Promotors and fans saw last weekend’s expo at the ASB Showgrounds as a break from the politically correct world we live in, a chance for men to reclaim their masculinity for a few short days.
Well, if this is what we males pride ourselves on, then thank goodness it only ran for three days.
Big Boys Toys (read: bikes, boats, booze and babes) is a cacophony of buffed surfaces, sleek design and general unavailability – and that’s just the promo girls.
Add to that a seemingly endless procession of what’re considered top of the range motorbikes, cars, boats, bicycles, gadgets and gizmos and you’ve apparently been dealt a good old dose of testosterone.
Surely there’s a limit to the number of wheels any man can see before you get tired (no pun intended). A line in the sand where your brain can’t take anymore “zero to 100 in the time it takes to blink”?
And there’s got to be more to being a man than ogling cars we’ll never buy, games we’ll never play and girls dressed like clothes are going out of fashion.
To give the organisers credit, I’m probably not exactly their target market – the Captain Macho, raw meat-eating, chest-thumping petrol head that lives for such a show.
In fact, I was on the back foot to start with. That the name of the expo is missing an apostrophe sticks out in my mind, like a scratch on the new H3 Hummer (which, by the way, holds the record for the most ridiculously sized mag-wheels the world has seen).
Don’t forget these people, beneath the veneer of cleavage and multi horsepower engines, are trying to sell products.
Nonetheless, Big Boys Toys does hold excitement in a variety of ways. The organisers put together a range of displays to take the expo beyond just cars, bikes and boats. And that the event attracts some 50,000 people annually also speaks volumes.
I guess it all depends on how you define “big boys” and the “toys” that interest them.
