Real men are primitive.

Much time and many volumes have been devoted to Freud’s famous question — What do women want? — with little commensurate attention to the male counterpart.

What do men want?

The simple answer is well-known, but a more nuanced answer has presented itself the past several days during Washington’s “Snowmageddon.”

Shovels. Men want shovels, the bigger the better.

…

Since the blizzard began, the shovel has become not just a tool of necessity but a symbol of purpose and meaning, about whose absence the usual existential lament is more acute in a city that lives so much in its head.

This is the axis of wonkery, after all, where men (and women) spend most of their waking hours in a seated position, staring at a computer screen or talking by phone. Interruptions to these mostly mental rigors involve other seated endeavors, such as the power breakfast and lunch, or the ever-popular drinks-and-dinner duet. Whatever ambulation is required in between is hardly enough to satisfy the muscular memories of our tranquilized DNA.

Oh, we “work out.” Gym memberships are as common as Metro cards, and personal trainers nearly outnumber cab drivers. Washington has a disproportionate number of triathletes, which is testament both to Washingtonians’ principal source of animation — stress — and to the city’s miles of friendly running and biking paths.

But purpose-driven exercise is of a different order than shoveling snow. One is a To-Do item on the calendar of obsessive-compulsives; the other is a taunt from Nature, a call to survival to bestir all those little lizard brains in repose. Man is never happier than when he is called to action, in other words. That is to say, when he is needed.

—Kathleen Parker, “Men: The Original Shovel-Ready Project”, The Washington Post Wednesday, February 10, 2010 (available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020902466.html?nav=hcmodule).