supplicium post mortem

When it comes to men, I don’t like facial hair. I detest tattoos. I dislike guys who slob around all the time. Maybe you will understand what I do like if I say that this picture excites me so much that it takes my breath away:

by Michael Appleton

It is a beautiful photograph so redolent with masculinity that I feel I could resurrect an old-fashioned activity and swoon. You can smell the room, right? That gentlemen’s store smell.

When I was little, my father would take me with him on his Saturday morning errands: the dry cleaners, the tailor, the market, etc. We’d always stop at a certain men’s clothing store. It didn’t make bespoke suits, like the shop pictured above, but it did smell of men’s clothing. There was a long shoehorn I used to play with, a contraption that produced a flame for your cigarette or cigar, and some butterscotch hard candies. I don’t know what my father did at this shop every week; I think he just went to check stuff out and to talk to the men who ran it.

But the store in the picture: you wouldn’t go there merely to browse. In fact, the picture looks less like a store than like the corner of a man’s dressing room. I look at the dressing gown, the shirt, the jacket, and I think of the man who would wear them, how he would look in them, and how his body would look underneath them, when he took them off, or when I took them off him. I can smell his shaving foam: Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. I can see the jacket on him, or being taken off and hung over a study chair. I imagine his cuff links, being threaded through the cuffs, or unfastened to roll sleeves up to the elbow. I can feel the heat of his body through the dressing gown, his hardness when engaged in a kiss. The man who wears these clothes is a man who understands something essential about what it means to be masculine, and that something does not involve track suits or tattoos or vegetarianism or a lack of grooming, any more than it involves emotional illiteracy, sports obsession, extreme skepticism, or compulsive topping. I can’t find the words to describe the potent masculinity in this picture, but I am drawn to it inexorably, as the feminine has always been drawn to the masculine ever since opposites began to attract.

Yet, my kind of feminine does not possess a waspish waist, stiletto heels, makeup, or a flirty little personality. Mine rides a bike to church and there changes into stockings and a skirt knee-length or lower. Mine wears tomboy shorts in the garden, or gray flannel when summoned to a certain type of study. Mine can surrender to love while seeking surrender in return. It can work a Melita drill, cook pizza from scratch, scuba dive to 170 feet, make algebra lucid, or deal with children who suddenly start to cry. It isn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it craves this.

by Michael Appleton

English flannel with Twist? Yes. Please.

Today I had an early-morning encounter with a prototypical Dude (as previously discussed), but I remain stunned, somehow, by the astonishing waste of space this Dude was, by his utter squandering of manhood. Take as read the fact that narrow encounters do not summarize the whole person. Yadda yadda. Long story short, this guy was a douchebag.

It is 8 AM and I am at the corner park with the dogs. This is one of those miniscule urban spaces here in Gotham where you are allowed to have your dog off leash before 9 AM and after 9 PM. My dogs get along fine with others. They’re friendly, but they tend to do their own thing. One of my dogs, the Corgi, is crazy about ball. We stop at this parklette so he can get 10-15 minutes of solid ball fetching (“Quidditch practice”). This morning after three throws, a Bull Terrier takes the ball. Bummer! Since Corgi will fight for the snitch if necessary, I keep him away from Bull Terrier while its owner goes to get the ball back.

kinda like Dude, but these dudes bathe & trim their beardings * "Let's twitpic our dick pics."

BT’s dad was a Dude: 20-something, ungroomed-bearded, slobbily dressed in an I’m-too-ironic-to-try way, mellow, and sporting some kind of dog-treat fanny pack. Dude wanders in the direction of BT, but he’s not chasing BT, presumably because he knows BT will only treat such movement as a game of chase. So Dude keeps circling BT at a distance. Time passes.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

I realize we will not be able to play Quidditch at all even when we retrieve the ball.

More time passes.

I start cutting off BT’s escape routes, but Dude does not close in. I signal polite impatience by leashing up my dogs in preparation for departure. Dude still does not have BT in hand. Now, you may say I should have blown it off and left the ball there, but this is a really good ball. It is orange and rubber and fits in the flinger and costs more than $6. No way was I sacrificing the good ball to Dude and BT!

Finally, I capture BT, but although I am a fearless dog-dom, I didn’t fancy putting my hand into the jaws of an unfamiliar Bull Terrier. I stick my hand into the mouth of any dog I know, but I’m not an idiot. I let Dude extract the ball.

Dude tugs gently on the ball, but BT will not relinquish. Dude, rather than opening the dog’s jaws, keeps gently tugging, all the while telling the dog to “leave it.” I would call his command a gentle suggestion—you know, only if you feel like it, buddy. Clearly Dude has been to obedience class; he has the vocabulary. But despite the fact that Dude considers himself a real-deal pack leader, the type who watches The Dog Whisperer and thinks, I got that; despite this, the Bull Terrier is the undisputed leader of this pack. And BT declines to Leave the ball, even when Dude tries to push treats in its mouth. Minutes are ticking by as I stand there watching Dude repeat his flaccid command, Leave it. Eventually, Dude gets up the energy to touch his dog’s jaw and loosen its grip on our ball. Ball is free! We depart. Corgi is pissed.

And I am pissed. Yes, Dude ruined Quidditch practice, but it was more the principle of the thing. And the principle is this: how can you walk around like an adult man and act like such a weenie? Had he, in fact, already undergone surgical castration? But even this suggestion is an insult to women worldwide, for I would expect any female dog owner to be able to get a ball off her own dog faster than that. My dogs (corgi or wolfhound) would not dream of messing me about like that. We understand each other. If they misbehave, spankings get doshed out, and then we understand each other again. (I am not a dog abuser, before you get your knickers in a twist. I never hurt them. I do make my point in non-verbal terms.) But back to Dude. Dude thought that repeating a command over and over and over in a dull-as-dishwater voice, like a nagging parent, was the same thing as being a pack leader. Dude also appeared to think personal hygiene and grooming (of himself, not the dog) was for yuppies. Dude’s jeans sagged in the back—not gangsta style, but I’m-too-fucking-lazy-to-stay-up style—revealing a bit of graying underwear. And Dude’s graying underwear was brief-material, not boxer-material. There was something terrfically unwashed and limp about it all.

And while we are on the topic, let’s talk about men’s underpants. I am not actually a big fan of boxers. They aren’t gross, but they don’t do it for me. They make me think of the preppy guys I grew up with, like Kirk, who in drunken idiocy dropped his pants at the dinner table during Junior Assembly in eleventh grade, revealing plaid boxers. I actually fancy classic y-front briefs, or boxer briefs. But fancying them is a different thing entirely from wanting to see them poking out from some Dude’s unkempt jeans at the dog park! What I really cannot abide in men’s underwear is the Euro-panties, you know, those briefs men wear in Europe without a slit? They look just like girl’s knickers but in boy colors. I mean, if you’re going to wear that, you might as well cross-dress entirely. Maybe I would change my mind if confronted with a hunk of hot Italian masculinity wearing said undergarments, but until that time, we say nyet on Euro-panties.

But back to Dude. What, I wondered all morning, does he imagine he is doing with his life? Does he have any idea what a weenie he is? ** Where—tell me please!—are the real men?! I know you exist, guys, but apparently not in hipsterville. Please, please, gentlemen, can you not come and kick the rear ends of these douchebags and recover masculinity for the human race? If you don’t, we are done for.

*for more pics from hipsterville check out Look at this fucking hipster.

**OK, I know I am a bitch. Let’s take that as read, too.