The Wide World
by Marcus Bachler
Have you ever seen a program called “Queer eye for the straight guy”? This is a TV program that uses homosexual men’s sense of taste to help emancipated straight men become “attractive” to women.
Now. Do you remember the days when men were still men and women were still women? The days when your father told you stories about how he climbed Mt Everest before breakfast after wrestling a snow leopard with his bare hands? Well, neither can I. Shame isn’t it? The days of the spirit of the “rugged man” who lived for adventure are now all but over ... the days when Ayn Rand got wet in her panties imagining architect Howard Roark working in a quarry breaking rocks in the hot sun. I can’t imagine her getting excited about whether or not Roark’s shirt was in fashion or matched his eye colour or not, can you?
But don’t despair, help is at hand. Recently, a unique compendium of an age-old magazine was released that tells tales of “brave men” in acts of derring-do, survival and adventure. No designer-label clothes, hair salons or personal fitness trainers in sight here.
Wild World was a magazine of true adventures for men, which flourished between 1898 and 1965. The magazine was aimed squarely at young, middle-class Englishmen, the backbone of the Empire, and intended to nurture a schoolboy spirit of adventure. Empire was not about being sensible, but about being courageous, and what better way to educate the next generation of plucky Englishmen than by feeding them a diet of gripping true stories about men who wrestle with big cats? Take for example the tale of Maurice Wilson, a school teacher, who in his late thirties decided to conquer Everest with little or no experience of climbing. In 1934, after reaching 6,400 metres with his Sherpas, he decided to tackle the summit alone – after his Sherpas refused to go on themselves. He simply wrote in his travel journal for that day, “Off again, Gorgeous Day.” Later, his body was discovered half way up to the summit; he had frozen to death. Such behaviour may seem reckless and stupid to us, but it is this lost spirit of adventure, and not the act itself, which is the essential element now missing from our “queer eye” society. The magazine makes the following observation:
He possessed, in spite of all his faults – his recklessness and foolish pride – the spirit that makes men great. Contrast this sentiment with today’s culture in which everything is deemed to be unsafe. In the UK and elsewhere, Health and Safety regulations are now exercised and enforced with a firm grip. Recently, the presenter of a British TV show, Jeremy Clarkson, was stopped by Health and Safety “officers” from driving one of the cars he was reviewing into some bales of hay. He even offered to sign a declaration taking full responsibility for his actions, but was stopped by bureaucrats from “endangering” himself. Children are no longer able to play certain traditional games at school without wearing safety glasses and all nut products must be banned from schools if one child out of 5000 pupils suffers from a nut allergy. In fact, even home-made cakes have been banned from traditional fund-raising stalls in case they might be laced with something dangerous. Nowadays Nanny State waves her finger at us and we jump. We allow her to put our reckless sense of freedom in a straitjacket. However, Wild World was never there to warn us like a “Nanny” against unnecessary danger; rather it was there to celebrate it, even if the peril was self-inflicted and the task pointless.
And it was not just a male fantasy either, but something for the adoring Ayn Rands of this world too.
The magazine will be found to fascinate not merely serious men, but also women of all degrees and even the smallest children, who will learn many delightful lessons from its attractive pages. Blithely unembarrassed, the magazine recalled a time before men discovered their feminine sides, and sensible behaviour. Times before “new-age men” were forced to sit down to take a pee by their womenfolk. Here are poignant souvenirs from an age when the world was wide, and a man, if he so chose, might dare to ignore Health and Safety warnings in the pursuit of the spirit of adventure.
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