From: 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon
Subject: Guys in trouble (long)
Date: 9 Jan 1993 10:10 CST
Organization: University of Houston-Downtown
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41A   

Reproduced without permission
from the Houston Chronicle, Friday. Jan 1, 1993

Not a very good year for all of us guys-again
----------------------------------------------
by Garrison Keillor

[...]
  Guys are in trouble. Manhood, once an opportunity for achievement, now seems 
like a problem to be overcome.
  Plato, St. Francis, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi- you don't find 
guys of that caliber today.
  What you find is terrible gender anxiety, guys trying to be Mr. Right, the 
man who can bake a cherry pie, go shoot skeet, come back, toss a salad, 
converse easily about intimate matters, cry if need be, laugh, hug, be 
vulnerable, perform passionately that night and the next day go off and 
lift them bales onto that barge and tote it. 
  Being perfect is a terrible way to spend your life and guys are not equipped 
for it anyway.  It is like a bear riding a bicycle: He can be trained to 
do it for short periods but he would rather be in the woods doing what 
bears do there. 
  Girls had it better from the beginning.  Boys can run around fighting 
wars for made-up reasons with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh and arguing 
about who was dead, while girls play in the house with their dolls, 
creating complex family groups and solving problems through negotiation and 
role-playing.  
  Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live and adult life, 
would you guess?
  Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls, don't kid yourself.  
Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence 
hits a guy like a bad drug experience. 
  You are crazed with madness.  Your body is filled with chemicals of rage 
and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. 
You come away terribly wounded, feeling that life is unknowable.
  Women know about life and about how to get along with others and are 
sensitive to beauty and can yell louder.  They know all about guys, 
having been exposed to guy life since forever, and guys know nothing about 
girls except that they want one desperately.
  Which gender is better equipped to manipulate the other?
  Men adore Women.  Women look at men and chuckle.  That's because women 
are the makers of life and we aren't.  We will never be able to carry life 
within our bodies, never be able to breast feed.
  We get more than our share of loot and we are, God knows, handsome devils 
and irresistible, and yet our role in procreation basically is to get crazy 
and howl and spray our seed in all directions.
  Some guys carry the seeds of adolescence in our bodies all our lives.  We 
go along being cool and winsome, saying incredibly witty things, one day we 
wake up middle aged and full of loneliness, our life seems like one long 
wasted afternoon and we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run offf 
with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life 
look at us in disgust.
  Men need women to tell the truth to.  It is a main featrure of sexual 
life where guys are concerned.  Because guys don't talk to each other.  
Never tell a fellow guy you feel bad.  It will embarrass him and he won't 
speak to you for months.
[.....]
---------------------

  Would you say that our country Lebanon would have been better off had he 
been a she instead than a he ?

alex
Xref: sparky soc.culture.lebanon:5553 soc.culture.magyar:993