Dear __,
There’s a guy on the Facebook who pops up once in a while. It’s an older clip, looks like, and he looks kind of like a creepy version of the old Verizon commercial guy, the can-you-hear-me-now guy. Which is why he seems like a rather unlikely guy to be asked the question, Do you care what women want?
Seriously, this thick-glassed jabroni doesn’t exactly scream “lady’s man.” His answer– in front of what I think is a live audience– is what I consider interesting, though, spot-on (says this self-professed ladies man), thus occasioning this invite to you to our table.
No, he says, I don’t care what women want. I care what they respond to. He says it all without stuttering. Shit, maybe he is a ladies man. This guy’s confidence is undeniable
Hmm, I say. To myself.
It’s pretty much the nature of the conversation we seek to have with you.
For starters there’s the more polished, polite, “evolved” side of our natures. That one we learn in books, through experience, in school, at home (if our parents are worth a shit), which, now that I think about it, makes it more nurture than nature. Anyway, it’s the one that, say, provides us with a filter. Political correctness, I might argue, is such a filter, watching our p’s and q’s, furthermore being aghast when someone doesn’t watch their p’s and q’s and then having a name at the ready–racist, sexist, homophobe–the evolved appear to know these quite fluently.
And.
And it’s the part of our nature that says something like, “Man, girl, you’re a real idiot if you don’t commit to a relationship with that guy. Shit, he’s got everything– looks, charm, attentive, handy, a great father, financially secure, confident, makes you wet with desire—everything you say you want in a man. Damn, girl, you don’t say ‘I do’ to a guy like that. You say, ‘Hell fuckin’ yeah, I do!’ He’s exactly what you want.” Yet.
Yet it’s like the creepy Verizon lookalike guy says: but what does she respond to?
And what she responds to is a perfect segue into the second part of our dual nature, the visceral part. The part of us that often makes no goddamn sense (until you delve into it more). Of course home girl should pursue and try and keep the one who she says she wants. The man who checks off all the boxes. As irrational as she might be by not doing that, though, she is only responding to what her viscera commands her to respond to. Women are so damn complicated, so it’s only a guess, but fuck it here goes: Yeah, but he doesn’t give me the butterflies.
Butterflies, what the.
Butterflies.
They are as irrational as it possibly gets. But we can’t–we mustn’t!–scoff or discount butterflies. They’re in nature, specifically ours, and are thus valid.
For the record, we are concerned at Things Men Carry with the current temperature. We are very concerned. Things Men Carry does not endorse, for example, bombing Colombia. Want to end the war on drugs? Simple: don those same masks, agents, and raid every coke party in America some rando weekend. Put them all in jail. What a novel concept, offing the demand side. You and I know that’s not going to happen, though. Our so-called war on drugs is much more insidious than that.
We’re also holding out for our DOGE rebate. Fuck sake, Argentina’s getting one.
And if that’s not “wasteful,” a two hundred fifty million dollar ballroom in the White House–come again?
And even this one, in which our own Defense Sec said so himself, that if you can meet the standards, you can serve. Question, then: has every transgender member in our military flunked these standards to deny themselves the opportunity to serve their country? We checked. It’s a healthy number according to Google. Let ’em serve, goddamnit!
And other stuff.
So yeah, we’re on it, promise. We just think that there’s not enough deference given to butterflies by esteemed individuals like you. These same butterflies which we submit are still about half of what the country is responding to, including ladies (and black and brown).
I guess we wonder what you think about all that.
-tmc
Things Men Carry 