Fuck the sunset, take the horse

[Guest]

In another thread, McKenna posted:

Just saw a bumper sticker that read: Fight smog, ride a cowboy!

I don’t get the cowboy appeal or mystique. I’ve seen it romanticized and eroticized on screen, in fiction and in cigarette ads, but I don’t buy it. Has anyone seen pictures of the real “Billy the Kid”? He looked nothing like Robert Taylor or Kris Kristofferson.

John Wayne, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and Robt. Duval—they’re not cowboys! And John Travolta? Give me a fucking break, Hollywood.

I know a good deal about the American west’s history and it’s ugly from this Mexicana’s pov. Fuck the Alamo.

So what kind of reality is the appeal of the cowboy for literate women with brains? Dígame, por favor.

Perdita

 

[shereads]

Redford does own a ranch and rides horses and stuff. Plus he has the hat.

My own favorite bumper sticker is, "Use an accordion, go to jail. It's the law."

My favorite cowboy-related saying is this quote from Anne Richards, former Texas governor, on the topic of her successor and current President, George W. Bush:

"He's all hat and no cowboy."

In another thread, McKenna posted:

Just saw a bumper sticker that read: Fight smog, ride a cowboy!

I don’t get the cowboy appeal or mystique. I’ve seen it romanticized and eroticized on screen, in fiction and in cigarette ads, but I don’t buy it. Has anyone seen pictures of the real “Billy the Kid”? He looked nothing like Robert Taylor or Kris Kristofferson.

John Wayne, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and Robt. Duval—they’re not cowboys! And John Travolta? Give me a fucking break, Hollywood.

I know a good deal about the American west’s history and it’s ugly from this Mexicana’s pov. Fuck the Alamo.

So what kind of reality is the appeal of the cowboy for literate women with brains? Dígame, por favor.

Perdita

 

[Guest]

ella, I forgive you for the Baretta brouhaha. Love the Redford description. Love Anne Richards.

close to loving you,

Perdita

 

[Mhari]

I dunno...something about the rough-and-tumble aspect of the real cowboy. And the truly Southern ones have that kind of ingrained politeness that just makes me go all weak in the knees.

I know...that sounds really weird. I can't explain it, myself.

Maybe it's the leather chaps and boots, too...

 

[shereads]

Cowboys still exist. They're really cute and they're named Matt, and they work as "guest wranglers" at a dude ranch in Colorado.

Perdita, Perdita. You would have fallen in love with one of the Matts (there were three Matts working at Vista Verde that summer, a ratio of one Matt per every 2 female guests).

Matt the Younger, who was maybe 22 and was a true cowboy (loves to compete in rodeos and enjoys working cattle and mending fence; wrangles ranch guests for a few months each year to make "the real money."

Teaching the first-day guests to treat their horses with courtesy, he said to one woman whose horse had stopped to pee:

"Um...Ma'am?" (Matt blushed beet-red) "You ought to stand up in them stirrups when your horse is....using the restroom."

Cowboys are an emblem of freedom from structure. Like all emblems, they lose some of their lustre when you look close, but it's a gorgeous emblem with an element of reality buried beneath all the poseurs in Tony Lama boots and $500 hats.

I agree about the Alamo. But that was about politics and power, not guys who work cattle and mend fences and try to keep to themselves...and are embarrassed to say "pee" in front of ladies.

 

[Guest]

Mhari: I get what you're saying. I can see that even in RL that 'type' might be appealing in an imaginative way, but do you really think they know how to fuck a woman right? I see them shooting off as quick as their pistolas. Plus what would you talk about?

Perdita

 

[Wills]

The dust, it gits everywhere.

That and 'chaps'.

W

 

[raphy]

Mhari: I get what you're saying. I can see that even in RL that 'type' might be appealing in an imaginative way, but do you really think they know how to fuck a woman right? I see them shooting off as quick as their pistolas. Plus what would you talk about?

Perdita

As a man who dated a (female) ranch manager.. Horses, mostly =)

 

[shereads]

Cowboys read because they're alone a lot, so you could talk to yours about books, Perdita. If you had to talk...I had a lovely conversation with an older-than-Matt cowboy in Montana two summers ago, about the vanishing landscape of the American West and then, more unexpectedly, about Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose."

If you could see the arm muscles on some of these guys who handle enormous nervous animals and bales of barbed wire for a living, you'd...well, you'd be pleasantly reminded that a man can be a laborer and also have a brain.

 

[whispering_surrender]

I know a good deal about the American west’s history and it’s ugly from this Mexicana’s pov. Fuck the Alamo.

So what kind of reality is the appeal of the cowboy for literate women with brains? Dígame, por favor.

Perdita

I would just like to apologize for being related to one of the "big names" of the American Wild West.....although, I'm pretty sure he was nowhere near the alamo....unless there was a good poker game going on down there.....

Whisper

 

[Guest]

... you'd be pleasantly reminded that a man can be a laborer and also have a brain.

I did not mean to imply that. I love real laborers. I suppose the cowboys I think of are of the mythologized west I do not like. Yours sound OK.

But I doubt John Wayne read much besides his scripts.

Perdita (opening her mind a tiny bit)

 

[Quasimodem]

Actually, The Duke (Marion, if you prefer) loved the ballet.

He took a lot of flack from the Birchers for attending the Bolshoi when it toured America, during the Cold War era.

 

[QuirkyK]

Cowboys? Well....the only thing I like about em is watching em' ride those bulls at the rodeo.

I think it's sexy!!!

But, the older ones out west? Umm....Weren't they all kinda' dirty and smelly? ewwwww.....

 

[Guest]

Erm, now I'm confused. Just saw Limbhugger's cowboy pics. Love the coat.

Quas, I saw the Bolshoi in the 60's, but I didn't get to go backstage (unlike Marion).

Perdita

 

[raphy]

When cowboys didn't dance
Didn't wear designer shirts
When their hearts were filled with memories
Their bodies filled with hurt
They would sit around the campfire and exchange a piercing glance
Back when the west was really wild and cowboys didn't dance

 

[shereads]

A-HA!! So John Wayne was a girlie-man. I knew it.

 

[raphy]

A-HA!! So John Wayne was a girlie-man. I knew it.

Can't really blame him after being given a name like Marion, really

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Yeah, I don't know. When I was a real little kid I had a crush on these old cowboys from the ancient serials they'd show on TV: Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, and Bob Steel (his movies were so old he used to wear lipstick, and the girls had 1930's hair). They had tight pants and they got to tie up girls, and that was enough for me at that age. But I switched to spacemen as soon as I could though. I liked rocket ships better than horses. Rocket ships don't have flies and you could use your TV as a control panel.

For a while my favorite cowboy was Lash LaRue. He was an hombre who dressed all in black and used a bullwhip instead of a gun. Very proto-BDSM. The actor had been a hair-dresser in real life before he picked up the bullwhip.

Germans seem to be just wild about cowboys and Indians and the old west. Cowboys seem to be kind of a European thing in general. That's because Europeans probably never had to drive 500,000 miles across Montana. Maybe it has something to do with liking horses, which I never particularly did.

I was in Wall Drug in South Dakota one time when a real cowboy came in. Wall Drug is a big tourist trap wild-west fantasy land and all these tourists were sitting around eating their buffalo burgers in the Chuckwagon Grill and this grizzled old guy comes in dirty, filthy, his jeans all ripped land a big bloody gash across his knee; real blood. Oogh. He looked like he'd been dragged behind a truck for 20 miles. I have no idea what he was doing there. He just stood there looking at the tourists and they sat there gawking at him, then he turned around and limped out. It was weird.

And that's my dissertation on Cowboys.

---dr.M.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

"Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys." W. Nelson

The "Wild West" is the great mythic legend of the United States. In the last few decades, it's become a more inclusive and less romantic myth, but it remains. The image of "The Cowboy" as a laconic, hard working, free spirit riding alone on an open plain or across a pasture with the Rockies looming in the background has become the symbol of that legend.

Of course it's not the complete picture. It was hard, low paying manual labor. Hispanics invented the job. Many blacks worked as cowboys after the Civil War. Scots-Irish cowboys, probably the predominate ethnic group, were hard workers, but would quit for the slightest imagined insult and tended to be lousy drunks.

But the appeal of the mythic cowboy, which is not limited to the US, comes from a variety of things. Throughout written history, the "man-on-horseback" has been, both figuratively and literally, looked up to. No good pre-twenty century military honcho would have dreamed of erecting a statue in his own honor that didn't have him seated on a horse.

There is also the sense that cowboys are/were one of the few laboring class types who would often work alone or in small groups without a foreman/supervisor hovering over him.

Cowboys have a rep for taking independence to the point of willful stubbornness. A smart boss will never give a direct order to a cowboy. Instead, he makes suggestions. "Matt, why don't you and young Matt here, go check out..." The cowboy knows it's an order, so does the boss. But for both of them, the appearance of equality has been preserved. Both have tacitly agreed the boss and cowboy are equals but just happen to have different jobs.

IMHO, among contemporary writers, Larry McMurtry probably does the least romantic, most realistic portrayal of cowboys and the west both of yesterday and today.

As for Marion Morrison, who better to represent the ultimate American Cowboy than a college guy who became an actor and changed his name to John Wayne, liked ballet, and supported the Panama Canal treaty?

Rumple "I didn't punch no doggie" Foreskin

 

[raphy]

Cowboys seem to be kind of a European thing in general. That's because Europeans

Not where I live, Mab .. Trust me

I dunno about those weird continental Europeans, but the English tend to look at cowboys (and the 'Wild West' in general) as another example of 'American barbarism'

Not making a comment on my own personal opinions. I wouldn't dress the way I dress if I didn't like horses, riding and the Marlboro Man image, just reporting on what I see in the city I live in.

 

[Guest]

And that's my dissertation on Cowboys.

Mab., that was a very enjoyable read. Wall Drug, what a name.

When my brothers and I were kids our father told us bedtime stories about himself as the San Antonio Kid, and how he fought saber-tooth tigers on the Texas plains. He's my ideal caballero.

Perdita

 

[OldnotDead]

Well, as a genuine Drugstore Cowboy (see the comment about Wall Drug above) with a Stetson bought in Old Tuscon Studios, boots from Shepplers, Duster from the same, I have to admit I'm glad it's popular enough that I can buy that stuff and have places to actually wear it.

Perdita,

You're right, the image of screen is very different from reality. True cowboys were the ones that caused a great deal of trouble and made some towns actually dangerous to live in once a herd had 'come in'.

I had the fun fortune to actually work with a genuine cowboy. Well, he had been. The senior partner of our firm had started out life on the Uehlein (can you spell Schlitz?) ranch in Montana. From there he had migrated to Beverly Hills of all places and for a time chauferred and handled Rin Tin Tin. (The movie one, not the TV one) It was fun when he brought his Stetson in to the office after I got mine and we compared the two. His had provided water for both him and his horse.

Charlie was a most interesting guy. I think the best image of him was the picture of him, Stetson and boots on the Concorde. I always thought it was his cowboy charm that got him all those 'little old lady' rich clients.

I, on the other hand, make no pretensions to reality. Yes, I like riding horses, but my idea of camping is staying at Holiday Inn Express instead of Embassy Suites. <G> I used to wear my hat and boots when I plowed the driveway.

But I did have fun once on my way to San Antonio. With a snooty, WASP, preppie associate, we took an early flight and I arrived to pick up the slightly hungover lad, somewhat astonished to find me in three piece suit with Stetson and boots. ON the plane he points out to me a 'real cowboy' with jeans, much more tired hat, and leather coat. You should have seen his face when we were getting our bags out of the overhead and it turned out 'real cowboy's' and mine were together, and 'real' said, "Ain't it great to get back home?"

What could I say but, "Yep".

OK, since Perdita mentioned the Alamo and I mentioned San Antonio - name the largest immigrant group of the defenders of the Alamo.

The hint is that taking a page from Chicago, they try to make the river green in March.

 

[Seattle Zack]

riding and the Marlboro Man image

The Marlboro Man is actually the most successful advertising campaign in history. The famed Leo Burnett agency came up with it, and it's been an enduring symbol of Americana ever since.

Marlboro was actually marketed and sold as a women's cigarette, all the way through WWII. The Burnett company created the macho "Marlboro Man" icon as a way to reposition Marlboro from a "mild as May" (the original tag line) cigarette to a product with broader appeal.

When cigarette ads were banned from TV, the striking magazine print shot of cowboys enjoying a smoke on horseback continued to fuel sales growth, and Marlboro became the No. 1 tobacco brand in the world.

As the anti-smoking movement has spread, the Marlboro Man has come under particular attack for his role in luring new customers to a cancer-causing habit.

Funny how advertising distills and purifies complex generalities into marketable, bite-sized pieces and makes icons out of the unlikliest of heroes.

 

[Icingsugar]

I've herded moo-moos. I can handle myself on a horseback. I can mend a fence. Does that make me a cowboy?

The whole romantisation of a gritty, dirty, mundane and down-to earth male-dominated job seems to be a bit...Village People?

 

[DirtyJJ]

Well, to sum up with snippets of what those before me have said...

The chaps
The strong arms/bodies
The old-fashioned gentlemanly ways
The boots
The tying up part...

That would be my fantasy cowboy, of course...

But I know what you are saying about the "real" cowboys Perdita. Very different.

Oh yeah, and I like Limbhugger too.