by Susan Percy

Created on: March 22, 2008

Call me old-fashioned. Or call me a wishful thinker who hopes "this too shall pass." But if you're one of those trendy types, a metrosexual kind of a guy-in touch with your feminine side-don't call me at all. Anyhow, I'm married. To a former Marine. I'm not in the market for another committed relationship with a man, but if I were I'd be beating the bushes looking for a guy like the guys I've lived among the last thirty years. Men who are not ashamed of-nor apologize for-their maleness.

I prefer men who act like men and that covers a lot of territory because manliness in not necessarily "macho." I can't even define manliness because I know it more by what it isn't than by what it is.

Remember when Paula Coles, one of the Lilith Faire songbirds, warbled the plaintive tune, "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" Her melancholy lyrics asked, "Where is my John Wayne?"

I heard the words and looked around me, wondering, "What's she missing that I'm not?"

That song exposed a quandary for the feminist elite, the near extinction of the strong, hero-type among their sympathizers of the opposite sex. My theory is the strident anti-male message sung and preached by many in the "sisterhood" simply ran "The Duke" out of "their" town, their hang outs and watering holes. Saloons out. Salons in. And, oh, how they miss John Wayne.

To regain that lost treasure, all Paula had to do was look at, sayParris IslandQuanticoto name a couple. Then again, the Lilith Faire itself had overtones rife with "woman good/man bad" messages. Lilith, according to some obscure myth, was Adam's first wife, pre-Eve, Eden, and the snake, and she rose to heroine status among the Amazons by blowing off Adam even before God got a shot at him.

Or, perhaps, adding to their dismay, the shrill feminists let John stay in their midst, as long as he promised to add a purse to his ensemble, cry with frequency, and amble on over to their pajama parties where he could listen sympathetically as they fretted over the woes of "hormonal imbalances, Pilgrim."

So, the feminists demanded a makeover of the American heterosexual male and there is abundant evidence on our streets that more than a few men submitted. We see them as they emerge from the centers of haute couture, laden with bags of products from the cosmetics counter. Sorry gals, the pots of vanishing cream and make up are for him, not you.

In cases where the man-bashers met with success in overhauling men, they looked hard at what they had wrought and went, "Yuck."

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