I like men

I do. I admit it. I've been married to two wonderful men who know how to be good friends as well as good and provident husbands and fathers. In a mixed gathering, I often find myself in a corner with guys talking about business, sports or current events. (A husband of a good friend once told me, "You're the only one who remembers who spoiled Milt Wilcox's almost-perfect game* and will also ask me how things are really going." This snippet is included as a reassurance that I'm not secretly a guy myself.) I just like them.

So my eye was drawn to a paragraph in the May 2006 issue of First Things in which Richard Neuhaus reports that Marian Saltzman, coiner of the descriptive tag for cosmopolitan men "Metrosexual" (which is so last year), has come up with a term for this year's man: "Ubersexual". Hold your horses -- repellent as the associations with that term might be, the definition is pretty attractive:

Ubersexuals are “men who embrace the positive aspects of their masculinity, such as confidence, leadership, passion, and compassion.” But they do so “without giving in to negative neanderthal stereotypes.” “The ubersexual has a passion for principles. The metrosexual has a passion for fashion,” and so forth. The ubersexual does not “turn up his nose at any cultural pursuit that doesn’t involve sports, beer, or burgers.”

Well, I had no interest at all in Last Year's Man with his "passion for fashion" -- actually, I had little notion that he was Last Year's Man -- but I very much like and respect men with "confidence, leadership, passion and compassion."

If this definition helps men like this be identified and distinguished from the herd, all the better. I have some wonderful daughters and delightful single friends who would like to meet you.

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P.S. Therése once identified another characteristic of admirable men, in a backward sort of way. "Men who go to daily Mass are studly." Eloquently put.

* Jerry Hairston, Chicago White Sox, 4/15/83