Meanwhile, in the Pastiche of Heterosexuality Olympics that's suddenly going on, Sean's "just thinking girls, girls, millions of girls." Michael fake-laughs and fake-woos. "Yeah!" This is the saddest thing in the world. This is like three Steve Carells locked in a room together and never getting the joke. Lee: "Steak. Girls. Lots of girls...hundreds. Literally thousands of them. Dressed skimpy. In a pyramid." Michael: "I like that." Lee: "Oh, should I see if I can get, like, a giraffe, or something?" Sean laughs. Michael suggests an "eating contest" and Lee's like, "Yeah! Write it down! Let's think big! Bigger! Flying money! So much fun!" Sean's like: "Okay, but the Scantily-Clad Fetish Objects?" and Michael does his scary Buffalo Bill voice: "That's it! They'll bring the guys in." This is like Suddenly Last Summer, this shit. Sean interviews, "As soon as I moved to Gold Rush, I felt testosterone flooding through my veins. I felt like a man again!"

(Insert ten-page rant about how actual men don't need each other's approval to be men, because manhood isn't a secret club, it's a fact of life, and if I thought for a second that these guys were the exception and not the rule, I wouldn't be half so fucking scared all the time. When was it, do you think, that American men just handed that shit over? And to whom did they hand it? Where is it now? When did masculinity start being something that was in the eye of the beholder? When did it stop being about spreading seed and start being about begging other men for the nod? When did the men in America get broken? When did they decide it was a club they needed to get into? You know who I blame, because I always blame them for everything: the Baby Boomers. The Greatest Generation has some shit to answer for, but at least they didn't assume that the burden of proof for basic questions of identity were everybody else's responsibility. It's the Tarek thing again: "Did you see me eating that beluga? Wasn't that so classy?" Only when it's gender and sexuality instead of just poverty anxiety and pretension, the stakes are raised, and you start talking about actual crimes, and about the pile of shit we had to sit through last week.)