Being the cowboy

The false stature and appeal of an American metaphor

Nomadic and stoic, but emotional (when the script demands it), cowboys make up a large portion of the traditional cis-gendered American male mythos. To be the cowboy, that requires strength, resilience, broad shoulders, and a quick trigger. Words that drip with venom, but with hands that are meant to hold, the cowboy is at once both fearful and alluring; women want you, men fear you, cattle begrudgingly accept you. You may get the girl, save her from an untimely train-track-laden death, bound with ropes from a man more conventionally villainous than thou, but you’ll never really love that which you won’t have a hand in taming. To be the cowboy is to be in love with the auburn sunset of the American southwest, and your horse. You, lone ranger, who have conquered the stars that shroud your midnight errands, the arid landscape that works unrelentingly against your individual manifest and destiny. Those sharp spurs on the end of a long black boot, the tool with which you bleed your only companion’s side, and bring forth supposed order to a land never in desire of your services. A marksman, a pistoleer, you ask the world to see you, witness you, one trigger-pull at a time. Most lonely, accustomed to the dirt and sweat that obscures sin, and obscures you. We do not fathom your depths as they are reckoned empty and without brilliance. Wretched and defiled, society dares not to see your actions of the day, and has cast you out. You, the cowboy, ostracized, without law but the one of your own, the last…