Real Men (II)

But most of all, I do this website because I love being a man. Amongst other things, I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools -- all the things that being a man entails. All this stuff gives me pleasure.
Kim De Toit states his blog's raison d'etre.

By these standards I'd have to consider myself a failure as a man; sure I like beautiful women and I'd like to have more time to get seriously into them and I have difficulty ignoring politics. But I can live without the guns, warfare, hunting and power tools. Sports I'll happily ignore most of the time too. All I know if self-defence is that it's all in the posture; if you know how to walk down the streeet or stand at a bar looking like someone who shouldn't be fucked around with, you won't be fucked around with. You can learn this in a couple of hours, which makes all the extra time spent mastering Osoto Gari superfluous. By Kim's standards, I'm probably one of those girly-men and I doubt that my rusty ability to perform a calesita would do much to change his mind. Dancing the Tango doesn't appear to be something real men do.

I do know a couple of people who get a lot closer than I do to Kim's idea of real men. They're not much into guns - but few Australians are, so I think we might have to make allowances for local conditions and cultural differences there. Hunting doesn't grab them either, but they are into other outdoorsy stuff. They have a big serious real man's dog - an Alaskan Malamute, 30 odd kilos of pure muscle, with a set of jaws that could break every bone in your hand. The sort of dog that has to be put in its place firmly - and kept there.

Where my idea of a power tool is that it's something you borrow, or hire, when there's really no alternative to fitting new window locks, these are people who believe that power tools are worth owning. Because they use them. They build pieces out of real timber, not MDF hidden under a veneer of wood-grain Laminex.

Pick a fight with either of them, and you're likely to get an earful of Nike; they're serious about self-defence, but they don't much like warfare. Who does?

They've been following the rugby world cup pretty avidly; they barrack for the All Blacks.

They do volunteer work with the State Emergency Service. So, when it gets windy and rainy here in Melbourne, they're likely to get paged to go out to deal with a tree that's fallen through someone's roof or into the road. So they get to work with seriously heavy power tools, chainsaws, portable generators and pumps. And drive big trucks.

In short, they have a lot of the interests and qualities that Kim thinks it takes to be a real man. It's unlikely that they'll ever meet Kim. If they did, there'd be an interesting discussion of Kim's views on real men and the proper relationship between the sexes, but I don't think Kim would enjoy it.

They're both women.