It's tarantula migration season here in New Mexico. They are on the move, searching for mates. My dog announces their passage through the yard. You know a spider is large when a dog barks at it.
When alerted, I rescue and relocate them outside the fence in the direction they were heading. Safe passage on your journey, little friend. Be fruitful and multiply.
I was living in California when I first learned tarantulas migrate for mating and saw a horde spilling across the roadway near Mt. Diablo. The males make the trek while the females stay in their burrows and merely come to the door when the male knocks, like the start of a bad 80s porno featuring a handyman or plumber. Depending on the female's personality, she will usually cannibalize the male either before or after copulating. She’ll have something like seven hundred babies that look like white eggs with legs and take anywhere from two to twelve years to grow up.Then it's burrow life again for much of the year.
Tarantulas are the only spider I don't mind sharing the planet with. They never try to get inside the house and when they walk on you (if you make them, because they don’t want to) they move slowly and so softly it feels like the touch of satiny ballet slippers. Tarantulas are, of course, much maligned because of their heinous appearance and from this stems the fear we harbor against them, quite unnecessarily so.
Observing this year's migration coincides with my effort to buck logs for firewood, which means I've been dealing with a finicky chainsaw (are there any other kind?) and making frequent visits to YouTube for troubleshooting and repair tutorials. YouTube has faithfully adjusted the algorithm and now I'm served a veritable buffet of chainsaw lifestyle channels, from timber fellers and framers, homesteaders and hillbillies to small engine repair wizards and Mad Maxes. An unanticipated though not totally surprising element of this channel-surfing is that in addition to learning how to tell if my tensioner needs replacing, I'm learning how to be a man.
Despite two women outliers who make excellent chainsaw repair videos ("married with small engines" and "chicanic"), chainsaw channels are testosterone-fests about men and manhood. Manly men who speak affectionately and nostalgically about the old times when “men were men,” as in how the chain break is a universal safety feature on saws today but “back when men were men,” chain breaks were unheard of and today, in order to signal they are all-man, some men will remove them. Safety is very unmanly.
I've learned about the eleven items every MAN needs in his chainsaw kit, the three different chainsaws every MAN needs in his arsenal (unless you can only afford one and THIS is the MAN’s saw), the way a MAN should fell a tree, the right way a MAN stacks wood. It's humorous, as if a woman’s chainsaw kit would be different or looking at a woodshed the gender of the stacker could be discerned.
Certainly today's cultural sensitivities tuned my ears to this overt masculinization, took me back to the days when English standards defaulted to he/him, women being a derivative of the universal man. Given the equality movement (Sojourner Truth pointedly challenging, “Ain’t I a woman?”), today’s gender fluidity and non-binary humans, this type of masculinization is jarring, a throwback, even offensive. But because I’m never not a philosopher, I took inward stock: am I a real man, enough of a man, the right kind of man? Does one ever know, once and for all? Who gets to say? What am I aiming for here? Do you, dear reader, know what we are up to in all this? And these are always cultural and social questions, changing all the time: third in the line-up of hot button political issues (behind abortion and immigration) is the transgender "issue" and all the perceived threats this seems to entail. Can a trans woman attend a women’s retreat if she still has a penis? Who can use which bathroom? Does exposure to transgender people undermine the “normal” development of masculine and feminine identity in children? The REAL man and woman motif is back in force, both in terms of biological determinism and socially constructed role-playing, and the stakes are high.
Insecurity around manhood seems a more frequent affliction than insecurity about womanhood, though this is just my limited observation. Manhood must continually be proven. Simply showing up on the scene is not enough, and the standards are always in flux. If one man can bench press 200 pounds and another only 120, this doesn’t make one man stronger but, weirdly, more of a man. Some performances of manhood are now deemed toxic (side question: is there a corollary toxic femininity?). Sometimes manhood is about penis size or simply whether one has a penis or not; other times, it's about truck size and having to register for selective service and if you are willing to die so the women and children may live. Do real men cry or not? Should a real man wear pink or like flowers? Depends who you ask. Why all this gendering of skills, obsessions, trucks and chainsaws? Why the ongoing proving ground?
I’ve made the switch to “human” for the most part and aim for something I think it means to be a good one of those. Gender is just too weird and confusing. I mean, I guess this week at least I'm certifiably a man thanks to my chainsaw and being actively engaged in the process of deforming or killing myself with it, potentially, though mine still has the chain break, so I’m clearly not a manly man. Almost makes me pine for the unquestioning simplicity of tarantula life, except for that cannibalization part.
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