What Are “Men Extenders”?

Introduction

Have you ever come across the term “men extenders”? Perhaps? But maybe you can’t recall where? Well, I don’t recommend googling it. For research purposes I had to do this, but at least I used an Incognito browser window. The results were not pretty. It took me a while to turn up the origin of the non-penile sense of the phrase, but I am finally equipped (no pun intended) to tell you where it came from. Following that I’ll launch into a full exegesis, as is my wont.

The origin of “men extenders”

Outside the realm of the saddest cosmetic surgery known to man, the term “men extenders” appears nowhere on the Internet except pages deep into the Quotes section of the IMDB entry for “Barbie.” Here is the reference:

This movie is a perfectly fitting place to kick off this new (and highly useful) term, because as we all know from being kids, Barbieland’s denizens are replete with accessories. (Here’s an old joke from my brother: “Hey, have you heard about the new Divorce Barbie? She comes with half of Ken’s stuff!”) Of course, most of the accessories are hairbrushes and pink dream houses and pink convertibles, etc.—i.e. her stuff—and whenever one of my daughters got a new Ken doll the first thing she’d do was rip all his clothing off, exposing his greatest lack (which is an interesting counterpoint to the non-Ken context of “men extenders).”

I can’t remember exactly what got me thinking about men extenders, but I know it came from a dialogue I had with my wife, where she posed a question along the lines of, “What are the quintessential men extenders?” It turns out to be a fascinating realm of exploration.

But first, some housekeeping

Look, I’m going to get into some ideas here involving what’s manly, and what a man ought to be able to do, and what it would actually mean to extend a man’s, well, manliness. (And no, that’s not a euphemism for his member—enough with that already!) Naturally there has been a lot of evolution, perhaps even revolution, lately about what it means to be a man and what ought to be expected of us. So I should state right up front that I’m not going to be so progressive as to ignore the past, or try to make this all about a new male paradigm, much less delve into the realm of non-binary. This post is about the traditional sex roles that, looking across the landscape of mankind, continue to be predominant: roles that even the most modern man—and woman—are still saddled with.

Yes, modern man is more civilized than he used to be, particularly in progressive countries (of which, say, Afghanistan would not be an example). We men have learned to dress better, scratch our groins less publicly, be a bit less dense about equality, and may more willingly share the boardroom with women, to a greater or lesser degree. But this doesn’t change, in my mind, the fact that we men have certain impulses—unconscious biases might be the better term—that we either quell or indulge, depending on our personalities, our position on the cultural spectrum, and the situation. What I’m getting at is, when our intellect, education, and breeding cause us to modify and refine our behavior, what is the knee-jerk behavior that’s being subdued?

My past and present have enabled me to come at the thing from both directions: the base primitive male and the educated, enlightened, housetrained modern man. Consider the following photo:

Look at the dazed look in my eyes. I was not just the kind of dad who bottle-fed his baby once in a while so he could get brownie points for having done so at all. For complicated reasons, I bottle-fed one of my babies a great deal, in lieu of sleep. And I changed a lot of diapers. How many? Well, if I were to say in the presence of my wife, “I reckon I changed about half of A—’s diapers,” she wouldn’t burst out laughing. (I actually tried this. She said, “Probably more like 40%,” and didn’t even roll her eyes.) On top of that, I am such a modern man, I am able to keep track of a non-cisgender person’s preferred pronouns when they have changed. (This surely seems like no big deal to Gen Z, but believe me, it’s not easy for my generation and I assure you, we are trying.)

And yet, evolved as I am, I am a person who over the course of his childhood was in a number of fistfights, and rather than looking back on those episodes in shame, I recall them wistfully—fondly, even. And although my now fully formed neocortex would prevent me from ever resorting to actual combat anymore, I still like to have an excuse to duke it out (metaphorically speaking) with some rando when I’m cycling (see here, here, and/or here). Many a woman would call this “macho bullshit,” and maybe it is, but I’m gonna own it … it’s my macho bullshit and I’m not giving it up (even though I did a huge load of dishes earlier).

For more on the topic of male impulses that won’t go away, click here. On the other hand, if you are so highly evolved that the last few paragraphs have triggered you, maybe it’s time to stop and go read something else instead.

So what are the quintessential men extenders?

As you saw earlier, the men extenders example given in “Barbie” is the horse. Certainly this makes sense; in an archetypal way, a man on horseback is utterly masculine … just think of the Marlboro Man. Of course, nobody rides horses anymore, and a modern man who can afford a horse and the land, stables, etc. required for one is probably more like a polo player than a cowboy … not exactly macho. It’s only because “Barbie” itself is so archetypal that this notion works in the movie.

So what about a motorcycle? Consider the Bon Jovi song “Wanted Dead or Alive” and its central lyric, “I’m a cowboy/On a steel horse I ride.” Frankly, I think this song kind of killed any chance of a motorcycle extending anyone’s manhood. The video, showing well-groomed pretty-faced rock stars playing in a stadium full of star-struck teenage girls, makes them come off as pretty much the opposite of an actual cowboy.

A truck? Now we’re getting somewhere. A big manly truck … built Ford tough, etc. I certainly see a lot of pickup trucks when I’m out biking, and it’s not uncommon for one to accelerate mightily as it passes me, as if to demonstrate something. If I’m riding with a pal when this happens, I’ll generally remark, “Wow … did you hear  the size of that guy’s testicles?” And more often than not, the dickhead who uses his pickup in that antisocial way is a well-upholstered middle-aged white guy and his truck is immaculate and probably never leaves the asphalt. In contrast to that, the smaller pickups that pass me, which invariably give me plenty of room, are usually more run-down, and are full of gardening tools (shovels, mowers, etc.) and driven by workmen, usually Chicano ones, like the guys who, in a few short hours, dug a deep trench in my backyard to install a French drain, while I watched from the kitchen window while doing dishes, feeling deeply inferior as a man.

Does this mean a big, expensive truck can’t be a men extender? Why, no. It’s just that a pristine Range Rover with leather seats exemplifies only wealth, not manliness, so there has to be more going on. Take, for example, my friend B— who drove a bunch of us to the Deschutes River recently to go inner tubing, and hauled everything in the back of his big pickup. Nothing about his payload that day was particularly impressive, but he mentioned that a pal gave him the truck because it was so old and beaten down it was getting hard to keep running. B— gladly accepted it because he has a lot of fun making little repairs to keep it on the road. And that is fundamental: the know-how that goes with the physical object. Bonus points for lashing a canoe to the roof and knowing all the right knots so it doesn’t slide off and maim somebody.

The more I ponder it, the more utility seems absolutely central to men extension. This is why, in fact, a beard or a tattoo or an ear gauge cannot be a men extender: because these decorations don’t do anything; anybody can choose to have one. It’s a sartorial thing done to you then you just parade it around, as frivolously as a fancy woman of old showing off with a big feathered hat.

Is know-how itself a men extender?

Not all know-how is a men extender; it has to be paired with the right object. For example, men who are really good with tech stuff, while they can earn legendary amounts of money, will always be considered a bit nerdy, and seeing these tech titans in action isn’t very impressive. “Look at how his fingers fly over that keyboard!” moaned no enraptured woman ever. And the C-suite types? Knowing how to properly tie a silk necktie isn’t a men-extending behavior, and the hoodies of the Mark Zuckerberg set are frankly childish. What about men who are just really good communicators? Tony Robbins might be worth $600 million, but he’s never going to star in an action movie or get a grill named after him. His tools—a ballroom and a microphone—aren’t the kind the guy next door would secretly covet. How about a telescope and a masterful knowledge of astronomy? Naw. No layman could ever appreciate whatever it is these oddballs see in the night sky. I myself got to see Halley’s Comet through a powerful telescope at an actual observatory, and it was pretty much the most boring thing ever.

I guess I’m not exactly unearthing the pure essence of men extenders here, but it’s like so many things: you know it when you see it.

The men extender I wish I had…

I myself cannot mourn not owning a beater pickup truck, or a canoe, or the earth-turning tools that (combined with laborer-grade sinews) might enable me to dig a giant trench in no time flat. Based on the gentrification of my neighborhood (which somehow transitioned from the Prius Belt to the Tesla Belt while I wasn’t looking), I don’t think my neighbors would appreciate a dilapidated F150 dripping oil on our street. Meanwhile, I don’t generally do much boating (in fact, when my wife and I have tried to canoe together, we just went in circles). And if I were a career gardener who needed a work truck, I probably wouldn’t earn enough money to live in Albany, and my kids needed good schools a lot more than they needed a manly dad. (In fact, having now left the nest, they scarcely need me at all anymore, which is fine I guess—I mean, it’s according to plan.)

But what I do long for, if I could just get my act together as a man, is a barbecue grill … and the know-how to use it. I mean, yeah, I could buy one of these giant gas grills that’s basically a stove you use outdoors, but I’m thinking more of something more traditional, like the classic Weber. Or, better yet, a giant commercial-type grill with the big ring you crank on to raise and lower that big blackened mechanism—a spit, is it?—that’s suspended by chains. You know, like you could roast a whole damn pig on (if you knew how). Because the fact is, I love barbecues, I love grilled meat, I love the smell of flaming lighter-fluid-soaked briquettes even if they’re deadly. And of course I’d love to extend my manhood … but even all these things put together aren’t enough to motivate me to actually buy a grill and learn how to use it. After all, I’m middle-aged, and already eat a dangerous amount of cheese, and had better look out for my health. Moreover, knowing I’d be buying this grill just to extend my masculinity … that seems somehow kind of wrong, kind of sad, kind of … well, emasculating, if that makes any sense.

My own favorite men extender

My wife assumed that to the extent I have any men extension, it would have to do with my racing bike, and my mountain bike, and the athleticism I’m able to pair with them. Honestly, I don’t think bicycles get the job done. Yes, I can ride them pretty effectively, but there’s really nobody around to see this except other cyclists, and at least on this side of the Atlantic the sport has never had the respect it deserves. Above all, a cyclist only propels himself along, and this doesn’t do anybody else any good. A fisherman with his own boat, especially like one of the guys in The Perfect Storm who braved horrific weather to haul swordfish out of the ocean, is very manly, as is a soldier, but some guy pedaling a bike faster than some other guys? Big deal.

My own favorite men extender is my toolbox, because it’s full of a lot of very cool bicycle-related tools that I actually know how to use, and which keep my family’s entire fleet going. Ditto my workbench and my smattering of household tools (drill, hacksaw, wood saw, etc.). Also ditto the tools I carry mountain biking paired with my ability to fix a student-athlete’s bike when it breaks down on the trail. Some of these bike-related tools are weird enough that the layman wouldn’t have any idea what they do. Others, like my wheel truing stand, have an obvious purpose but the layman wouldn’t know where to start. (Truing a wheel, by adjusting the tension on each spoke, is a real art and most DIY types could only cause harm with such tools.)

And what’s my absolute favorite tool? That’s a tough one, but I guess I’d have to say my Dremel rotory tool. It’s kind of like a drill, but you can put various different cutting bits on it, the coolest being a disc-shaped blade that will pretty much cut through anything. Sparks fly everywhere, which looks cool. The first time I encountered this phenomenon—though with some even cooler tool in my dad’s machine shop—I  asked him, “What are all those orange sparks?” He said they were tiny bits of molten metal. “Won’t they burn you?” I asked. He said by the time they hit you they’ve cooled off enough. So I think being brushed by a shower of sparks is actually kind of pleasant. (Of course I wear safety goggles—I’m not an idiot.)

Recently I bought a bike from a pal, and it came with a U-lock, hanging from the top tube, that alas lacked a key (thanks to my pal’s typically clueless teenager). I think I got a bit of a discount based on the hassle of that lock. But I had it off within minutes using the Dremel.

I used my Dremel again the other day, cutting a metal plate out of a giant cooking pot it’d gotten stuck in, and I mentioned to my wife, probably not for the first time, “The Dremel blade spins at ten times the speed of a drill.” Without grabbing my biceps, my wife did not say, “Get over here, you big hunk.” In fact, I don’t even thing she was listening. And that’s perhaps the most interesting thing about men extenders: I don’t think women even notice them. Women just aren’t tuned into that stuff.

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Letter to a Middle-Aged Cyclist - Buy New Wheels NOW!

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. And check this out: if you launch the video and then close your eyes, it magically becomes a podcast! Naturally, the traditional text-O-rama blog format follows below.

Introduction

I’m not much of a consumer, but recently a friend bullied me into buying new wheels for my road bike. Based on the outcome, and with all the zeal of a convert, I exhorted another friend, who complained about broken spokes, to buy these wheels as well. Seeing an opportunity to expand my beneficence, I hereby entreat all middle-aged road cyclists to buy new wheels too. Here are my top five reasons, followed by a handy Q&A.

Reason #1 – You’re not getting any younger

Okay, right off the bat you can find some pretty badass looking wheels nowadays. Case in point, these Dura-Ace C40s I just picked up. Have a gander at these bad boys.

Now, if you were 70 years old, would I be recommending these to you? Of course not. You’d be a geezer, unlikely to get much use out of them. When my dad was like 70, and had suffered some shoulder injury he thought to be permanent, he decided he needed a recumbent, because it was closer to the ground. “If I crash on a regular bicycle and land on my shoulder, it is done,” he explained sternly. Alas, he was too old a dog to master the recumbent bicycle, so then he bought a recumbent tricycle. Now he no longer needed to balance, but the supine riding position, he complained, gave him terrible neck pain. Well hell, I could have predicted that!

The awkwardness of the recumbent is not just a physical problem. There’s also the aesthetic consideration. Nobody should ride recumbents, any more than any tortoise should be flipped over on its back and laughed at. Fortunately, after giving up on the trike, my dad decided his shoulder was okay after all and bought a sensible Fuji hybrid/commuter bike. Not bad, except he never rode it either; apparently after his hip replacement he couldn’t swing his leg over the bike. So he asked me what I thought about him trading it in for a women’s model, with no top tube.

My instant reaction was, “What, are you crazy? What’s next, you gonna start drinking rosé? Dude, it’s time to man up, do some damn physical therapy, and ride the bike you got!” But if course there was no point in saying this. By the time a guy is asking you if it’s okay to ride a women’s bike, it’s too late to help him. “Sounds like a great plan,” I told him, “and I’m sure Performance would gladly swap your bike for a women’s model at no charge. After all, you’ve never ridden it.” This was a gamble, of course; would he take my advice, and if so, whose demise was approaching faster—his or Performance’s? (In the end it was a dead heat.)

I hope I’ve made it clear we need to put off the geezer years for as long as possible and hang on to youthful stuff with all our might. In this battle, aesthetics are important. If you’re over 50, you’re heading toward the years when you wouldn’t necessarily carry off those badass new wheels very well. Similarly, there’s something sad about a 65-year-old in a distressed-looking leather jacket and that’s where we’re headed. At some point that jacket would need to be traded in on a cardigan sweater because who the hell are we kidding? As Anthony Bourdain once said, “There’s nothing cool about ‘used to be cool.’”

[Above: my brother Max and I when we were younger and cooler (even if we weren’t, strictly speaking, cool). Can I still wear that jacket? Yes, I think … but not forever.]

Don’t even get me started on all the super-cool sports cars you see in the Bay Area—the Porsches, the McLarens, the Audi R8s, even your occasional Lambo—that inevitably have some 60-plus douche behind the wheel (driving responsibly, of course). Seeing this grotesque pairing of speed-obsessed engineering and delusional, over-moneyed, existential Viagra, I fantasize about the guy’s irresponsible 18-year-old grandson stealing the car and taking it out for a joy ride, maybe even leading the cops in a stupidity-and-adrenaline-fueled high-speed pursuit.

At least bikes provide a healthy outlet for midlife-crisis ya-yas. So we should all be using high-end, kickass gear while we still can. If we can still put the hurt on younger riders, and we can still make our racing bikes go jolly fast, we’re not too old to deserve really awesome machines. Yet. So you need to snap up and enjoy these wheels while you still have the mettle, the minerals, the sound & the fury to put them to good use. Seize the day!

Reason #2 – The price is right

I hear anecdotally that everything is cheaper now because of the COVID-19 shelter-in-place and the low price of oil. New cars, as described here, are still being shipped over here and there’s no place to put them because the dealers aren’t making a dent in their current inventory. It’s kind of a consumer’s market in general, apparently.

So when I broke my third spoke in under 500 miles on my current rear wheel, and complained to my friend Pete, he immediately urged me to buy new ones. He even sent me a link to where the wheels he recommended were on sale for $350 off. Within a few minutes I found them on closeout at another place for $600 off. DAAAAAAMN!

There’s also the price of not buying those wheels. Look, your gear is going to wear out at some point. Why wait until then, when the economy may well be booming again, and you’ll have to pay what the market will bear? And why run the risk of finding out the hard way that your hubs and/or rims are approaching wear-related catastrophic structural failure, like my crankarm back in 2011?

With my new wheels the cost analysis included the crap I’d have had to put up with from Pete if I’d stuck to my penny-pinching ways. He wrote, and I quote, “Do it do it do it do it. Don’t be scared.” I hemmed and hawed and he pointed out, “It’s not like you’re gonna go on some expensive vacation any time soon.” I acknowledged this point and he replied: “See, you’re practically making money on the deal!”

Not a bad argument, but the “don’t be scared” was even more powerful. Did you catch that? How he was, albeit subtly, impugning my confidence? Like I’m too scared to throw money around? I went silent for a bit and he texted me, “I assume your silence means you bought them!” He basically rim-shamed me into the purchase, and I hope I’m doing the same with you. If not, read on because I’m not done yet.

Reason #3 – Aero wheels actually will make you go faster

By “modern” I mean the truly aerodynamic ones. No, not like those super deep-dish time trial wheels, which is frankly overkill, but something a bit more aggressive than what you might have on your bike. In my case, I had been rocking the HED Ardennes, which claim to be aerodynamic but aren’t very deep (and frankly aren’t very durable—long, dull story). I’m talking something at least 35mm deep, from the edge of the rim where the tire sidewall begins to where the spokes go in. And the wheels need to have a relative paucity of spokes—not a mere 16 front and rear, like the early Shimano wheels I swore off of, but not your old-school 28- or 32-spoke build either. And bladed spokes, needless to say. Why on earth did my replacement HED wheel, which I just bought late last year to replace the defective one I bought in 2014, have non-bladed spokes? What, did they forget? What’s next, toothpaste without fluoride? Leaded gasoline? CRT televisions? Dial-up Internet?

Now, the bicycle industry has a long history of total BS when it comes to aerodynamics. I give you the aero water bottle, which led to famous victories by nobody ever.

They’re just hideous. I doubt anybody would use them even if they did confer a real advantage. Aesthetics, remember?

And you think the placement of these shifters, and the internal cabling, led to any actual benefit?

To some degree the bicycle industry pretended that making something needlessly ugly would automatically lead to aerodynamic improvement:

So I’ve been skeptical about aero wheels too (other than, obviously, disk wheels, tri-spokes, etc.). When I was pondering my last new wheel purchase in 2014, I incredulously emailed my teammate Sean (a legit bike maven), “It’s crazy ... the more expensive Dura-Ace wheels are heavier than the C24s … could that be right? Is the idea that the aerodynamics are so much better, it’s worth it? The order of the universe seems out of whack all of a sudden.” Sean replied, “Yes, that is correct. I too have trouble accepting the idea that heavier wheels can be faster, but apparently the aerodynamics more than make up for the weight gain, unless you are doing major climbing.”

So is he right? In a word, yes. There really is a big difference with these Dura-Ace C40s (35mm deep in the rim-brake version). It’s not subtle. Consider this: there’s a little downhill on Wildcat Canyon Road, where I try to get as much speed as I can to carry me up the next rise. I’m accustomed to hitting a little over 30 mph on that if I pedal fairly hard. With these wheels, putting out about the same perceived effort, I hit 37 mph! Digging extra deep yesterday, I reached almost 40. Going down South Park Drive, without pedaling, I can feel the bike picking up speed like it never has before, as though gravity had gotten stronger. (In a sense its effect is stronger, as it’s impeded less by wind drag.) Descending with these wheels is the difference between paddling your little canoe out on the lake vs. feeling a giant wave pick up your surf kayak and hurl it toward the beach.

Now, I know just what you’re thinking: your decisions these days are data-driven. You don’t want this mealy-mouthed, feel-good subjective nonsense clouding your AI-like judgment. So here are the cold, hard facts about my first two rides with these wheels.

My first ride was one of my favorite loops, 19.3 miles with about 2,500 feet of climbing. My previous best time of the year was 1:19:02, an average speed of 14.7 mph. On this route with the new wheels (their maiden voyage), I clocked a 1:16:26, averaging 15.5 mph. Pretty staggering improvement, eh?

Now, there’s a such thing as “new bike syndrome” where you automatically go faster because a) you’re excited about the new bike, and b) you’re frightened into riding harder by the looming specter of buyer’s remorse. Does new bike syndrome extend to wheels? Anecdotally I wouldn’t say so, and anyway we can account for that effect, to some extent, by looking at average heart rate across the two rides.

For the ride that produced my former best time, my average heart rate was 131 bpm, and I was in Zone 3 (>144 bpm) for 0:17:49. On the new wheels, my record-breaking ride was at an average HR of 132, with only 0:15:55 in zone 3 (and no time in or above zone 4 for either ride). In other words, the level of effort was comparable, one ride to the next. So, yeah—it was the fricking wheels! They actually made me faster!

Of course I can’t base this conclusion on a single ride. But the next ride corroborated this; it’s a bit shorter at 16.7 miles, with just over 2,000 feet of climbing, and I beat my 2020 PR of 1:07:43 handily, completing the ride in just 1:04:45 (15.5 mph vs. 14.8). This year I’ve done one or the other of these loops 17 times on the old wheels, and never averaged above 15 mph. With the new wheels, I’ve broken the coveted 15 mph average all three times on the longer loop plus the one time on the shorter loop. Four for four!

Moreover, factoring in longer rides (with more flat sections), my highest average speed of the year on the old wheels was 16.3 mph (on a 33-mile ride with 2,900 feet of climbing). On the new wheels yesterday, I averaged 17.6 mph (on a 39.4-mile ride with 3,300 feet of climbing). That’s an 8% improvement … stunning.

Reason #4 – New wheels will actually make you ride harder

Okay, I’ll confess that comparing my average heart rate across rides is somewhat specious, given the slippery nature of the term “average.” After all, the average person has one breast and one testicle. Coasting on downhills will lower the average heart rate figure inconsistently, etc. Meanwhile, by looking closely at some of my climbs, it’s clear I’ve been going harder lately. On the old wheels I recently clocked a non-stellar 8:13 up Pinehurst Road, whereas with the new wheels yesterday I managed a much better 7:39. My average heart rate over the slower ascent was a mere 140 bpm. Yesterday, my average for this climb was 148 bpm. Across the whole ride, I’d averaged 122 bpm for the first ride, and 133 yesterday.

So does this deconstruct my whole argument, suggesting that greater effort, not greater efficiency, explains the improvement in speed? First of all, no—the difference is too great, and too consistent, and I do have the pair of rides with very similar heart rate yet dissimilar speed & time. Second, it kind of doesn’t really matter if I could have gone as fast, or as hard, on the old wheels. The fact is, I didn’t. I’m going faster and harder now, clearly. When better equipment puts better performance within our reach, we’re much more likely to stretch ourselves.

There’s also the matter of momentum. The parts of my rides that aren’t big climbs or descents are still lumpy, and with the new wheels I find myself carrying more speed from a downhill into the next uphill, such that if I go a bit harder I can stay in the big chainring for longer stretches (in my case, from Summit Reservoir all the way to Inspiration Point), which inspires and enthuses me. It’s a virtuous cycle.

[Google Maps says it takes 23 minutes to ride the above route. With my old wheels I did as well as 12:58. My new PR with the aero wheels is 11:35.]

Reason #5 – COVID-19

Let’s face it, if we’re smart during this pandemic we’ll all be riding alone for the foreseeable future, with nobody to draft, so we need to be as aerodynamic as possible or we’ll a) get too frustrated to continue, meaning we’ll give up cycling, launching a downward slide into sloth and depression, or b) we’ll be unable to resist drafting others, meaning we’re one snot rocket away from bringing the coronavirus home and killing our entire family.

Meanwhile, returning to the fiscal discussion I started earlier, during shelter-in-place it’s harder to spend money. My credit card bill hasn’t been this low in years, and for the first time in forever all the transactions fit on one page. Why not splurge a little? Besides, there’s a good chance we’ll all be dead soon, along with our would-be heirs, so what’s the point in saving? It’s time to buy! Buy buy buy!

Questions and answers

Q. Why not just get a whole new bike, since there have been so many improvements in technology, such as disc brakes?

A. How can you even contemplate such a major purchase when the global economy is melting the fuck down?! I can’t believe you’re thinking so irresponsibly. Besides, better brakes will not make you go faster. Aren’t we slowing down enough as we head into middle age? Meanwhile, it might be pretty hard finding a new bike anyway ... the pandemic has caused a major bike shortage, as described here.

Q. Why wouldn’t I upgrade my mountain bike wheels instead? Maybe with some sweet carbon rims?

A. With the vast hordes of hikers I’m seeing in the regional parks, I don’t consider mountain biking safe whatsoever right now, or even fun. How are you supposed to socially distance on single track? I can’t imagine spending money on a bike I might not get to even ride in the foreseeable future.

Q. What about crosswinds?

A. Whaddya mean, crosswinds? What the hell are you even talking about? Listen to this guy … crosswinds.

Q. In your previous post about selecting bike wheels you touted the benefits of wider rims and claimed that “the HEDs really do ride better” and “the ride is really plush.” Now you’re pushing Dura-Ace wheels with a narrower rim profile. What gives?

A. You know what else is really plush? Your bed. Or we could ride around on beach cruisers. Look, we’re heading toward old age, infirmity, and death … this isn’t the time to make ourselves comfortable. To paraphrase Andrew Marvell, “The grave’s a fine and restful place/ But no one there is fit to race.”

Q. You seem to assume that all your readers are still gainfully employed right now, even though unemployment in the U.S. is now at historic levels, with more than 20 million people out of work. How can you callously pretend we’re all in a position to spend money on nonessentials?

A. Just buy the damn wheels.

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Beck’sting: Frexting for Men?

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mature themes, alcohol references, and mild strong language.

Introduction

Dang it!  Tonight is the only night I have free to write, but half my research cannot be done.  There’s something wrong with the Google.  I think their server is down.  So I’ll have to go mainly from memory when I talk about Beck’sting.

What?  You haven’t heard of Beck’sting?  Well, I’m a little hazy on its origin, but have tons of first-hand knowledge myself.  That’s right … I’ve been Beck’sting for years and didn’t even know it was a thing.

What is Beck’sting?

Beck’sting is an empowering way for men to allow their appreciation of fine beer to manifest in a way that will never come back to haunt you.  When you Beck’st a friend, his response is always positive and always confidence-boosting.  It presents you with a really non-dangerous platform to intercept or allocate affirmation and the visual essence of thirst-quenching, pure drinking satisfaction.

Okay, I cheated a little bit there.  I was trying to be expansive and touchy-feely so I could capture some of the excitement and zeitgeist-y-ness of a bunch of articles I read online about frexting.  But unlike girls sending sexy pictures of themselves to their girlfriends, Beck’sting just isn’t all that titillating, probably because it’s a guy thing.  So I borrowed some verbiage.  (You didn’t think “intercept or allocate affirmation” was mine, did you?) 

Beck’s is not one of my favorite beers, and thus not the subject of many of my Beck’sts; fortunately for me, the term applies generically to texting photos of any beer.  I’m hazy on the origin of this term, but one theory holds that Beck’s, the American beer that used to be German, “anonymously” coined the term as an Internet “guerilla marketing” thing.  The more common explanation is that the obvious term, “brexting” (brew + texting) was already taken (it means breast feeding + texting.)

By the way, when I first came across the word “frexting” I had no idea what it meant, and automatically thought to ask my teenage daughter, who is like a walking encyclopedia.  But as the question left my lips I realized with horror what it might mean, and hoped to God she’d never heard of it.  She hadn’t, so I immediately engaged her in a conversation about bird species or science or something so she’d be unable to commit the word to memory to look up later.  (I’m sure I failed but I’m not about to bring this up with her again to find out.)

My first Beck’st

Looking at photo metadata, I can say my first known Beck’st was all the way back in 2010 .  (It’s not like I’ve carefully filed these over the years, as I didn’t expect Beck’sting to become a worldwide phenomenon.)  One caveat:  I seldom text and actually sent the photo via e-mail, but with smartphones the difference between texting and e-mailing is largely semantic. Here’s that (possible) first Beck’st:

I sent it to my friend “Chuck” (I’m using a code name here because I don’t know how public he might want to be about his Beck’sting).  I hoped that he would appreciate my Beck’st’s artistic merit and construe it for what it is:  a fun and empowering way for men to strengthen their bonds while conveying the exciting idea that those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.

I was of course taking a risk.  Frexting, I’ve read, is always consensual and girlfriends “care too much to ignore each other’s hot bods” and “will respond all, ‘GIRL, YOU ARE ::fire emojis::!’”  On the other hand, the frexting literature warns against traditional sexting because of the “critical male gaze” and the danger that “a boyfriend you send it to will do something vindictive with it later.”

How much damage could you do with a Beck’st?  I didn’t want to find out the hard way, but fortunately Chuck was very affirming.  When he wrote back, “Mmmmmmmmm,” I felt that the exchange had brought us closer together.  And not long after, he Beck’sted me back!

A word on –exting and the sexes

Is it really fair to say that only men Beck’st?  Well, I don’t really know because I haven’t known that many women.  But I think it’s fair to say that a woman is less likely to chug down some glorious IPA, pause for a pregnant moment (maybe with a subtle gesture that says “wait for it!”) and then belch, deep and loud and proud, and announce, “Wow, that felt great!”  I think women are less flamboyant about their enjoyment of beer, and thus less likely to Beck’st.

Meanwhile, nobody needs to bother making the case that frexting is a women-only thing.  Some websites—and it’s always women’s sites that have stories about frexting, and they all quote one another like they’re wound up in some tight journalistic braid—suggest that the reason men don’t frext is that they’re homophobic.  But these same sites are adamant that frexting isn’t sexual.  So if it’s not sexual, why are non-frexting men (i.e., men) homophobic?

There’s actually a very simple reason men don’t frext:  we just aren’t interested in our own looks or our friends’ looks. In fact, we’re not interested in any man’s looks.  Case in point:  my wife doesn’t like Daniel Craig as James Bond because, she complains, he’s not attractive enough.  Do I care?  Hell no.  He’s a great Bond because he’s a badass.  I don’t care what he looks like as long as he beats somebody down in a stairwell and drives an Aston Martin DBS really fast.

I’m not judging either sex; I’m just acknowledging what I think is a basic truth about humans:  the females got the looks.  It’s pretty common, throughout the animal kingdom, for one sex to be more flamboyantly good-looking than the other.  Consider the peacock:

You ever see a female peacock fan out her dirt-colored feathers?  Of course not.  I mean, why would she?  Same with men.  Why primp and preen?  We have nothing to work with! We’re not the fair sex!  We’re just crudely made lumps who grunt and scratch a lot, and I for one am glad I don’t have to try to be attracted to us.

And you can call me sexist, but I’m just going to say it:  it’s totally fine, and normal, for a woman to be vain, but vanity in a male I find deeply distasteful.  When I watch my wife (and lately—gasp—my teenage daughter) carefully applying makeup in front of the mirror, I’m as fine with it as when I watch my cat washing herself.  But a guy fussing in front of the mirror is as bizarre and wrong to me as if I saw a dog washing himself.  I spend as little time in front of the mirror as possible, because I’ve been looking at this same face for 46 years and I’m tired of it.  So I use the mirror only for shaving and occasionally making a bare-bones, half-assed effort to style what’s left of my hair.  So why should I expect a friend of mine to want to see a photo of this mug?  (And don’t even get me started on  my stick-thin body.  I’m fine with it, and it does a decent job for me on the bike, but nobody needs to look at it.)

Women might frext to get a friend’s honest opinion about this or that cute or sexy outfit, but in my experience, guys are pretty blasé about what they wear.  And if they see a friend getting too caught up in matters of fashion they’ll probably hassle him, as well they should.  Here’s an example.  In the mid-‘80s, when the original Oakley Factory Pilot sunglasses came out, I thought they were a bit much.

The Oakley Blades weren’t quite as gaudy, but they were also a lot of money, and I made the mistake of asking Chuck, “What do you think of the Oakley Blades?”  He parroted this back to me endlessly, all summer, openly mocking my self-consciousness.  Thirty years later I still remember all his flak, and even though he was right to mock me, it’s really reassuring when I send him a Beck’st and he texts back affirming my choice of beer, or when out of the blue he suddenly Beck’sts me, “just because.”

Okay, I was bullshitting you about the “reassuring” and “affirming” bit, just now and throughout this essay.  I just can’t resist trying to adopt (well, mock) that of-the-moment, “this is how we live” tenor of the women’s magazines as they go on and on about female-empowerment-thru-lingerie-selfies.  But Beck’sting is not about us men—it’s just about beer.  Being a guy, I can pee standing up, I make more money for the same work, and I get to wear comfortable shoes without anybody calling them “sensible” … I don’t need empowerment.  And this toxic “male gaze” the frexters keep talking about?  It’s not pointed at me!  One journo-frext-alist writes, “[The frexter] counters the male gaze by saying ‘I THINK I LOOK GOOD, AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIT IF YOU THINK I’M A NARCISSIST.’”

I don’t think the male gaze itself ever accuses women of narcissism.  In fact, the male gaze doesn’t accuse anybody of anything.  That’s like saying the male’s taste buds accuse a sandwich of not being tasty enough, or of being narcissistic. And how can we find these frexts narcissistic when they’re not even sent to us?

As for narcissism, I think men and women alike should avoid it like the plague.  Vanity is the fear that you don’t look good enough, so there’s at least humility in it.  Narcissism is self-delusion.  Nobody is that hot, except Narcissus, and look what happened to him.  (If you’re rusty on your Greek mythology, this is the guy who saw his own reflection in a pool and fell in love with himself, forgot to eat, and starved to death.)

Speaking of food, here are some pasta-themed Beck’sts:

The point of the first photo was for scale, to show Chuck the width of my hand-cut pappardelle.  The second one was Chuck stoking my envy:  that’s Café Gondolier pasta (which I don’t get any more since I moved away from Boulder), paired with a Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA, one of my absolute favorite beers, which I almost can’t bear to shell out for—it’s like $12 for a 4-pack.  Chuck knows I’m cheap.

Why Beck’st at all?

Okay, so if Beck’sting isn’t self-affirming or empowering, and doesn’t bring friends closer together, why do it?

Whoa, hold on there.  I never said you should!  You must be confusing this essay with articles like “8 Reasons Why Frexting Is the Thing You and Your Friends Should Already Be Doing.”  I don’t believe that just because a trend has been identified and labeled, it should pushed on people.  Of course, some people don’t need to be pushed, because they live in fear of missing out on what everybody else is doing.  Consider the journalist who wrote, “Not having sent a frext myself, I decided it was time to see what all the buzz was about. Of all my female friends, I decided my friend Amelia would be the ideal choice.”  (How is this “automatically consensual”?  How does she know Amelia won’t be totally weirded out?  Whether she realizes it or not, this journalist is adopting the Senator Packwood ethos of “How can you know until you try?”)

That said, I do find Beck’sting fun, for a variety of reasons.  First, there’s the sheer artistry involved.  A glass of beer can look really good, based on the composition of the photo and/or the backdrop.  Check these out:

(Regarding that last photo:  no, of course I don’t smoke, and I’m not looking to learn how to roll my own cigarettes.  But I do love the original artwork on that jar of loose tobacco.  And that golden Belgian ale was as tasty as it looks.)

It’s also pretty cool, I’ll admit, how smartphones can shrink the space between us all.  When your friends are far away, it’s nice to realize they’re not completely gone.  Think of the Tom Waits song “Shoreleave,” where the Navy guy over in Hong Kong writes, in a letter home, “And I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there.”  This same world-shrinking simultaneity sometimes involves beer, as when I Beck’sted Chuck from a little coffee shop where I was getting some writing done.

Moments after I sent this, Chuck Beck’sted back with the following photo and the message, “Dude, we’re drinking together!”

Beer can fuel nostalgia, too.  There’s a seasonal Boulder beer called Upslope that’s only available for about a month a year.  Chuck socked away a six-pack of it four months in advance of an epic mountain ride we did last year, so we could enjoy it after the ride.  His will power flagged during those months and we only got to share three of them, but that’s probably for the best.  (I meant that bit about how those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.)  Eight months later he sent me the following Beck’st with the comment, “Remember this stuff?  Good freeking times!”

And then there’s the very practical matter of how to remember that great beer your pal recommended to you.  Lost in the aisles of BoozeMo, you can just pull out your phone.  Here are a few beers that Chuck either turned me on to, or that I’m still intending to try:

And here’s a seasonal ale I Beck’sted Chuck about a couple years ago.  It’s back in the stores now (though with a less groovy label; that barn owl drawing, according to a friend of mine in Bend, was modeled on a real owl that hung out around downtown Bend like a community mascot).  I think I’ll have to pick up a sixer of Jubelale and send Chuck a reminder Beck’st!

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A Man’s Gotta Do...

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but (look at that, I got your attention!  What a great way to start a sentence.  The audience is promised something to pity or despise the speaker for.  It’s almost as good as, “I love so-and-so to death, but…” with that “but” promising some great gossip—but I digress) I sometimes cheer myself on by thinking, “Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.”

The action I have to take, that warrants this silent self-encouragement, is never something really manly, like dragging a guy out of the pub (because he’s been mean to the barmaid or something) and giving him a good beat-down.  Usually it’s something that I simply don’t want to do.  This thing may require grit or steely resolve, or not; I guess the idea is that I’m trying to convince myself that by doing this thing, I’m manning up.  Manning up for a change, if you want to be a dick about it.

Tonight my wife didn’t feel like cooking, so I did.  If you think I’m going to complain about this, and say something silly about “women’s work,” think again.  That said, I do consider myself lucky that my wife does most of the cooking.  This is not such a routine that I can actually expect dinner on the table, per se.  Sometimes my wife makes dinner; sometimes she shows no sign of making dinner and then abruptly throws something together; sometimes she announces, “I’m not making dinner” and then—makes dinner.  Other times she says “I’m not making dinner” and means it.  Sometimes she doesn’t say anything, and I start a timer in my head and eventually either say something or start cooking.

Tonight I made my go-to quick combo:  grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.  These sandwiches are not actually grilled.  They’re fried.  If I were manning a grill—because that’s what you do, you man a grill, and if your wife offers to help you say, “Now you stand back from that grill, little lady, that’s man’s work”—that would be one thing, but a) nobody puts cheese sandwiches on a grill, and b) I don’t know how to work a grill, and c) I don’t even own a grill.  So these were fried sandwiches, which I guess is better than making a frittata but still nowhere near serving up charred meat that’s pink in the middle, and let me just say that even if I had a grill and manned it, I wouldn’t mess with all that stupid stuff about pressing your finger against the web of your thumb and thinking that has anything to do with whether meat is done.  Meat is done when the outside is no longer red, because when’s the last time you heard of a guy getting e. coli or tapeworms from a good piece of meat he bought from a butcher, a real butcher who wipes his bloody hands on his apron and has a Brooklyn accent?  But this is all just posturing because I don’t even own a grill.

So anyhow, I served the family some fried cheese sandwiches and soup, and then everybody scattered, and I wasn’t full, so I started making a second sandwich, and my wife, perhaps worried for my delicate physique (I’m just saying that, of course she’s not actually worried, as I’m very slender, certainly not the kind of broad-chested dude who has gravitas and can carry off a double-breasted suit, certainly nothing like Henry VIII) said, “You’re making a second sandwich?”  So I answered, “Yeah, sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.” 

Immediately following this I considered issuing a caveat, something like “And sometimes a guy’s gotta do what a man oughtta do, if there were an actual man around.”  I wish I were the kind of man’s man who can say things like “Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do” without issuing a caveat, but I’m just not.  I worry that my wife will start laughing, or will silently think to herself, “Dude thinks he’s a man?”  So I usually beat her to the punch with the caveat.

But there’s something so wimpy about this.  If real man’s behavior is questioned, he doesn’t deign to answer.  But of course nobody would question a real man’s behavior anyway.  That’s Walter Mitty territory.  When’s the last time a Bond girl asked Bond, “What are you doing?”  No, they’re about to be killed, and Bond is fiddling with his watch or his pen or something, but she never doubts him.

So, after telling my wife that eating a second sandwich is the kind of thing a man’s sometimes gotta do, I managed to stick the landing and not offer a caveat.  A small victory, but I couldn’t help but reflect that less than an hour earlier I’d said those same words, but to myself.  What is this, a mantra?

I was at the store.  Not a sporting goods store, not REI, not a purveyor, not a place that sells outdoor survival gear.  I was at Safeway.  I was buying groceries.  That is an activity that is not on the list of things that a man’s gotta do, not even sometimes.  I’d worked my way from one end of the store—produce & salad dressing—to the other end:  beer & meat.  Isn’t that great?  It’s like the store is organized into His & Hers. 

My love of the beer & meat section is tempered because every time I go to the store, it seems like the price of a six-pack has gone up another buck.  This cuts into my freedom, because I refuse to pay those prices.  I have to look at what’s on sale.

Mindy Kaling, the comedienne from “The Office,” writes about the differences between a man and a boy.  If she were differentiating between men and women she might discuss the matter of whether a male of any stripe should be reading her book, which talks a lot about shopping and how to be a good girlfriend.  I should really be reading Cormac McCarthy or something.  But presumably she wants both sexes to buy her book, so she only goes into boys vs. men.  She’s got a whole chapter on this.  She says (among other things) that when the shampoo is almost gone, a boy puts water in the bottle and shakes it up to get the last bit out, while a man just buys a new bottle of shampoo.  You know what?  I always put a little bit of water in the bottle and shake it up to get the last bit out.

So, is frugality the stuff of boys?  I don’t know.  I’ve always thought that timing the sales—having a hunch about when Rosarita refried beans will finally go on sale, or what the latest windfall discount from the Great Premium Jarred Spaghetti Sauce Price Wars will be—was kind of like playing the stock market, which has always seemed like a manly activity.  But in light of Mindy Kaling’s opinion, I suppose shopping sales is really more of a “Hints From Heloise” kind of thing.  I guess I should be ashamed.

In this case I was totally torn because four of my favorite beers were on sale, meaning they were discounted from Totally Scandalous Disgustingly Venal Daylight Robbery down to mere Ripoff, and I couldn’t decide which to get.  The beer I really wanted was Stone IPA, but even on sale it’s really, really expensive.  I think it was marked down to like $10 or something.  For a freakin’ six-pack!

So I told myself, “Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” and bought all four brands of beer.  That’s pretty bold, innit?  Isn’t that what a man would do?  I mean, a boy is usually broke and digs through the sofa cushions for enough change to go buy Bud, right?  Well, I couldn’t exactly bask in this idea, because I couldn’t help wondering if the Stone IPA is just another macho affectation.  My wife has suggested as much.  She calls it “the Emperor’s New Beer.”  She has suggested that IPAs in general are just one big pissing contest.

You could probably win a pissing contest by drinking enough IPA, actually.  At least, so long as the basis of the contest is urination duration, which seems to me like the right one.  But of course duration is not what my wife meant by pissing contest.  She means that we males are forcing ourselves to drink something really bitter just to show how masculine we are.

Look, I honestly enjoy IPAs.  I really do.  No, I didn’t take to them right away, I’ll concede that they’re an acquired taste, but I do like many of them.  And if I were only pretending to like IPAs, of course I wouldn’t like one more than another, which I do.  And it’s not like I only drink an IPA when another guy is watching.  But now there’s a voice in my head that says “Thou doth protest too much!”  What kind of a wussy voice is that?  “Thou doth”?  Quoting Shakespeare?  Shut up, voice-in-my-head!  Who are you to second-guess my taste in beer, and/or my masculine dignity?

Well, the scary thing is, I’m starting to develop a taste for something far more bitter than an IPA.  Before a bike ride, I like to have NoDoz.  I crush the tablet with a meat tenderizing mallet (a man’s tool, which every time I use it reminds me that I should get a grill and learn how to barbecue), and dissolve the powder in water so it’ll kick in faster.  That caffeine-water makes a double or triple IPA taste like the sweetest nectar. 

And this caffeine-water is growing on me, its taste symbolizing the suffering I’m about to do on the bike.  It’s a pleasure similar to how, after a hard ride, my legs burn when I come down the stairs.  What I’m saying is, I guess I could probably develop a taste for anything.  Which could mean that my learned appreciation of IPAs actually is the affectation of somebody trying to be more manly than he really is.  As in: “I have to develop a taste for something; I’ll develop a taste for that bitter beer that only real men like!”

In truth, I don’t feel insecure about my masculinity.  This guy vs. man thing is more complicated, and may be based on that divide I felt as a kid, acknowledging that my dad was of a different generation than I, always on the higher tier.  My friends and brothers seem like guys to me, too.

There’s no single societal consensus about what a man even is.  I’m sure it’s not just somebody who wastes shampoo, wears cologne, and has a mortgage, which are Mindy’s criteria—but whatever manhood is, I’m not at all sure I’m there yet.  What’s it going to take?  Grey hair?  I hope not … then I’ll go from guy to old man without ever enjoying a proper manhood in between.

I asked my younger daughter, who is still of the age before tact, and so can always be counted on to give a brutally straight answer, “Would you say I’m a man?”  She thought about it.  “Not really.  You’re kind of just a big daddy guy.”  Fair enough.  My older daughter says, “Your behavior doesn’t always seem very adult.  But I’m glad—that would be boring.”

Is it time to just jettison this “Man’s gotta do” quote?  It is kind of antiquated, after all; most people associate it with John Wayne (and the 1939 movie “Stagecoach”) though it first appeared in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (click here).  But I kind of like the quote.  It reminds me to try to be a man, to live up to that (albeit vague) standard, which is a lot better than shamelessly embracing the arrested development that has become fashionable, like billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg with his hoodies and sneakers.

I first heard “man’s gotta do” from my brother, when he described a wild night of babysitting.  What made it wild was that the kids’ dad, Mr. K—, a miner, a real dyed-in-the-wool blue-collar guy who spoke in an irreverent snarl and always grinned at you with a hint of menace, like he was going to slap you upside the head because it’s what you deserved, decided to see if he was getting his money’s worth with the babysitter (i.e., my then twelve-year-old brother).  To Mr. K—, babysitting wasn’t about getting the kids to bed on time with their teeth brushed; it was about protecting them from intruders.

So when he and his wife got home, pretty late, he started hammering on the door and then burst it open and stormed into the room.  My brother, instead of running for cover, put up his dukes and assumed a prizefighter’s stance.  (This was during the ‘70s when people said things like “Put up your dukes!”)  Mr. K—, needless to say, was delighted.  “That’s what I wanna see!” he yelled.  “Somebody who’s not afraid to protect my kids!”  His wife said something less enthusiastic, probably along the lines of “I’m not sure that was actually the right reaction,” to which Mr. K— replied, “Hey, sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!”  So there it is:  Max was a man at age twelve.  And I’m still reaching for it.  Sweet.

Epilogue

Check out this postcard Max sent my daughter, which arrived the very day I finished this blog post:

In case you’re having trouble with the small print, here’s what it says: 

It’s a beautiful day.  In a minute I’m going to go get my hair trimmed.  After that, I’m going to go swimming.  This is not the kind of day I get to enjoy very often, but I worked very hard to make it happen.  That’s the thing about life.  In order to have time and space for yourself, you have got to do what needs to be done.  I have long said “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, when a man’s gotta do what it is a man does when he does what he’s gotta do.”  I believe this is true for everyone, even pets and children.

He might as well have added “and my brother” or “and your dad.”  You see?  My brother employs the caveat, too!

I phoned Max up and described the amazing coincidence.  Sure enough, the origin of his quotation was Mr. K— having quoted it.  Max still remembers that babysitting episode the same way he’d described it to me, all those years ago.  “It’s been a running joke ever since,” he said, “but usually one I keep to myself.”