Your friends at MEL are a modern, forward-thinking bunch; we believe there are all kinds of different ways to be a man — and new models are popping up all the time. This week we saw that you can be America’s orangest presidential candidate and enthusiastically pat down your own daughter. (Sure, men want to marry Melanias and raise Ivankas, but maybe some wish they could have it both ways?) Okay, bad example. What about being a Breitbart tech editor so dogged in your commitment to inciting harassment that even notoriously laissez-faire Twitter sees fit to ban you? If you squint, you could even call said ban “the most gigantic possible gift!”
Still no? Well, another kind of man you can be is a conservative media mogul forced to resign after a flurry of allegations of a half-century’s worth of sexual harassment. Sure, you think that option doesn’t sound so great, but it comes with a $40 million golden handshake — “basically the salary he would have made through the end of his contract in 2018,” Vox informs us. (Billion-dollar buyout or no, your friends at MEL are starting to think they’re in the wrong branch of media.) Or, I guess, you could be noted vengeance-taker Ted Cruz?
More potential manspiration: An erstwhile reality TV star now manning the oven at T.G.I. Friday’s. A robust fellow designed by experts to survive car crashes. (Downside: If you opt for this route, you are eye-searingly ugly). An exiled whistleblower working on extreme iPhone security. A meal-replacement creator (illegally) living in a shipping container. A Congressional leader hilariously inept at making sports analogies:
Pointing to the in-state rivalries between teams like the Texas Longhorns, Texas A&M Aggies, and TCU Horned Frogs, Ryan said, “You guys are at each other’s throats … [But] when one team advances to a big bowl game or a national championship, don’t you root for the Aggies? … Don’t you root for the Longhorns?”
The ballroom full of Texans erupted in laughter, boos, and shouts of, “No!”
Ryan chuckled, taken aback, and said, “Start thinking that way, OK?”
And then, “Holy moly, this explains everything right now.”
Probably better to be a dude who digs his own baby, but not other people’s babies; a married guy who gets hit on a lot; or a youthful tech zillionaire engaged to marry a Victoria’s Secret Angel who shares the good news in questionably tasteful but extremely synergistic fashion!
https://twitter.com/amandahess/status/75586606271814041
Okay, so dudes in America kind of bummed us out this week. Let’s look abroad. You could be a dude in South Africa appalled by the notion that someone on this earth might not be conversant with Slavoj Žižek (now only the world’s second most famous Slovenian writer—thanks, Melania!). A former prime minister of Portugal favored to become the U.N.’s next secretary general. That sounds pretty good, right? Sure beats being Brexit engineer Nigel Farage, digging very, very deep to find a rationale for his contention that Obama is the most anti-British U.S. president in history: “It was interesting, when we had the oil spill [in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010] and it was BP of course, he just couldn’t say ‘British Petroleum’ enough and I thought yeah, you’re saying something here.”
…Whatever you say, Nigel! Honestly, you might rather be a dude who commemorates his sexual conquests with tattooed rosary beads. Just don’t be the one who draws a dickbutt (whatever that might be) on his coworker’s going-away card. And pretty much anything beats being a reporter stuck filing from outside the GOP convention in Cleveland all week.
Come to think of it, if these are the options, maybe you should all just pack it all in to go run a store in rural Montana.
