Kenneth Silber. My wife has a lot of power tools and knows how to use them. This capacity intrigues men and women alike. Her uncle, a housebuilder in Vermont, on a visit once said she has more tools than he does, perhaps an exaggeration but not by much.
When I put a picture on Facebook of my wife drilling into a wall on our back porch, the mass approval was swift. Once, my wife was drilling at the base of the mailbox at the end of the driveway, bending over in jeans next to our well-trafficked street in New Jersey.
A truck happened to pass by, the driver eyeing her with open-mouthed rapture. Later, when we had friends over for a socially-distanced picnic, she took them down to see the basement, and the visiting couple asked where the bondage rack was. Power tools can unlock the imagination. She brought new tools for me on the next date. My wife is an architectural lighting designer, a job that requires time on locales of construction and renovation. Knowing your tools garners the respect of men working at these sites.
Being unfazed by a give and take of salty language and off-color jokes helps as well, she tells me. I got a call from a pollster the other day. But one question from the pollster, a woman, came out of the blue. The facts were pretty clear that sexuality is a spectrum, even if most people readily identify as being male or female. And such biological issues barely begin to tap the complexity of people choosing to engage in activities and social roles at odds with conventional expectations of which gender does what.
I could imagine them being a divided demographic, with right-wing and left-wing elements. A grievance at the undervaluing of mechanical skills, once perhaps a left-wing sentiment, has been a factor in Trumpism.
