When does a
boy become a man?
Is it when
he reaches a certain age?
Could it be
when he gets his first full time employment?
Maybe it’s
when he first breaks free of his parents’ apron strings?
These
questions have been in the public eye of late because of the behaviour of the
Prime Minister’s son Max Key.
Max Key recorded himself shouting
"real men ride women" at some cyclists as he drove past them in
Parnell, near Key's home where he still lives with his parents.
This caused a bit of a stir…Nadine
Chambers-Ross wrote an item on the subject of Max Key and women cyclists: She
wrote,
“Never mind the overt sexism, or the homophobia. Never mind the blatant
disregard for the law forbidding using your phone while driving. The First
Son's cat call about what a "real man" rides reveals something
else entirely.
You might well wonder how a guy who has not yet cut the apron or (let's
be honest) purse strings is an authority on anything, let alone what constitutes
a real bloke. But Max Key has actually highlighted our national guilty
pleasure: bagging cyclists.
We love discussing the fury induced by being stuck behind well-padded,
bouncing lycra-clad buttocks riding two or three abreast. We're apoplectic with
rage watching a cyclist switch seamlessly from a being a road user to a
pedestrian the second the lights go red. We hate them so much the backs of
buses must be emblazoned with images reminding us that cyclists are, in fact,
human.
I think it's high time we got over our collective loathing of cyclists
– and not solely because I've reached max Max Key.
I know they can be arrogant. But perhaps they wear their arrogance like
armour because they aren't afforded the arrogance implied by a tonne or two of
Beemer surrounding them”. To read more go to:
Nadine’s words: ‘You might well
wonder’ got me thinking a little bit deeper about Max’s strange behaviour. I’m
not like Max at all, at twenty-one I had left home and was serving overseas
with the army in Malaysia. Social media and Main stream media for that matter,
gives a celebrity style coverage to Max simply because he is his father’s son.
Now Max has a history of acting
strange, firstly he likes to dress up as maybe a US tough guy who likes a fag
or two:
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| Max Key loves a fag or two. |
Max Key thinks
"real men" smoke cigarettes and ride women, but this should not be
unexpected based parental behaviour learned no doubt from his father’s examples
over the years.
It can’t be easy for a teenager living in the Key mansion,
financially supported to please every whim he decides on and wants. I mean the
mansions so big that he would hardly be noticed unless he did something outrageous.
His older sister was doing outrageous things in Paris in regard to undressing
etc. so maybe he felt he had to follow suit.
Most normal Kiwi teenagers are too busy helping Mom and Dad
in various activities around the house, like lawn mowing, gardening and other
household reoccurring tasks. At least for me that was the case…I earned my
pocket money in this fashion plus after school work at the local poultry farm
whereas I imagine Max has his own credit card with a few thousand top up
available at any given point…
Now as to the yelling
out “Real men ride women not bikes”, maybe he was simply following his dad’s
advice about being a ‘Real’ man:
Do you remember when Max’s dad was busy taking the mickey
out of David Cunliffe for David’s apology to woman?
Max’s dad even had a ‘T’ shirt printed; I wonder if he
gifted one to Max at the time…maybe Max was wearing it when shouted out the
sexist and idiotic remarks.
For Max to meekly and
cheerfully heed his dad’s advice as a financially dependent son, would not be
unusual, a sort of a ‘chip off the old block’ syndrome. So proving to his dad
that his maleness was real was best displayed by being photographed on the
beach…with a female riding him rather than he riding her…I wonder if she rides
a bike.
At this point while writing
this I felt a sympathetic moment for wee Max, it must be hard for a son to
accept his father’s moral standards without question. Because it’s not as if
his dad’s standards were high in the sky and beyond reach.
Do you recall the Pony-gate affair, where dad without
consent just loved pulling a young woman’s pony tail, it was a shocker no
matter how you looked at it for it had deep sexual connotations, it was washed
aside by quick PR activity and lot of help from Dad’s friends at the Herald,
Cameron Slater and other somewhat shady character’s best left unnamed.
Maybe it was this
event that lead Max next to try being a woman, you should note that Max never adopted
a pony tail, maybe just maybe he was letting his father know, that he couldn’t pull
this young woman’s hair. A sort of a psychology 101 lesson to his dad to keep
his hands off me: Maybe his dad took more notice of that than he did of his wife’s
command to stop that behaviour at the local coffee bar, who knows.
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| Max dreams on Air Force One. |
Max of course gets to
accompany his dad on Air Force One, a sort of a PR clip-on and media
attraction. Maybe it is proving all too much for him. But let’s not forget he
is twenty-one and not in training or education so maybe he is registered as
unemployed, and maybe he is also receiving an unemployed benefit, or his dad
might be employing him as a political cadet of sorts, no doubt on a ninety day
trial period. The possibilities are endless. Let us all hope that one day soon
wee Max comes of age breaks free from his father’s odd values. States freely
and openly that he his untying the chain, developing thoughts of his own…growing
up in other words…and proves this by considered behaviour like treating women
cyclists as human beings and closing his mouth so the wind stops blowing his tongue
about.
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Key family takes a selfie or two.  |
