A Not So Nice Rack

Oh yeah, it’s a double entendre about breasts, but stick with me for at least a couple paragraphs so I can redeem myself.

I suppose it could have been a scene from one of those embarrassingly overt “male performance” commercials, only I don’t (yet) have grey on my temples or near the chiseled chin those I-get-the-job-done type actors have. I was however in the right place, walking through the automotive aisle at my local box store getting supplies for an oil change. A stand of magazines near the Valvoline Full Synthetic caught my eye. Muscle cars. Hood scoops. Chromed out engines.   But atop all that eye candy, even more prominent than the cars; a woman. She had more makeup on than clothes and admittedly, everything on that cover pulled my male eyes to one focal point; her chest.

It’s all marketing of course and quite effective. Why not make something more desirable by draping something even more desirable over it? Maybe shine it up with some baby oil?

Once the initial adrenaline flourish subsided and my biological response checked, I wondered how uncomfortable this woman must be in everyday life and how she keeps herself from falling over, or if she even knows what shoes she has on. Her “augmentation” may be eye catching and sell some magazines, but it’s only an illusion with little bearing on how desirable she may actually be.

For some reason it got me thinking about whitetail racks.

As deer hunters, we’re constantly being reminded that size matters very much and is a direct measure of our abilities as woodsmen; which is empirically untrue. I know guys who pay lots of dollars to pick out which buck they want to be chauffeured to in order to shoot. The taxidermist is on standby before a round is even chambered. I’m not saying that’s wrong, it’s not what I would ever want to do, but it proves that antler size doesn’t always correlate with skill.

Nor does rack size correlate with satisfaction…at least not in my book. This past fall when my buddy Michael killed his first deer with a bow; a scraggly-headed five pointer, I had to choke back a few (manly) tears when I saw him with it. His accomplishment filled me with such joy because I knew how diligently he’d worked to kill that animal and I love him like a brother. It was an awesome moment with a great friend and a deer that’d never make the cover of a hunting magazine.

I fear our fixation on antler size is creating a warped sense of what a legitimate deer ought to be, much like the oiled up model on the car. Too many guys have overlooked truly beautiful women to chase a mirage just as many bowhunters have chased a false sense of legitimacy as a deer hunter because they haven’t killed something over 150 inches. Satisfaction eludes their every effort and quite often, these individuals aren’t much of fun to be around (they tend to be one-uppers who do more talking than listening).

It’s also causing us to create some crazy looking genetic experiments on deer farms. I seriously wonder how far off we are from deer stalls with overhead cables to assist these venison medusas in keeping their heads up. Will someone create a genetic line of bucks that can grow an entirely full whitetail skeleton inverted from their pedicles?  Antler doppelgangers?

I want to kill a huge buck. Most of us do.  That slim chance is what sends us out to the stand when we’d rather stay home, but I don’t want antlers to become the sole reason I hunt. There’s so much more to bowhunting than bone. Real bowhunters, like real men, ought to be able to recognize the beauty and purpose in all things. I know it sounds a little “Kumbaya” but we have to emphasize the magic of the hunt and the mystery of the kill. Maybe then we can take our eyes off the rack to appreciate the true heart of the bowhunting experience.