Nevertheless, He Persisted: Tales of Masculine Perserverance
Even after two too many after-work old-fashioneds, Jim Talbott, 33, sensed that the woman on the Brooklyn-bound L Train was not quite as attracted to him as he was to her. She didn’t smile or thank him when he told her, slurringly, that her dress was “real nice.” Instead, she plugged her ears with ear-buds and turned the volume all the way up. “Is that Beyoncé?” he asked, twice, to no reply. He guessed he should probably stop talking to her, should stop staring at her legs, should absolutely not follow her off the train when she rushed out at First Avenue. Nevertheless, he persisted.
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“I love sports,” Steve Ames, 22, would say, “just not lady sports.” Whenever lady sports came on TV, he would wave his hands in mock excitement and squawk, “Look at me! I’m a lady playing lady sports! Don’t mess up my hair! Oh no, I broke a nail!” Nobody ever laughed. He persisted nevertheless.
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Francis Whiting III, 76, was the last of a dying breed: a true gentleman. The light of chivalry may yet be extinguished from the face of the earth, he lamented, but it would not disappear before he did. He rehearsed this thought, or some variation thereof, dozens of times each day: when, for example, he held the door for a woman slightly too far away for it to be strictly necessary, and when he stood as a woman approached his table, and when he assigned the most challenging cases at his firm to men, and when he noticed a woman at the office looking tired, and told her so, and urged her to get more rest. It was no simple matter, being chivalrous. Nevertheless, he was a man of principle, and persisted.
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“Manufacturing is the key,” Henry Parker, 52, explained to the other parents at his son’s school’s family-day picnic. “That’s the thing most folks don’t understand.” He was about to deliver further insights into the state of the economy when he was interrupted. By a woman. Who disagreed with him. Who had many things to say about the economy. Who was an economist. Henry, who wasn’t, felt a swell of panic rising in his gut as he listened to her opinions on technology and automation and the evolving nature of labor. It was possible that he was outmatched. Nevertheless, he could not keep quiet. His first words after he cut her off were garbled, but he persisted, and soon he found that he’d raised his voice high, very high, far higher than was socially acceptable, and was demanding to be told, “What in god’s name this woman could possibly know about robots.”
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