In praise of manual labor

It's funny the way a man will stick with you, even after he's gone. I still remember the off-hand comment made by an old boyfriend after I'd just come home from the salon. "Girls should never cut their hair," he said, looking at my new bob. "Men like it long." Now, years later, I slink into the salon after too many months between visits. "Just a trim," I say time after time. "I'm growing it out."

Of course, no man leaves an impression like the first to break a girl's heart, and so I carry more of Dillon's wants and ways than any other. What I remember most about him — and this was from high school, which now feels like a different world — is the way he worked on cars. He had big hands, strong but not rough, with long fingers that were too wiry to be delicate. In one of those rare moments of simple adolescent pleasure, I once sat and watched him work under the hood of his old Saab, and when he stepped close, I could smell the mix of motor oil and sweat that has defined manhood for me ever since.

At that time, Dillon and I were just friends, and my real boyfriend — a fastidious kid named Jimmy who wore glasses and had an unhealthy attachment to his mother — liked to poke fun at my working-class friend. "What's he going to do," Jimmy asked at dinner one night, "work on cars for the rest of his life?" Jimmy had just gotten into a big-name school up north, and he was set on the white-collar path from university to office fixture. I bet he couldn't change his own tire.

I wonder if Jimmy knows that manual labor is now in vogue. Matthew Crawford, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and looks good in a coverall, makes a case for it in his new book, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." In a

piece for The New York Times Magazine,

Dr. Crawford talks about his experience of moving from a knowledge worker at a think tank to owning his own motorcycle repair shop. "Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid," he writes. "For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank."

Not only is manual labor intellectual, which Dr. Crawford does an excellent job of pointing out, but it is also sexy. Why, after all, do women love men in uniform? Because it represents physical work. A man in uniform does something with his day: pilots fly aircraft, deliverymen handle packages, and soldiers blow stuff up. The cubiclesitter in pressed khakis and a button down? His work is less tan- gible, less evi dently macho.

Which is not to say he is less manly. Give me a man in a suit who can lay tile or fix a car any day. The point is this: There is an inherent sexiness to manual labor. The man with calloused fingers and an aptitude for fixing things strikes a chord in the female brain. Now, if only we could bottle the scent of motor oil.

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