Y’all will never guess — we in the South have several towns ranked among “America’s Manliest Cities.”
That’s right — Nashville is No. 1, Charlotte is No. 2, Memphis is No. 11 and good ol’ Birmingham is No. 23.
Well, don’t that crank your camouflage pick-’em-up truck?
But, ladies, before you go organizing a Manly Man Hunt to any of these cities — you know, tour buses filled with rope-and-duct-tape-wielding eligible women in full-on, trap-and-keep mode — you might want to know what being “manly” means.
The survey was conducted by Combos snacks, and included such criterion as “most sports bars” and “most monster truck pulls per capita.”
Huh.
So it’s really a “Cities with Most Redneck Men” survey, or maybe “Cities Filled with Men Who Intend to Stay Single — For a Long, Long Time.”
A report from the Manliest Cities survey states that Nashville achieved its high ranking because of its large number of NASCAR enthusiasts, the popularity of hunting and fishing and a heavy concentration of barbecue restaurants.
But let’s think about this.
What right-thinking woman would choose to look for a man, say, in a city with the highest number of bowling alleys or with most power tools per capita?
Do you want a man who will help you put out the azaleas come spring, or do you want a man who’s down at the Split Happens lanes rolling a few frames and sucking down a Pabst Blue Ribbon?
New Orleans also does the South proud in the Manliest Cities survey: The Big Easy boasts more hardware stores per capita than any other city in the country.
We all know the only power tools a woman wants her man to be familiar with are the vacuum and the George Foreman Grill.
Sure, it would be nice if your man were experienced with pistol-grip drills, nail guns and reciprocating saws (like anyone even knows what one of those things does) — if he would use them as God intended and you demanded. But when’s the last time you saw a man use a tool from his extensive collection to actually fix something around the house that needed repairing?
Does he rehang the shutters? Fix the leaky faucet? Put a new leg on the three-legged chair in the living room that makes you have to cock your head to watch TV?
No, he uses his fancy tools on “projects,” such as installing a flat-screen across from the toilet, or a handy dandy built-in keg cooler in his Barca Lounger so he can show off to other Men Who Measure Their Worth by Their Tools.
New York City, while it does have a high number of bowling alleys, is last on the Top 50 list because there’s not much place there for fishing, home improvement and drag racing. Well, duh. A man who requires a bi-weekly mani-pedi and carries a Man Purse uses the word “drag” in only one context, and it has nothing to do with racing.
Did anyone really think a city where a performance of “Guys and Dolls” is a major tourist attraction and there’s an art gallery on every corner would have lots of gun-toting motorheads in it?
When a New York man refers to his trigger finger, he means the one that points to the half-caf, blended cream, mochaccino at the corner Starbucks.
So now you might think I’m being picky: I don’t want a man who hauls a bloody deer head into the Hair of the Dog Neighborhood Bar and Taxidermist, but I also want to be the one who carries the purse in the family.
Well, yeah.
I’m all about happy mediums.
I say a guy should never be too manly to plug in the vacuum or whip up a dinner quiche; I just don’t want my guy sitting beside me at the salon with foils in his hair.
You might get past the bloody deer head, but a man discussing his guylights with a stylist is an image you can never truly erase.
Kelly Kazek
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Discussion
Know what you want before man hunt
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