Toying with Perversion
I have friends in their early thirties who hunt Pokémon and festoon their walls with Pikachu plushies. I know men in their mid-thirties who’ve lined their man-caves with GI Joes, posing them with weapons at the ready. I have acquaintances nearing forty who snag up everything Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, from toys to linens. All of the aforesaid collections include Transformers, too, and there are Power Rangers and Masters of the Universe galore. I myself am not immune: I hoard old Nintendo games, and not necessarily good ones. I used to think we were all quite pathetic, collecting toys in our adulthoods, but recently I’ve had a change of heart.
A few weeks ago, the prairie burg in which I reside played host to an auto show. Cherry-red Mustang convertibles and mirror-sleek Camaros careered up the main drag. Cars from the fifties and sixties hooked sweeping lefts and rights at every important intersection. Behind the wheel of any given hot-rod was a Caucasian male, aged fifty to seventy, yellow-white hair thrashing out behind him. The only exceptions were the bald men with their baseball caps bearing the logos of football teams or the slogans of demagogues. Virtually all of the auto enthusiasts wore aviator shades.
It might seem appropriate to draw a connection between restoring cars and collecting toys. Both, after all, involve harkening back to one’s youth. Both pursuits are about reclaiming something from when you were younger, or finally obtaining something you wanted way back when but never had. But here is where I’ll demur, as there is a critical distinction to be made between these types of collectors.
The nerd collecting toys from his or her (more often his) youth is harkening back to childhood. The car buff restoring and operating old muscle cars is harkening back to his (always his) teenage or young manhood. While the nerd associates He-Man or Shredder or Snake-Eyes with innocent childhood play and perhaps a fondness for a simpler time, the car buff seeks something different. He is attempting to revivify a period that is decidedly post-pubescent. He is trying to recreate a sexually supercharged phase — a stage in life when having a Mustang or a Camaro or whatever would have attracted women. If only he’d had the sleek car, he would have had copulations with equally sleek women as well — he is certain of this in his imagining of that particular past. Of course, now he’s got a gut and gone gray, if he even has hair at all. His chances of picking up “sleek” women are slim, unless he’s willing to sink some money into that, too.
The car buff’s nostalgia, then, is based in an unfulfilled sexuality that never can be fulfilled. Even if he does somehow manage to pick up a young woman, it will be him as an old man making love to her. This moves the whole scenario beyond pathetic and into the realm of the tragic. While the thirty-something nerd collecting action figures on the verge of his forties might seem a little silly, he does not even approach the pathos of a middle-aged man buying a car to rekindle some vestige of his virility. Paying $200 to obtain a vintage Optimus Prime for the sake of nostalgia is a lot less pitiable than paying $20,000 to restore a Mustang for the sake of nostalgia and a perceived chance of wooing some much younger trim. (One possible exception to this rule would be cases wherein aging GI Joe fans were shelling out hundreds to assuage a fixation for The Baroness.)
While thirty-somethings purchasing toys may possess some delusions of their own, these likely don’t involve sexual payoffs. No man (or, more accurately, man-child) ever bought a vintage WWF action figure in the hopes that it could get him laid. (The possible exceptions here would be nerds dating or married to partners with a fetish for the insertion of action figures into bodily orifices, or nerds who possess that fetish themselves.)
Perhaps I’m being too cynical. Perhaps I have at least to concede that the fifties and sixties produced some of the best automobiles, and the eighties and nineties produced some of the best toy lines. Naturally, people who lived in and around those eras will seek out the cars and toys that remind them of better times for each of these industries. Silly though it may be, this kind of nostalgia is harmless, so long as it isn’t sexual. A backward-looking sexuality — a “retrosexual” gaze, in a manner of speaking — might just be the ne plus ultra of pathos, especially if it’s predicated on metals and plastics of the past.
