In the spirit of progressive thinking for which today’s modern male is celebrated – he once completed an entire load of laundry without complaining out loud – Orillia Today set out to explore the many ways in which men have evolved from the unibrowed knuckle-draggers of yesteryear to thoughtful, caring beings willing to shop for their wives’ feminine hygiene products so long as other guys don’t find out.
(Men have not yet evolved enough to understand why feminine hygiene products are openly advertised on television in settings that typically feature fluffy clouds, flowers and possibly even kittens tumbling about in knitting wool. Those scenes just leave us more confused.)
But first let us take you to Finland, where men are proudly bucking the trend by displaying their manliness in a time-honoured tradition that doesn’t involve embarrassing trips to the drug store in which we stare down at the counter in the hope that the clerk doesn’t recognize us from the photo in our newspaper column.
Males in Finland may be every bit as progressive as males in other parts of the globe even if every year hordes of them take part in something known as the Wife Carrying World Championships.
This widely anticipated event, which is not yet being considered for Olympic status even if it hands-down beats bobsledding for sheer excitement and thrills per second, is brilliant in its simplicity: men hoist women over their shoulders and race for the finish line, or possibly even the Finnish line.
This is accomplished with a significant amount of grunting, huffing and straining, the men lumbering awkwardly as their better halves dangle upside down from their shoulders.
Spectators cheer wildly as the couples push forward in a celebration of the communal spirit that brought them together in the first place, two people working as one to accomplish a single goal — winning your wife’s weight in beer.
Obviously, this presents a conundrum: the lighter the wife, the better the chance her husband has of arriving at the finish line first; however, the less she weighs, the less beer her husband will take home.
This is a debate that will occupy philosophers for the remainder of time, and cannot be answered within the tight confines of a newspaper column because I am running out of space and my editor is wondering whether I’ll be filing before Christmas.
The festival is said to have originated in the 19th century when Finnish women were often stolen from neighbouring villages, while another account points to a legendary bandit named Rosvo-Ronkainen, who apparently made prospective gang members run through the bush with heavy sacks on their backs.
Today, single men wanting to take part in the annual event are invited to choose any woman over the age of 16 to be their “wife” for the day, and participants come from the world over.
You may have seen the t-shirts around town: I flew to Finland, carried my wife 250 metres and all I got was a bad back.
According to a recent television news report on the 2008 race, the winning couple left with beer and a year’s worth of accident insurance.
Beat that, Olympic bobsledders.
