NEW ORLEANS - NOW: I have always had more female friends than the average guy. That's because women are cuter and because I like women and they seem to like me. Just this week, a woman of friend of twenty years standing sent me an e-mail joke that insists chocolate is a vegetable. The joke concluded by saying that if you sent it to four women friends you'd automatically lose ten pounds.
"Hey, wait a minute!" I wrote back. "It said send it to four women friends!"
Her response was that I should consider myself an "honorary" woman
Well... Being an honorary Irishman I don't mind. I like being considered an honorary Serb. But being called an honorary woman is tough on a guy looking for his next date.
On the other hand, I've written more about women than anybody else here at G21, so it's probably fitting that I get to kick off this Holiday Special edition on the fair gender.
My Portuguese brother, Dove's, wife Nilda comments that I have "a strong feminine side" to my personality. Dragana and I are in near-daily contact, sharing our romantic dreams about life, history (think Romuliana) and love. My friend Max sent me a joke e-mail saying that she aspires to be an "Ornament," with some monied guy paying for her manicures, pedicures, masseurs, tanning rooms, personal trainers and designer fashions --- not to mention a hefty weekly spending allowance just to be on his arm. Then, of course, there is my long, off-and-on "conversation" with my First Love, Lynda. Over time, I've written about women who have loved and hated me (many times they are the same woman) and women I have loved or wanted to love.
So what can I tell you about women? Well:
- Women are practical -- despite the disparaging jokes -- because economically and biologically (as in CHILD-BIRTH and the future of our children) they have to be.
- Women are emotionally honest. It might just have to do with that "nurturing" thing. Women have to provide in ways that make what we call a "home." That means that they tend to be considerate of the feelings and especially the needs of others. They're just hard-wired that way.
- Women are competitive. (Yes, I know that you normally hear that about men. But what do you think "cattiness" is all about? Why do you think a woman resents appearing at a party wearing the same dress as another woman? Charlie the Tuna has been right about one thing: Women don't preen for men, they preen to outshine other women. End of story.)
- Women appreciate beauty and symmetry. That's what the make-up and fashion angle is about, friends. Not to mention why us guys ALWAYS consult them about color-matching.
- Women understand suffering and pain. That's just a given. (See CHILD-BIRTH.) And the fact that too many men want "their" women to devote their lives to those men's dreams --- while facing the fact that the woman in question might be kicked to the curb, as Charlie the Tuna says, to be replaced by an Ornament once the man's dream is achieved...
All of the foregoing makes being a man who might be considered, in the most benign sense, a "Ladies' Man" an interesting position to live with/in/for. My multiplicitous female friends each challenge me to reach for the stars and each claim that I should hold out for that Last Woman who will "appreciate" my attributes. They down-play the urgency of my personal Biological Imperative and the raging of my testosterone. They chide me for being attracted to "dangerous" and damaged women and bimbos.
I listen to the advice of these women with a grain of salt, remembering that --- though they know men --- they can never know what it's like to wake up every day with a woodie, i.e., what it's like to be a man.
After all, the woodie is saying:
"Good morning, Rod. What have you done during the last 24 hours to make me happy? What?!? We're sleeping alone AGAIN? What's wrong with this picture?"
I joke that I get older every year and the women always stay young. At least the ones that catch my eye...(See TARGET-RICH ENVIRONMENT)
You will probably note that we have the photo of a statue of the goddess Athena, Apollo's twin, who sprang fully realized from the head of Zeus, on our cover this week. She was one of the archetypes of womanhood in ancient Greece, the lodestar of Western civilization. It was a tough choice deciding whether G21 should go with Athena, Minerva, Ceres, Persephone, Venus, or Hera. Athena, the mother of the great city of Athens, seemed to fit.
Some of you would determine by this that I've always been a Pedestal type of guy. And, I'll confess, you are probably about half-right. I recognize the inherent problems such a stance includes, but I also see lots of guys I know --- mostly married guys --- who don't understand how much more they ascribe to that impulse than ANY single guy (like myself) ever would or could.
And maybe that's why I have always had too many women friends. I can be as catty as any of them, and remind them about the raunchy side of the male mentality -- AND how, sometimes, they underestimate us. (We pretend not be able to do or understand certain things if the situation calls for it.) But, we also know, that bottom-line women ALWAYS choose us, not vice-versa, and women know they have what we can't live without.
