What Some Men Are Thinking: A Man-ifesto

I'm thinking of starting my own Men's Rights Movement, a kind of Man's Lib. There must be one out there already, but I am aiming for a few very specific rights. Certain duties are pushed upon us only because we are men. We are bound by some archaic cultural laws without our knowing it, and it's time for some changes. I think men should be allowed the choice to:

(1) Be afraid of Spiders - Okay, I admit this is not such a powerful, impressive opening-- not exactly, "We the people..." is it? But this is a biggie. Women have asserted themselves in the world in recent decades as stronger, professionally capable and to be taken seriously as people of leadership and courage. Until there's a spider in the living room. Our kind, gentle nurturing wives, mothers and sisters want one thing, and that's to have someone smash that spider until it's just a smear along the side of a rolled-up issue of Cosmopolitan. They suddenly morph from Nurse/Teacher/Mother into Emperor Ming the Merciless!

Except this time, Ming is tugging at your arm, pointing excitedly to a corner and saying, "Over there, Kill-it, Kill-iiiiiit!" in that urgent, squeaky voice you also use when, say, the toilet is overflowing (more on that later).

You try to persuade Empress Ming that:
(a) Said arachnid is about the size of this period (.)
(b) You can't fatally bash the magazine on a glass table.
(c) And what has the spider done to you, anyway? Can't I just scoop it up and toss it outside? Didn't you once tell me Toby Macguire was attractive?

Your argument is fated to fall flat because it is still your traditional role as the man to defend against, and destroy any threat to your you and yours, no matter how small, or disgusting (Article CXII, Subsection B(ii), Line iv, Aisle 5 by the cheap noodles). Most spiders aren't at all scary, but any woman (by which I mean "my wife") will say you have to kill all of them, even the kind you played with as a kid (and I'm counting the plastic ones here).

(2) Not know how to fix something - This is customarily the hallmark of a real man of our modern times, perhaps akin to how women are all unrealistically expected to know how to cook. If for example, you don't know how to replace the traction winged semi-flangular gasket on a T-4071B style Goodenrude motor sub-assembly with the flux capacitor at half-mast, you're supposed to feel less of a man (and more of a squirrel, perhaps) than the next fellow.

Here's a little secret: many of us guys (not just me), when we lift open the hood of a car, do not know what to do! You could take a blender, a radio and a cake mixer, smash up the casings and dump the whole mess into a cardboard box along with some snorkel tubes, and it will look exactly the same to us as what's under the hood. We'd look at it, sort of prod at it with a stick for a while, and to buy time we yell out the same thing : "Try starting it again!" Then we resume watching this episode of Broken Appliances of the Crypt, waiting to see if any of the dead parts will somehow begin twitching back to life.

Some of you men might have been tempted to cry out, "Hold on a minute! That's wrong! The T-4071B doesn't even come with a traction gasket fitting! Those were phased out in 1984, the same year the Kansas City Royals had a change of uniform design-- as well you know! What's going on here, were you giving out some sort of trick question?"
To which I must reply, "Uh, yes?" and back away nervously until I'm ready to proceed to the next item on the list. (Are they gone yet? Okay...)

(3) Travel Light - There are times in men's lives --it could last whole days at a time-- that we do not feel the urge to pick up something heavy. When we travel, we pack the essentials: jeans, shirt, underwear, toothbrush and wallet. Then we stuff all these in a small knapsack we've owned since high school. Our female traveling companions only see that:

(a) They have packed their wedding dress, prom dress, hair dryer, cosmetologist, tarot card reader, tortilla-making kit, rice cooker, three fully-stocked display shelves from the closest drugstore, field equipment for half the Unied States Navy, and a flat iron.
(b) The men's hands are free.

This will happen multiple times, depending on how many female traveling companions you have with you at the moment. You could be the only man traveling with a group of 15 women, each with her own new set of luggage and shipping crates each the size of a Mini Cooper, and all of these strong, independent, professional women would like the gentlemen to carry her things for her. Of course, it might just be me; I have the tragic (cough! cough!) case of frequently (cough! cough!) being mistaken for a powerful champion bodybuilder, being the short, asthmatic (I said, "cough-cough!") Filipino guy that I am (I don't want to brag here, but I'm almost the size of an average American in the eighth-grade).

There you have it: my testosterone manifesto, my assertion of comfortable manhood, free from the stereotypes that bind our civilization and push us into roles that may no longer be appropriate for this day and age. You might also be tempted to come to the following conclusion: "Hey wait a minute! This guy's just being lazy! He's doesn't want to carry anything, fix anything, or even rid his own house of insects!"
To that I must reply, "Hey, I thought you left already! Besides, spiders aren't insects, they're arachnids, so nyah-nyah-nyaaaah!"