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August 07, 2005

Chicks & Dudes

I spent a lot of time listening to Tom Leykis while I was in Seattle last week. His was one of the many shows on 100.7 The Buzz that was the basic radio oxygen sucker during my drive-times.

What is wrong with people that they don't know this stuff? I mean this guy calls in and he says he's got this woman and her kid living in his house and what should he do? Leykis walks him through the finer points of his stupidity and sends him off with an understanding in no uncertain terms that it's her or his career. In my 20s I was so persnickety about women, some people thought I was gay, but it sure is good to this kind of flat talk on talk radio.

Leykis is murder on single mothers and everybody who listens to his show knows it. His position is basically this: IT'S A MISTAKE. No argument here. The intellectual in me wants to second-guess him, but I know he's right. In fact, the second-guess argument in me went back to the question of abortion rights during the beginning of the Culture Wars. I had the balls to suggest, without much proof either way, that black families persist because black women are not as afraid as white women to be 'burdened' with children. So our abortion rates are much lower and our 'extended families' are more real. That was 1986, and I haven't gone there much since. Instead, I turned to more macroeconomic explanations of poverty. But I'm probably about to turn all that waffling on its head this month as I revisit Moynihan. But I can tell you confidently on the gut level, that Tom Leykis has it dead right when it comes to dating, sex and family values. I haven't heard him misspeak yet.

Although I don't listen as often as perhaps a conservative pundit ought to, I do sense something conspicuously dysfunctional about today's relationships. Cobb's Rule #1 is that "There is marriage, and there is everything else. Everything else doesn't matter." So I don't really give spit credibility to 'relationships'. As I was saying not long ago, you would think with the diseases and trifling people out there, young folks ought to get it through their heads that it ought to be all about getting to the alter in one piece. Nevertheless, they amazingly seem to sidle half-assed into 'relationships' and wonder what's wrong.

So I'm thinking here, as I look at Ambra's talk about what men do wrong, that I should jump onboard this meme and take it to the next phase. Because clearly, if Leykis is making money, there's not enough daddy work going on and perhaps I can be of service.

The more I think about it, the more I need to slap myself for not doing more. Especially as I get into this gay marriage discussion, it sounds like all I am is 'against' while not saying what I'm for. Furthermore, a lot of confusion surrounds my position as conservative, as if conservative blacks have the same exact puritan hangups as our non-black cousins. And so I think I'll start a new category, Boys & Girls. I'll test it out with the readership and use the best of it for my own kids.

Posted by mbowen at August 7, 2005 04:03 PM

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Posted by: Ryan at August 7, 2005 07:30 PM