Rachel Thompson, @RachelintheOC, is a very successful Amazon author who is currently working on a book themed 'Mancode'. She has mentioned it in tweets, and it started me thinking about how differently men and women can think some times.
I've known women like Rachel all my life. They're attractive, smart, and hold men accountable, which makes them scary. Being held accountable means we not only have to think about what we're doing, but also what we're saying. They demand that we think in a higher gear than neutral, which gives us a headache. As we age and learn, we become adept at not really listening unless key words pop up in the white noise that's passing directly through one ear and out the other. Words like, "My mother is -", or just a single word like, "beer", or "sex". Words that relate to comfort, gratification, food. Men are very basic animals.
Anyway, I started thinking about Rachel's mancode. It sounds like she has a manual that explains men. This is a frightening thing in the hands of a woman. I don't have a manual. I don't know a single guy who does. As I've waded through the years, I've often thought a manual would have been nice to refer to while in the middle of experiencing a testosterone disaster, or saying just about the worst thing I possibly could to smooth over something that I did.
Man's code, concerning women, is not something that we (men) all got together and agreed upon as the coolest way to deal with women. Women are actually the ones who instigated and formed the philosophy that we use to maintain a relationship that we can cope with, and hopefully understand, though understanding it isn't as important as coping with it.
About the time of puberty, when a budding young man discovers the wonders inside his pants, he should be able to reach down there one day and pull out a manual instead of what he usually pulls out. The manual should be a publication of nature. It would just bloom between our legs on our fourteenth birthday. It would be a manual that justifies the degree of all the stupid things he's going to do according to the level of testosterone that poor sucker is carrying around, because from this moment on he's going to think in delusional realms, such as, seeing some beautiful woman smile in his direction and thinking, "She wants me, bad.", when in reality she was grimacing from the sun being in her eyes, or, (teenage reasoning), saying to his self, "I can take him.", when looking at any other male, when in reality he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. Let's face it, male hormones are a curse that we must suffer through, and what we need from women is sympathy, their warm naked bodies pressed against us in understanding.
So, if nature was fair, when a boy in adventurous discovery thrusts his hand into his pants for his hourly check to make sure his gear hadn't gone anywhere, and pulls out a paperback manual, he would know that he has a guide that will explain why his brain will be working in direct harmony with his penis from this moment up to his death and possibly beyond.
If we were a truly advanced species, there would be a second volume that would sprout from his crotch a few years later entitled, 'How to understand women and respond to the code they expect men to live by.' Okay, not much of a title, but - I'm a man.
Women think that men are about as sensitive as saw dust, but I'm here to tell you that isn't true. We're just sensitive about different things. I'll give you a for instance.
I was out to dinner one night with three women. One was my girlfriend, one my business partner, and one was another artist that I worked with. The three of them had started talking about what rutting pigs men are with great enthusiasm. I sat there quietly shoveling fettuccine Alfredo into my face and guzzling beer in acceptable to all males fashion, keeping my thoughts quiet, as my experience had taught me when in the face of danger, such as a group of women or any other preoccupied pack animal that has formed into a hunting party.
These women were vicious and unbending as they thrashed my gender with their viper tongues and sliced us to pieces with their sharp words, laughing with malice at what they saw as our shortcomings and barbaric ways, completely ignoring the fact that I, a man, was sitting in their midst.
I couldn't take it any longer. My gender needed a spokesman and I rallied to the cause as any red blooded American male must do.
I guzzled down the rest of my beer before speaking, and to show that men could be sensitive, civilized, even delicate, I covered my mouth before belching. In a man's mind, that was a sensitive, thoughtful courtesy to the ladies. In a group of men, nobody would care.
"Excuse me, ladies.", I said. "But you may not have noticed that I'm sitting here and you're talking about my gender, my planetary brotherhood."
They all went silent for a moment, which I found remarkable from a group of women, before they burst out laughing and said, "Oh, John, we're not talking about you. You're different."
Different?? What did they mean, I'm different? Am I not a member of my gender? Am I a eunuch? Are they insinuating that I'm gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
A threat to my manhood had been suggested. The red flag of maleness raised in my subconscious. I suddenly felt the hair on my body thickening, my arms stretched and knuckles dragged on the ground, my forehead sloped and eyebrow ridge thickened as my voice dropped two octaves and I said, "Are you saying that I'm gay?"
"No, no, of course not. You're just different." They assured me, but I wasn't assured. I never did get a straight answer from them. To this day, when I think of that night, a rattling of insecurity ripples through my manliness. I had just experienced woman code, and didn't have a clue how to deal with it, or understand how they came up with it. It was a thought process that could have been beamed down from the Orion galaxy, yet it came from my species.
Mancode is pretty simple, really. It's basically keeping a woman content enough to leave him alone with a beer when he's watching a game. Men's lives are pretty easy these days. Imagine what our ancient forefathers went through.
Better yet, imagine the women. Women are who really created civilization. Men were quite content going out on hunting parties with the boys and trying to jump women when they were bent over picking wild vegetables. A warm fire in the cave at night and what ever fermented drinks they had in those days, and I guarantee they had something, was fine with them. Booze was probably the only thing that cave man invented without women's influence.
I figured out the powerful influence that women had on civilization when I shared a cabin with a buddy of mine in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. This was a man's cabin. It didn't have any electricity, running water or a restroom. We were content to do our cooking on a wood burning stove, which works very well, by-the-way. We did build a water system from an underground creek and put a faucet and sink in the kitchen, but that was all we really needed for convenience. We had kerosene lamps for light, which is all a man needs, since putting on make-up isn't in our routine - - well, most of us.
When ladies came over and wanted to use the restroom, we pointed to the shovel with the toilet paper roll on the handle near the back door.
"Take that shovel and toilet paper - go out the back door about one hundred feet and you will see a fallen redwood tree. Dig a hole and hang your butt over the tree." Sometimes I couldn't resist and would add, "Oh, and remember to watch out for snakes." That's something that only men would think is funny - totally against the woman code, and a completely stupid thing to say, because not a single woman ever used our shovel. Not even after we explained the beautiful view they would get of Lexington Dam and the bay area from where they sat. What was even worse, is they never spent the night and would usually leave soon after the rest room request.
We decided if we were going to get women to spend the night, we needed a restroom, and not just any restroom, like a nice simple outhouse, which is easy to make, but something nice - civilized. Women had to walk into this room and subconsciously see that we were not just a couple of horny mountain men swinging through the trees like a couple of apes, which is exactly what we were.
We designed a bathroom with a tub on a wide redwood platform, flushing toilet, a sink encased in redwood with brass handles, stained and beveled glass windows all around the room and even planned a mirror over the sink that was actually a glass mirror instead of a metal sheet.
We went to work, and what a project. Half way through it I realized that we were creating a civilized setting - a room from scratch, that wasn't just functional, but had ambiance, art - class. We weren't doing this for us, we were doing it for women, and not just any woman, but all women who came our way. That's when I came to the realization that this is how civilization started.
Fifty thousand years ago a woman said, "Look, Ork, this is the way it is. If you ever intend to get laid again, you had better build me a bathroom with running water and a flushing toilet.", and now we're so far removed from our natural setting by civilization, we no longer know what we're missing.
Even when we long for the good old days, we're not even sure what we're longing for because the trail back has been erased by woman code, and now it's substituted with a sports event on a box in an enclosed room where women can be sure that we are under control, and if they wish to display their power over us, they simply stand in front of the TV and pull a robe open and say, "I'm your sports event now, big boy." Okay, maybe it doesn't always work that way, but it always works on me.
We have civilization as women deemed it should be. Men may have built it, but it was a woman's idea. We live in a world created by woman code.
So, I thank Rachel for giving me something to write about tonight. It's been fun. You can find Rachel's newest book, A Walk in the Snark, at, http://t.co/4Hig4CO. I hope I have that right, but if I don't - hey, I'm a man.
All content - poems, posts & images - are ©2010 by John Evans. No permission is given to post, share, copy, print, e-mail, reproduce, distribute or link to. All Rights Reserved. Please contact John Evans at JohnEvansPoet.Com for licensing inquiries.
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