Are Men Slobs?

Sooner or later the older male is regarded as a slob.  He leaves a solitary sock on the bedroom floor.  He wears the same pair of underwear for a week (to conserve water and detergent).  Or his wife discovers an entire room in the basement littered with his dirty dishes and salted meats infested with various stages of fly larvae.  And women ascertain from these signs that men are slobs.

But men are not slobs by birth.  They are created.  And they must work at it.

Consider, for example, the younger male who inhabits his college dorm room--a space about the size of a British phone booth.  He enters into this social contract fully intending to domesticate himself and succumb to the social norms of decency.  But there are classes he must attend, and papers he must write, and before long he begins sleeping late and allowing his teeth to turn green.  He discovers that, without the intervention of women, he can actually live quite comfortably in his own natural juices.

After graduation, having learned that he can survive on two pair of socks and one stick of deodorant, he begins looking for a woman who knows how to launder sheets.  He has not been sleeping on sheets, but has been thinking about it.  Usually he asks a woman to marry him, and she agrees, providing he will clean himself up and wear a necktie to the wedding.

But as the male ages, he learns how to navigate around the social contract of marriage and, bit by bit, become a slob again.  He leaves a dish in the sink.  He clips his toenails on his wife's pillow.  Or he slips into bed at night unshowered following a day of chainsaw work in hundred degree heat.

If he leaves the toilet seat up he will be divorced within six months.

The male slob, however, doesn't ask for a woman's pity nor her wrath.  He seeks understanding.  He wonders why he can't stuff peanuts under the couch or eat the potato chips he discovers under the cushions.  He doesn't see why women object so vehemently to his nose picking.  And why the anger over his belching?

The older male is not a slob by choice.  His role models are legion.  And before he dies he hopes he can get one more day out of his sneakers.  His shoes have holes in them, but no more so than his soul.  He's just running out of time to be reformed.