Smoke and Bounce

11:11 pm EST

"COSMETIC? GIMME A BREAK!"

Straight outta Eden, and ain't nothing changed: "... In the sweat of your face you will eat high-fructose corn syrup until you return to the grocery store, for out of it you were taken. For a username you are, and to the internet you will return." (GENESIS 3:19)

What good is a man today? I feel small and confused. Take away currency and what good is a man? Does he make a better driving instructor than a woman? Is he a stand-up comedian at his best? Shall we blame his practical worthlessness on government welfare policies? Really? The government? No, I think not. Here's an alternative conjecture: the new and irreversible context of human lethality.

For millions of years, humans survived eating raw game on the savannahs of East Africa, after permanently coming down from the trees of the continent's dwindling jungles. The vegetation gathered by females was a less significant portion of the diet than most dilettantes of paleoanthropology think. (The invention of fire for cooking was far more important for vegetarian edibility than meat, and was invented way, way later than weaponry.) Females stayed at home while the males hunted prey not because they did their part procuring food or because they were less skilled in the arts of violence, but because as the generations went on the offspring took more years to raise and protect. Compared to even the most intelligent other species of mammal, human babies are virtually still embryonic the day they are delivered from the womb. What's more (though beside the gist of this essay) the female hips were widening as prenatal craniums grew in size, and wider hips increase torque for the runner -- narrower-hipped men ran more quickly, developed longer endurance, and made the best hunters.

Males killed; females killed at home defending the family and tribe from predators. Thusly we reach the explanation of modern worthlessness of the male. Bear with me. Today, what is NOT the home? If you live in a quiet suburb, is it an inner-city ghetto? Not really -- both inhabitants' toilets connect to the same water-treatment facility. And hunting is recreation, not a genuine way of life or method of survival, and dogs and guns make the practice easy for both sexes to the point of equality. If statistically women hunt less than men still, it's only because of lesser native instinct than men. But that doesn't mean human females kill less than men -- they kill more. Their lethal instincts haven't gone anywhere; they've been empowered and are in greater demand. The reverse of hunting is violent defense of the home. And again, today, what is not the home? The majority of humanity on the planet now reside in cities. Backyards, movie theaters, highways, sidewalks, department stores, amusement parks, factories, station wagons, libraries, restaurants, hospitals, gyms, coffee shops, cruise ships, dance clubs, and so on -- these are domesticated environments, not wilderness preserves. A city is woman's turf.

So where are the blood and corpses; the mass graves? Where are the amputees? Where are the weapons? ... Aw, come on, people: this is an easy one -- you're not being serious with me, are you? Jesus Christ, man! What the hell are those grass stains on your shoes? And aren't you supposed to scrub the shower tiles this weekend? Isn't your kid scheduled for his flu-shot Tuesday?

Antiseptic genocide is still genocide. And how fashionable it is these days! You used to kill lions, woolly rhinos, mammoths and great Irish elk, and now you're murdering the colony of bacteria at the bottom of your toilet bowl with "cleanser" because your wife is scared the microscopic critters will jump into your kid's rectum and kill him. Verily, I say to you men: your woman would assassinate her own shadow if she could. Face it: a man mowing his lawn is both deluded and pussy-whipped, and if you outsource the "duty" to a Mexican immigrant, your wife is just a garden-variety slave-master. Even some of the most familiar practices of human bodily hygiene are just necessary responses now to the forfeiting of natural biological self-regulation of microecology; your underarm hair exists in the first place to increase surface area from which you can emit an aphrodisiac and racial odor, and the parallel fetidness of your underarm exists only because of the natural selection of bacteria you've accelerated with deodorant. Of course, dear Smoke and Bounce readers, you won't hear these facts from the medical-industrial complex, because there's no money in it for them. They would like to perpetuate your wife's sublimated fears of long-extinct baby-eating pythons for as long as they can, you men, and keep you going back just as they do to your shitty job day after day to pay for the weapons of the war on wilderness.

Brothers: Your gender may be getting hornier and more irresponsible, but your prison cells are getting more comfortable and a hell of a lot smaller. I don't think I've ever heard anything more mythical, more absurdly self-deceptive, more plainly unfunny and ridiculous than the joke about your wife's "ball-and-chain" in the kitchen. The real bitch, man, is you. Think on that next time you watch some stupid action movie.