When thinking about cowboys many would think back to the wild west, when cowboys were portrayed as heartless ranchers and outlaws not afraid of anything, or anyone. The truth though, cowboys like everyone else have hearts, they may not show emotion as liberally as most people but under their hat, boots, wrangler jeans, and a button up flannel they have feelings just like you. In Gretel Ehrlich’s About Men, Gretel delves deep into her memory of her time in Wyoming and her memories of the cowboys.
Within the essay, Gretel challenges all of the preconceived notions about the cowboy through her experiences and observations of the cowboys she has met.
Gretel starts the essay in New York where she lives, when missing home she always looks for Marlboro ads in the subway. ‘What I’m aching to see is horseflesh, the glint of a spur, a line of distant mountains, brimming creeks, and a reminder of the ranchers and cowboys I’ve ridden with for the last eight years’ (Ehrlich 125).
Seeing these ads make Gretel feel just a little bit closer to home, even if she is standing in one of the largest cities in all of the country. As much as it comforts Gretel to see a Marlboro ad on the subway the way that the cowboy is portrayed just doesn’t sit right with her. ‘In our hellbent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true character’ (125). Within this quote Gretel makes her true feelings clear about the way everyday people, who haven’t got to spend time with cowboys like Gretel herself, see cowboys.
Gretel believes that through all of this wild romanticization of the cowboy we have strayed too far from his true self, making almost a mockery of what a cowboy really is. Just because a cowboy on the advertisement is ‘strong and silent’ doesn’t mean that is how he wants to be seen and portrayed it could very easily be because there isn’t anyone to talk to. Gretel looks at the cowboy as a mysterious and misunderstood creature, who like anyone else, just wants to be happy. Gretel believes that a cowboy has to love his job, as he works 10-15-hour days and for 30 dollars, they have to. In order to truly dedicate themselves to a job from which they are barely making money, the cowboy truly has to love what he does for a living. This helps by showing an example of how much the cowboy actually cares about what he does and puts his heart and soul into a 10-15-hour day.
As the essay progresses Gretel begins getting deeper into why the cowboys act as they do, not because they have no feelings, just because they don’t know how to express it. In their own way though they do express it, ”Now don’t go telling me these lambs are cute,’ one rancher warned me the first day I walked into the football-field-sized lambing sheds. The next thing I knew he was holding a black lamb. ‘Ain’t this little rat good-lookin’?” (126). The cowboy tells Gretel to not call any of the lambs cute, yet he immediately turns around and begins telling Gretel how good looking one of the lambs is. This really shows that the cowboy shows emotions in his own way, maybe he doesn’t even correlate calling a lamb ‘cute’ or ‘good looking’ mean the same basic thing. Through the front, their kind hearted nature still shines through and shows just how fragile the cowboy can be.
When it comes to cowboys, I believe that Gretel knows what she’s talking about. Having spent a lot of her time in Wyoming where cowboys are still a common sight, she has become familiar with how cowboys act and why they act the way they do. I agree with Gretel that media portrayal of the cowboy makes them appear rougher and colder than they could ever be. Gretel’s multiple stories about her time with cowboys show a warmer side of them. I believe that these cowboys just have a harder time expressing these pent-up emotions, because they spend so much time working and not enough time for a healthy social life.
One of the rhetorical techniques used within the essay is Pathos, as emotion plays a huge role within the essay. Gretel uses emotion as one of her main talking points throughout the essay using not only examples of the emotions of a cowboy, but her own emotions. This technique helps convey to the reader how important this topic is to the author, Gretel. Even if the reader has never met a real life ‘cowboy’, they begin to form an image of him as a real person, with real emotion through Gretel’s examples and stories throughout the essay. One quote from the essay really stands out when thinking about cowboy’s emotion and their lack of expression continues to stand out. ‘Even young cowboys are often evasive with women. It’s not that they’re Jekyll and Hyde creatures gentle with animals and rough on women but rather, that they don’t know how to bring their tenderness into the house and lack the vocabulary to express the complexity of what they feel’ (127). This quote brings the essay a lot of emotion, playing on the rhetorical technique of Pathos. It shows how young cowboys, brought up on the ways of the cowboys before them, still don’t fully understand how to handle emotion or express it. The reader can relate this quote to themselves, maybe they, like the cowboy have their own issues expressing emotion as so many people today do.
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