Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

I've noticed that men are talking more in men's rooms lately. Especially at the urinal. It used to be taboo for men to speak while taking a leak. Eyes straight forward or down at the target. Neither to the left nor to the right. And by no means, no chit chat. You were there for business, not small talk. Talk signaled something you probably didn't want to signal in a men's room.

Things seem to have changed. It's OK to talk in front of the urinal these days, just keep your eyes front and center and your hands to yourself. A big reason is likely that the men's room is the last place men can get away from women. Locker rooms are no longer sacrosanct. The workplace is an exercise in equalitarianism. Men's clubs are a relic of the past. Martha Burk wants to open the doors of the Augusta National Country Club to women, though what woman in her right mind would want to belong to an organization whose president is named Hootie?

The men's room has become a last refuge of masculinity in a world gone unisex. I once walked into an airport restroom, only to find a startled woman emerging from one of the stalls. Immediately I was accused of being the interloper. "You're in the wrong bathroom," she snarled. I pointed to the bank of urinals along the wall. "I didn't know you had these too," I said with a smile. The look on her face was worth the price of embarrassment.

There seems to be no problem with women only organizations. A new gym opened up across the street called Curves. Curves is a shopping mall gym which offers a vigorous thirty minute workout for the busy woman who doesn't want to be ogled by men. I always thought women worked out in order to be ogled by men. I guess you're not supposed to admire a work in progress. Then again, Michaelangelo probably wouldn't have appreciated you looking over his shoulder while he painted chubby cherubs on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

I can understand the need for a place like Curves. It must be tiresome to be ogled by all those sweaty guys while you're busy trying to firm your gluts. Men are natural born oglers. Put a female in spandex, and we're going to ogle. No question about it. When Jesus equated looking with lust to the act adultery, he cut right to the heart of the male psyche and nailed us but good. We can't help ourselves. The same impulse that drove us to the Sears catalog and National Geographic in the wonder years, drives us to ogle. Before we can do anything about it, it's already happened.

My wife gets the Victoria's Secrets catalog delivered to our front door every few months. This is to ogling what Field and Stream is to fly fishing. The beauty of it all is that it comes delivered by mail in my wife's name for free. The same content openly delivered directly to me would have me sleeping on the recliner with the cat.

If a woman ogles a man and gets caught at it, he's flattered and she's embarrassed. If a man ogles a woman and gets caught, she's offended and he keeps on ogling. So it goes. Men and women are not interchangeable, no matter how hard we try to live in denial of it. The Bible puts it rather succinctly, "male and female He created them." No kidding. A few years ago, a popular book suggested that "Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus." Thousands of years earlier, the Bible reported that man is from the mud and woman from his side. I prefer the latter explanation. Regardless, men and women aren't interchangeable.

There are testosterone driven humans and estrogen driven ones. This goes beyond hair and eye color. It gets down to the very core of our humanity. Ever since the proto-man and proto-woman took a bite of forbidden fruit, what was intended to be a harmonious complementarity of testosterone and estrogen has taken on some serious tension.

The only relief is for male and female to go to their respective corners once and a while - she to her ladies' room, he to his men's room. She needs to be with other estrogen driven humans to carry on several multi-level conversations at the same time. And he needs to be with other testosterone driven humans to break or build something. She needs to be free from the pressure of being ogled, and he needs to be free from the pressure of ogling.

Hootie and the boys at Augusta weren't trying to make some great anti-feminist social statement. They were just a bunch of rich guys who made a really nice men's room for themselves where they could get away from women for a while. And once a year, they open their men's room to some other guys who play a decent round of golf for a tacky, green, polyester jacket, and everyone gets to ogle the azaleas and the dogwoods.

So long live Curves and Augusta National, urinals and spandex, men's rooms and ladies' rooms.

"Male and female He created them." And He knew what He was doing.

© William M. Cwirla, 2003

Pages in this category:
Luke 20:9-20 (5 Lent C)