Actual Man's Work for Actual Men

(Thanks to Sam and Grookey for their contributions to this post.)

When I was a boy, neither I nor anyone I knew ever said, "When I grow up, I want to be the kind of man who excels at killing spiders." Some of us may have enjoyed killing or otherwise utilizing spiders for our own youthful purposes, but our fantasies of grown-up freedom and manhood were probably not built around dead arachnids. Secret agents, pirates, and superheroes do not kill spiders -- they are killers of men. They have adventures; they buckle swashes; they conduct daring night-time missions. That's what most of us wanted. We wanted an adult life filled with missions.

Then we grew up, and we looked around and realized that we weren't buckling any swashes. There was a distinct lack of espionage. For most of us -- those of us who are not professional daredevils -- we spend exactly zero minutes of our week jumping cars over other cars, or over any objects at all. Where did our missions go?

It turns out that real men do have missions, just not the sort we expected. Our hazy boyhood ideas about What It's Like to Be a Man resolve into an adult reality of killing spiders (but not for recreation), wiping up after dependent organisms (cats, dogs, human children) and, every now and then, if we're lucky, actually using Man Skills to fix things.

I once watched the father of an ex-girlfriend cleaning approximately one kittens-worth of hair out of a bathtub drain. I looked at him, on his knees in front of the tub, drain plug removed, left sleeve rolled up, and thought, "This is being a man."

Our assignments come to us on chore lists, in verbal requests or from our own conscientious observation that something is broken and should be fixed. (This last case is rare for me, much to Mrs. Workerbot's dismay.) They're usually pretty quotidian, but, if we use our imaginations, we can add a little excitement back into the situation. "Soldier, there is a serious pile of crap out there and you're the only one who can clean it up. Here is your weapon." Or, "This is a critical operation: recaulk the bathtub." Or, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go into the basement and re-balance the washing machine. If you are unable to complete this mission, the machine will self-destruct."

Most of us trade the imagined masculinity of our childhood fantasies for the real -- and, in my opinion, important and virtuous -- masculinity of adult life. The glamor disappears, and in its place we have to be able to find satisfaction in jobs well done (a phrase that shows up in my post on the Novelty Trap, as well, and not accidentally). And that's okay.  Because otherwise, as Grookey pointed out to me, we'd be Somali pirates.