So today I helped my Father-In-Law take some parts off an old Ford F150 he owns. During the course of torture … er sorry … During the process I got rather hot, tired, bruised, and filthy. When getting cleaned up I realized something that I’ve been ignoring for a while now. Men and women are exchanging equipment.
Now we’ve been exchanging roles for quite a while, sometimes due to need and sometimes due to the pure simple joy of being “bad”. Now during the course of swapping roles we’ve swapped gear here and there. Generally I tend to think that this gear swapping has been temporary. While a man is doing a lady role, he often uses lady gear. While a lady is doing a man role, she often uses man gear. It is all very understandable – probably more so than the idea of lady roles and man roles in this day and age, but I digress. Somewhere along the way we’ve become quite used to using each other’s gear.
One example is bathroom soap. Here you can see how I came to this observation now. When I was growing up the manliest of soaps was Lava while the ladies used Lux. You knew Lava was for men because they ground up volcanoes and put it in the soap. Volcanoes! Lux soap on the other hand had no crushed rock in it. In fact you could buy Lux in powder form, that’s just one step away from being a liquid. Lava smelled like a forest. Lux smelled like flowers. I’m not pointing these things out to try to illustrate how much better or worse men or women are to the other, just that during one point in my life men and women had distinctly separate gear.
Fast forward thirty plus years and while Lava is still around, men are about as likely if not more to use something called a Shower Gel. Shower Gel doesn’t have ground rock in it. In fact at least one Shower Gel smells like chocolate. At the risk of sounding sexist, men should NOT smell like chocolate. Well, not everyday at least, and certainly not ALL over. I won’t say how I know this, but many Shower Gels have scents not based on the forests but rather fruits and sometimes even vegetables. Fruits and vegies may not be flowers, but they also aren’t very foresty either. I also won’t admit that I realized that previous bit while using a luffa.
Now some of you will probably say something like, “But Bruce Campbell/Isaiah Mustafa uses my shower gel”. I can understand why you might not think you are using a lady soap, but you are wrong. These men are simply very manly men who advertise for a lady soap. Ok, Old Spice isn’t a lady product in general, but shower gels are. Sorry for the harsh reality check. If you use a shower gel and feel the need to man up, go get some Dove bar soap. Dove bar soap is manlier than any shower gel. Why is this such a revelation? Because the soap is called Dove! (Dove is a lady word).
So in conclusion, we all use lady soap now. Maybe this is for the best. I know after a day of being me, I often smell pretty rough while my wife seems to be smell not so rough. Granted it could be because her lady soap works better than my “man soap”, or it could be because I sit all day in a methane cloud of my own creation. I don’t know. What I do know is that I need to get some Lava.
© 2011, Joe Little. All rights reserved.
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