In praise of machismo: everyone is getting off on this postterrorism man thing except us dykes. That's what I thought until I caught myself ogling a construction worker. (last word).

After September 11 everyone was talking about masculinity, mostly because any heterosexual woman who hadn't previously fetishized firemen now felt compelled to do so, if only out of gratitude. A predictable response, really. In bed, or perhaps on the rack, submissives utter few words more delightedly and desirously than the time-honored "Thank you, sir."

Gay men too had always hankered after the ladder-company boys because they're well-muscled and in uniform, one presumes. Or maybe it's because those baggy pants come on and off so easily--they beg for a quickie.

Meanwhile, heterosexual men have been enjoying the boon, basking in their acceptable machismo for what is probably the first time since the sexual revolution, taking special pleasure in rescuing lost house pets, carving turkeys, and fixing the boiler, as if to say, "You see, I have my uses."

Everyone is getting off on this postterrorism man thing, it seems, except us dykes. Or at least that's what I thought until I caught myself ogling a construction worker the other day as I was having lunch at an outdoor cafe. He was wearing a ripped threadbare T-shirt stretched taut over his broad, flat chest and V-shaped back. It was tucked into his jeans under a black belt cinched tight around his slim waist. His ass was like a caged animal, punching against the fabric of his pants. I half expected him to shout "Stella." He caught me staring and smiled archly. The oddest little atavistic thrill went through me.

Yikes, I thought. This can't be happening. But it was.

If I had acted on my instincts, I wouldn't have been the first lesbian to go breeder in midlife, but the thing was, believe it or not, I didn't want to jump this guy. It wasn't a sexual frisson. It was something altogether different--and something I suspect a lot of other dykes have felt at one time or another. It was (if I can say this without sounding precious) an aesthetic experience. I felt the kind of mental excitement you feel when you look at a work of art. Here was masculine beauty, and I was admiring it full on.

As my girlfriend and I talked this over, we realized that lesbians, wittingly or not, had never shut themselves off from the considerable appeal of masculinity. Instead they had merely co-opted it, borrowed it, made it their own in such a way as to enjoy it from, as it were, a safe distance.

All along, ever since the advent of butch and femme, lesbians have been compartmentalizing bits and pieces of masculinity, not because they feel beholden to straight culture or obliged to imitate it but because lesbians of all varieties have grown up admiring (cryptically) the male virtues--whether the bodily or the cultural ones--and have found ways of incorporating them into an all-female culture. Meanwhile, of course, they have effectively repudiated all the undesirable baggage that goes with having a penis, pasted it onto an effigy called the "typical male," and left it out in the min. And why not? Gender is a supermarket.

Oddly enough, however, September 11 reminded us, among many other things, that masculinity is a valuable commodity. There were, of course, female cops and firefighters down at ground zero, but my point is that they too were helping to exhibit on a grand scale the attribute that our culture calls machismo.

Maybe, in fact, it's all the things that make a man seemingly impossible to domesticate, that make him indispensable to the society at large: strength, size (you'll pardon the expression), stolidity, physical courage, and the kind of blunt will that drives him inexplicably into a dead zone when the rest of us are running the other way.

The friendly fireman embodies all these things unthreateningly, and that is why we like and even desire him. He's easy to compartmentalize and, thus, to admire or--where dykes are concerned--to mimic, perhaps castratedly.