As of today, I am proclaiming a boycott of the salty snack Combos due to it’s naming of New York City in last place on a list of the manliest cities in the country. For those of you scoring at home, this is now my fifth boycott, added to Abercrombie & Fitch, Dunkin’ Donuts, Eden Farm Grocery on 20th and 3rd, and the ten dollar bill (Alexander Hamilton was a dueling madman).
Combos’ new website is called The Combos Man Zone: Home of the Combivore (are you kidding me?). It features tools for becoming a Combivore and a sweepstakes called “The Ultimate Mancation.” And here I thought the cheese was only inside the snack.
The criteria for determining manliness is an interesting one: “using criteria such as number of professional major league sports teams, popularity of tools and hardware and frequency of monster truck rallies. Cities also lose ranking points for emasculating characteristics like the abundance of home furnishing stores, high minivan sales and subscription rates to beauty magazines.”
I’m going to throw out a wild guess here and say that the beauty magazine subscriptions are probably going to, oh, I don’t know, women. It’s just a guess though, I’m not the manliness expert.
Who came out on top of this rock-solid search for manliness? Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, Nashville, music city, home to uber-manly guys like these:
Rascal Flatts. They mow their own lawns.
Commonly perceived manly cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh didn’t even crack the top 25. And is Orlando, Florida really ranked 14th? Really guys? Were you counting all the tourists that come from Philly and Pittsburgh to see Disney World and then get the heck out of there?
Oklahoma City came in third thanks to it’s country-topping purchasers of salty snacks (like Combos). In an unrelated contest, Oklahoma City was recently named the Best City to Have Heart Failure In.
What really gets me, and I know will steam all New Yorkers, is that Los Angeles actually finished ahead of us on the manly meter. Los Angeles.
For New York itself, we might not have the abundance of Home Depots and no, there is no NASCAR track nearby, but you go to Harlem and tell a few guys that they live in the least manly city in the country. Tell the thousands of men not doing simple home repair, but working their asses off in the toxic subways and up on skyscrapers, doing things men in other cities wouldn’t dare dream, and see what you come back with. Tell the tens of thousands of men who may not have the “manliest” of jobs, but have to endure all hardships that this city throws at them.
Every summer I see tourists from the so-called “manly cities” losing their shit in 110-degree subway heat, their wives yelling at them because they can’t figure out how to get to F.A.O Schwartz. Every Christmas they get run over by cars, yelled at by cabbies, bums and psychotic over-caffeinated Wall Street types. Get up close to one and you can literally see the fear in their eyes.
So, my former friends at Combos, nice try. But I think New York deserves it’s own place in your rankings of Manly Cities. It’s a different beast. One that eats spit-fired lamb (the guy said it was lamb) from a street cart, pastrami sandwiches the size of your arm, and a half a pepperoni pizza at 4 in the morning. And that’s just our women!
You can keep your pretzels Combos. We know what we have here, even if no one else understands.
Read the full Combos article here.
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Has an ad ever made you stop and question the very fiber of your being as much as this one from LOFT? Witnessed on 23rd and Broadway, I was nearly trampled by a line of commuters close on my heels as I paused to contemplate its claim. Who is this woman that I, a man of 30, am supposed to be? Do I really look this happy in a double-button sweater jacket? Should I have left the black rimmed hat at home?
