Before Carrie sings the "Home Sweet Home" song, which neither DVR nor I are particularly interested in, Ryan shakes his hand dutifully and asks if he think he brought it home. Kris says, meaning it for the first time ever on this show, that they're not really competing. They like each other. Ryan says they're good friends, pushing that again, and calls it a "fun fun fight," but honestly I think there's something more interesting going on here, which is that you Americans have chosen two different versions of the same wonderful thing, which until maybe I guess this year weren't viable as heroes.

Boys with feelings have not been in vogue for a very long time. I mean, it's music and acting and all these things, but as a discrete product, as a selling of the personality itself, you don't get that too often until recently. I mean... Fine, let's do it. No homo, but the reason I do perseverate on unicorns and talk about them all the time doesn't have a whole lot to do with girly horse emotions, it comes from the fact that I was raised in a very twee, very hobbit-oriented milieu, and it took awhile to get to that sad day when I figured out that unicorns were officially a Girl Thing. I learned all that stuff differently -- like, the Rouchefoucald tapestries at the Cloisters: this bayoneted engine, this killing machine with its head in the virgin's lap, all that stuff -- but once it became clear that outside the Empowered Feminism Child Development Shire it was something entirely different, I knew I was getting into some pretty sticky territory thinking about them at all.

Which would be a particularly unfierce but somewhat sad 1970s Shel Silverstein poem except for the fact that when I was a kid, I was Very Definite about things. Insanely so. Not stubborn, just over it, and not willing to discuss further once I'd made up my mind about things, because if those nonnegotiable things became problematic, it just meant they had to be kept deep, with alllll the other stuff that wasn't up for discussion. Which wasn't really a problem either, because I desperately need to be admired and it just makes sense to hold onto stuff that doesn't belong to other people anyway, if they're not going to appreciate it.

So one of these decisions I came to as a boy was that unicorns were, like my Dad, the best possible option for what being a man actually looked like. Because you have to be able to do both: be strong and fuck things up if necessary, but also capable of holding your son or daughter in your lap, or crying, also when necessary. You have to be absolutely in love with sex, but able to set it aside too, without thinking it defines you. Pretty much any contradictory thing we think nothing of demanding from women, but write ourselves a pass for, that's what you're accountable to. You have to be both things all the time if you can ever hope to stay whole, and the trick is being present enough to stay in control of that, and not get lazy enough to ever be one or the other entirely. How to be strong without turning cold, tough but tender. Soft, but not fragile.