Snips and snails

I was watching Hombre last night. It's a classic 60's style western with Paul Newman and Richard Boone. I say "60's style" because it had the political correctness of the time embedded in the plot. Newman, having been abducted and raised by the Apaches, had come to distrust (maybe even hate) his fellow White Men. For good reason, of course. Richard Boone is always excellent as the Bad Guy, of course.

Quick synopsis: John Russel [Newman]is informed that he has inherited a lodging-house in the town. He goes to the town and decides to trade the place for a herd. He has to go to another city. The only stagecoach is one being hired for a special trip paid by Faver and his wife Audra. As there are several seats others join the stagecoach making seven very different passengers in all. During the journey they are robbed by a gang led by Cicero Grimes [Boone]

But it was one small scene that intrigued me enough to post about it. The three women are chatting about men. Two seem to see them as necessary for survival and security and, thus, to be tolerated while the third opines that she likes them for themselves, for what they are. There are remarks made about the noises men make; "bathroom noises", "coughing up phlegm", and "bedroom noises."

And we do. Make those noises, that is. Not that women don't. They just hide it better. Men don't seem to be so concerned about it. After all, as boys, we made a game of making some of those noises so it stands to reason we wouldn't abandon them in adulthood. We are a crude lot.

I began to muse about the relationship between the sexes, about the attraction. I was reminded of the old rhyme we all learned at one time:

"What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails
That's what little boys are made of !"
What are little girls made of?
"Sugar and spice and all things nice
That's what little girls are made of!"

The odd thing is that we boys reveled in the rather disparaging description.

Why do women like men? We are pretty gross at times. And most of us are hardly the ideal human form. We have "love handles" (I had them in my twenties), grow pot bellies (and are sometimes a bit proud of them, calling them "beer bellies"), lose our hair, have rough hands, smell bad quite often, spit a lot, make all those noises previously mentioned plus more not mentioned, can be violent and belligerent, and crude. Not all of us, of course, are this way but most of us are and all of us are capable of it.

Women, on the other hand, tend to be quite the opposite. They suppress the noises, work hard to keep the physical attributes from becoming unbecoming, abstain from belligerence and crudity. At least until they've been married awhile.

There is a scene in another Newman movie, Slap Shot, where Newman is in bed with the ex-wife of a goalie on another team. She confesses that she "likes women" and Newman's character is sympathetic to her, bringing up much of the same thoughts I did... plus a few... in a more descriptive way that I won't go into but mostly having to do with body parts and aesthetics.

I should get to my point, shouldn't I?

Just what the heck do women see in us anyway?