Certainly, I can understand the allure of those memories of the golden yesteryears when polyester was a new miracle material and we all did our spring plowing with horses and mules. I get it. I also understand those who carry a knife as a signifier of their heritage, whatever that may mean to them. I've done the same sorts of things.
However, to refer to people who don't see the need for a knife on a daily basis and don't share our enjoyment of knives as a hobby (that's what it is, folks, for those who don't let it develop into a full blown fetish) as some how less masculine, less of a man, less of a person, is simply insane. And I mean that clinically. As in divorced from reality. To say nothig of sexually insecure. This, I do not get. Not everyone shares our hobby. Wow.
Some people like knives, but have little use for them. I'm in that demographic currently. Other people don't have any particular feeling one way or another for them and have no real, identifiable need for them. So, they don't carry one. I'm totally fine with that. I don't understand the attraction of Kindles, Nooks, and iPads. I like to think that doesn't reflect adversely on my sexual potency. Comes to that, I don't think anything reflects on my sexual potency but my sexual potency. I left junior high school behind a long time ago.
The poster who pointed out that things have changed in our society is correct, but I'm going to say that things changed a long time ago. We don't hunt our meat every day anymore. We don't walk around the bush from one place to another anymore. Few of us (less than 2%, last time I checked) even work in agriculture, that last bastion of supposed "need a knife every single day"-ness. I have a small farm and I rarely needed a knife to do the things I did there. Backhoe, yeah; tractor with a hay spear, definitely. But a knife, while nice to have and useful from time to time wasn't a huge requirement for me. My biggest knife need? Opening bags of range pellets for the cows. I carried a larger knife so I could slice both sides of the bag with one swipe, saving maybe three seconds per bag. Seriously. Sometimes I'd cut the netting from the round bales, but sometimes not. Other people have different ways of doing things and I'm perfectly OK with people who farm in a knife-intensive way--but that's now how I do it.
That said, I like knives. I like sharp, shiny objects, I guess. However, after repeated testing, I have found that no matter how sharp the knife, how large the knife, or how expensive the knife, my "equipment" remained the same size as before. Disappointing, really. I had hoped to reproduce the effects implied here.
Some people (like me) enjoy driving highly capable four wheel drive pick up trucks. But really, other than that one big red clay hill on my farm, I've never needed four wheel drive. Fun to have, but not really a need. Still, I like it and I can afford it, so I drive one. Most people have zero need for this sort of thing and see no reason to pay for it. I don't blame them, nor do I think less of them as human beings.
Again, things change. In my field, you used to be able to tell the engineers from the riff-raff by their expensive hand calculators (and before my time by their slide rules--which of you still carries a slide rule?). I have a calcultor on my phone that does everything I need it to do. Honestly, we simply don't do that much math once we get out of college. What math we do is usually done on either a spreadsheet, or a purpose-built piece of software that does the math on its own. So, I don't really need my HP-28S anymore. I'm not even sure where it is, actually.
Same same knives. At one point in our history, knives were needed for everything from opening the flour sack and bean can to trimming horse harness and prying open the cracker barrel. Things have changed. We have can openers and few of us ride horses to work every day. Nothing wrong with that; things have always been changing. In fact, things are so much better now than they were a hundred years ago, that I don't honestly understand this pining to live in a log cabin without running water. Seriously. I don't. Nor do the vast majority of people. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I've thought about this some. There are people who like to be prepared for weird, out of the ordinary things. I guess I'm one of them because I have a $500 pocketknife and a titanium prybar on my keychain--which I have never had the occasion to use. My Dad would think I'm insane. Yes, he carried a small stockman pocketknife for as long as I knew him, but he wasn't a "prepper", or to call them by their earlier name, a "survivalist". Other people don't feel the need to be prepared for weird, out of the ordinary things. I, as an example, never assembled an "earthquake survival kit" even though I lived in an earthquake prone area. That sort of thing didn't appeal to me. But, I don't believe I'm less of a manly man for refusing to do that.
So, I'm old and grumpy, but I honestly think the better way to introduce people to our hobby is to be nice to them and demonstrate the utility of our pretty, pretty knives. It's the pretty, pretty that hooks us, I think, but the demonstrated utility that will let someone bust open the check book on what really is pretty much man jewelry. Crappy attitudes toward other people eventually get reflected back to us. Be nice. It only hurts a little at first.
