When men were men

When men were men, it all seemed like halcyon days for the Iron John crowd. Hey, I could’ve said salad days, but would that have been manly? Mayhaps not. (Oops, another affectation. Maybe my own metrosexual’s slip is showing, harking Victorian.)

But when men were men – I hear often from old high-school buddies whose barrel chests are still reminiscent of Caloy, Chito and Joey Loyzaga’s – it was a great fun time, well before the advent of global wimpization.

Them were the days when pelotaris at the jai-alai fronton on Taft Avenue played manfully and heedlessly sans headgear, when riding pillion on a motorbike meant having your hair blow wild like Richard Burton’s in the wind, ditto the biker, whose waist you didn’t ever have to clutch at, oh, no.

Whatever happened since? Now you can’t even draw a cigarette stick from a pack without being served a dire warning that "smoking is dangerous to your health."

Why, in civilized, oh-so-chi-chi Sydney, non-filter Camel packs hardly have space left for the brand name. Talk about wimpish graffiti courtesy of some Surgeon General or other. Overweaning text of screaming alarum stresses, on all four sides of the medical billboard, sparing only the tinfoil top, that your nicotine habit is synonymous with grand peril.

Up front: "Warning: Don’t smoke near children" – all in bold caps. On the obverse: "Children who live with smokers suffer more from colds, coughs, ear infections, asthma and chest disease..." Etc. On one slim side: "The smoke from each cigarette contains, on average..." And here various figures, down to the percentage point, are offered for tar ("...containing many chemicals, including some that cause cancer"), nicotine ("a poisonous and addictive drug"), and carbon monoxide ("a deadly gas which reduces the ability of blood to carry oxygen"). 

Variety rules the planet even Down Under, however, so that another pack offers this central warning: "Smoking when pregnant harms your baby." Thank god, some real men who call one another "mates" might say, that doesn’t apply to us.

When did this all start, the gradual process of turning earthmen into wimps? Maybe when tattoos began incorporating such intricate, curlicued designs well beyond the stark geometry employed by our Pintados and Pintadas of the Visayas? No, it couldn’t have been coeval with Babaylan practice, as in those heathen days, women and bayots knew their place, as shamans (?!).

It all developed much later, when busybody advocates of healthier lifestyles came hand in hand with – in fact, often held hands with (not only when crossing a dangerous city street) – the PC police. Read Political Correctness, not Philippine Constabulary, especially since their favored weapons of combat have become Plexiglas shields, nightsticks and water hoses.

Fellowman, Humankind and Humanity have since been placed into question by language feminists, who not only conducted marauding raids all over the Bible’s patriarchal pages and virile verses, but also invented their own make-up term: "herstory."

Wimpization must have started long before the seatbelt law (again, in some supercilious, super-silly Western countries, even affecting riders in the back seat; thank god we here remain more humane), or the day Robert Jaworski started using a clutch bag (of pure leather, mind you). And well before kikay kits turned unisex.

It couldn’t have been the season when Allen Iverson started freeing all hip-hop cagers’ groins and thighs from John Stockton-era shorts, or when the NBA applied the no-touch defense rule. Where it used to be "no harm, no foul," "no pain, no gain," now one can’t even extend a stiff forearm against a power forward’s sacral dimples. And only Silas, the Opus Dei albino in the Vatican court, can proclaim that "Pain is good."

When men were men, why, we could go underwater anywhere and apply makeshift projectile throwers to spearfish lobsters and lapu-lapu, or bring down usa, baboy damo and labuyo in the wilds of Tanay with self-designed bows (as the macho artist Sonny Yniquez still does). But even archery has turned scientific chic, and come up with recurve and compound bows. And the closest we can now come to tasting rare game is to engage in a candlelit dinner at Perdigon Vocalan’s exotica resto in Angono.

When oh when did real men start losing the much-vaunted primacy of reckless, dominatrix conduct, as leering (if loathsome) lords of the realm? Was it the day Max Alvarado and his henchmen’s music died? Remember, that chorus used to be composed of serial, lascivious heh-heh-hehs before an attempted rape.

Now we are told, in court, no less, that even would-be rapists take a conscientious break to put on a condom – this after caveman behavior inclusive of piggybacking the victim into a mobile cave.

Oh, I know, now I know. It must have been that afternoon when a driver (not of a Starex van but a lowly jeepney), sometime in the Manila ’50s, got the inspiration to place a ten-centavo coin right inside his ear, as décor. And us graders and high-schoolers of the time, why, we followed suit by placing the same currency as cute embellishments in the strap slots of our moccasins.

That must have been the day us cowboys lost it, to the less brutish but rather noble Injuns of civilized conduct.

Now, decades later, thank god only for Cialis and Viagra, or generic sildenafil, that some of us can still be men.