Honey, Can You Hand Me My Spear?

Forget Grey’s Anatomy. No more Desperate Housewives. We’ve even abandoned PBS.

In fact, apart from the occasional baseball, basketball, football or other game involving men and sweat, the television in our household displays none of the variety implied when we switched to whatever that cable thing is which gives something like 687 television channels. No, for all the variety available, we might as well go back to the days of the dinosaurs, also known as the big three networks.

For in the Bontempo household, only three television shows reign supreme: Man vs. Wild, The Deadliest Catch, and Dirty Jobs (none of which, ironically enough, is found on any of the “big three networks”).

As you might imagine, the person watching, or rather, mesmerized by these fascinating tales of men triumphing over messy, yucky stuff is not me. No, the individual glued to the escapades of these rough and tumble fellas (only when he can’t find the zillionth rerun of any of The Godfather movies, of course) is my husband, Dave.

In a way, I get it. The lives of our former hunter/gatherers are drastically different from the days of yesteryear, when our guys spent most of their time matching wits with Mother Nature in a daily game of survival. Way back when, the men really did find themselves locked in a cage match with nature, forced to fight their way through face to face meetings with creatures possessing really big teeth that were just as intent on finding food for the young ‘uns as were the guys. And in those situations, it really may have been important to know how to avoid detection by lions or how to navigate one’s way out of the perfect storm.

Now, not so much. My husband really doesn’t need to know how to determine if the dead zebra he’s just come across is fit to eat, nor does he need a lesson in how to skin the poor creature and consume it. And considering the fact that he’s rarely been dropped in the middle of the Amazon or the plains of the Serengeti and forced to find his way out, it’s also not essential for him to be able to build himself a bed of mud and sticks between two trees over a river, so he can get some sleep before continuing on his he-man journey back to safety and civilization.

Now, he pretty much just needs to remember how to find his car keys and the box of Tastykakes he keeps hidden in the garage for breakfast. As far as journeys go, the trip from home to office to coaching job (with a stop at the soft pretzel store for rations), isn’t all that arduous.

But I can see how his genetic makeup is screaming for more action. It doesn’t seem fair that men who are only looking to behave as men are wired to do should be denied the pleasures of some heart stopping guy fun.

To that end, each of the shows mentioned provide websites which, while probably not completely satisfying the male urge to get lost in the wilderness and hunt for something, can bring a guy close with interactive games. Depending on their choice of adventure, a guy can forge his way through the jungle, captain a crabbing ship on the high seas, or test his knowledge of any number of dirty, filthy jobs, all from the comfort of his favorite blue chair.

This summer, Dave won’t be navigating anything more threatening than the hot sand of a beach, except through television and cyber-space, and that’s fine with me.

I never liked zebra meat anyway.

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