping she will move past me, but she doesn't. Her lips part and she says, "You come here often?" Before I can speak, she uses a line on me I'm sure few have heard before, "Which do you find more appealing, a carbide-tip rip saw or a steel-hardened crosscut blade.?" Too shy to answer, I make my escape. I hear her call as I walk away, "But you didn't even let me ask about router bits." Such is the life for the 21st century Home Depot shopper. Use to be, shopping for construction supplies was a man thing. In the old days, a woman didn't know the difference between a monkey wrench and a hack saw. Now I find myself asking the fairer sex their opinions on the pros and cons of oil-based paint as opposed to latex. I am not a Darwinian, but it seems females are evolving at a faster pace than us men. I have not been hanging out at Michael's Craft Supply lately and I don't have any desire to peruse Bath and Body Works anytime soon. Yet, hardware and automotive stores are hardly bastions of mono-gender sanctuary anymore. I guess the new evolution hit its stride about the time "that" woman fired the first shot on the Citadel and brought down the all-male college. Even though the battle was trenchant, resistance was futile and eventually the fort fell into enemy hands. But what nice hands they are. It is funny how motives are different for men and women. If a woman tries to break tradition, it is for her whole species, for the sake of the long term. For a man to seek out becoming the only of his gender among women, it is simply to increase his odds for sex. As a matter of fact, a man would not even want any other men following after. If I could have gotten into Agnes Scott College, I would have nailed the doors shut behind me. Home Depots are cropping up faster than Russell Crowe scandals and this is because of women. They are a valid shopping demographic. And as men see this as an infiltration of their turf, some would say women don't even give it a second thought nor recognize it as a battle. Maybe it's a competition with only one insecure team playing. But maybe, just maybe, it's like the stone-faced poker player who already knows he's going to win and just doesn't want to tip his hand. Women could never be that calculating, could they? I expect that one day the earth will be like those '60s B-flicks like "Amazon Women on Planet Z," where the women rule the planet and men are nothing more than slaves, used only for the sake of reproduction. But then again, I guess that would mean we both just got what we both wanted after all. [Visit Billy Murphy on the Internet at http://ebilly.net.]
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