Picture yourself, the great hunter, fancy hat, red flanneled jacket thing, and a shiny new rifle. Welcome to the world! You are hunting the elusive elk. Today is the first day of hunting season, and you have just arrived in the 200 acre of game reserve. It was a bit crowed. You actually had to spend all day looking for a parking space, and finally ended up driving back to the nearest town and walking in. Its kind of tough to walk around; the forest is filled with annoying, loud, smelly hunters that fart a lot. Nevertheless, you press on, looking to bag that elk.
You spend too weeks in the forest, mostly running into nothing but other hunters. You see a couple walking back with some very fine-looking elk hides, but not many. No, the only Elk you've encountered are a couple fat ones, and maybe one or two pregnant ones, and them some babies. Nothing you really want to shoot. All the good elk have already been shot or driven off. You should have been a jackass and violated the hunting season thing like all the successful hunters, but you didn't, and now its too late.
Yeah, in case you didn't figure it out, that was a metaphor. If you don't know what the metaphor was about, you clearly don't know me very well because I really only think about one thing most of the time. In summary, I hate being the one that has to do all the chasing when you find that special someone. Approaching girls is like poking a finger into a yellow jackets nest, looking for quarters: I've never found what I'm looking for, but I'm sure as hell got stung a lot.
I'm writing this because I just discovered this book called The Rules, which I had previously heard of (forshadowing!) from certain friends of mine--the kind that make a big deal about which way your shoulders are pointing when you talk to a girl. Based on the bullet point list in the wikipedia entry, the book advocates basically every behavior that makes my life difficult. For example, number 2 there, says don't ask a guy to dance. Thats retarded. The rest of them are basically a list of ways to basically avoid someone and give them the impression that you don't want to date them, when you really do. There is something to be said about the fact that the only girls who read this are the kind who read self-help books, which probably aren't the kind of girls i'm interested in, but I don't know for certain. What if attractive, confident girls read this?
Let me...paint you a picture of a not perfect, but ideal, date. I'm in a nightclub, like brasils. Someone who looks like Krystal asks me to dance (while we're dreaming, lets pretend its also like that night where I was the only good male dancer in the club). We dance a bunch of times throughout that night including a nice sexy bachatta where I dip her at the end and make her think I'm about to kiss her but don't. Then, maybe, I suggest we get ice cream (or she does), only this time we don't walk halfway across the city only to find scoop deville closed; we simply go two blocks over to the ice cream place in old city. Then we laugh and have a good time and (violating rule #3 there) she does more than 50% of the talking and I use up less than half of my drinking stories. Then we go back to my place to play rock band and halfway through Nine Inch Nails' The Hand That Feeds I ninja-tickle-attack her left flank in order to make her screw up the guitar solo (I am on the drums) and then like a verse later she straddles me on the ...whats that called...drum stool thing that I dont even own in real life, and starts trying to make out with me but I manage to finish the song anyway even though she dropped off with the guitar because I am so awesome. Then we make out on my couch and she takes off my pants and I turn on the tv....
Ok just kidding about that last part, but it is necessary so I can say this: the girl's behavior in that fantasy pretty much violates every applicable rule in that book. I mean, maybe not, since I didn't read them that closely, but probably most of them.
I am very much opposed to this thing where women make it so we chase them. I've done quite a lot of chasing myself--quite a lot--like if you had any idea what I've done to get certain girls it would be the most depressing thing you've ever read in your life quite alot--and I can say that there's a big problem with the "playing hard to get" thing which is that it is nearly indistinguishable from the "I actually hate you but you're a nice guy so I'm going to lead you on for a few years" thing. And then ten years go by, and you are a 26 year old "programmer" whose closest thing to a relationship with someone that doesnt hate you is ...one girl that hates you and a picture of another one hiding behind a door. As well as a few horrific dates with girls you never want to see again.
Just so we're clear, I also hate the other end of the spectrum, with the feminist bullshit. For example, people who suck at statistics but claim women make less money than men. Or the people with the retarded sounding gender-neutral pronouns. I am a big fan of using the male pronoun for any generic situation where the gender is undefined. I know that somewhere, someone imagines some kind of link to sexism that I don't care about, but they can die in a fire. I'm also a big fan of having girls that are not famous actresses change their last name when they get married, for no other reason that I grew up with it and I'm used to it. You know what? Even if I met a girl with a cooler last name than mine, and we got married, I think I would first change mine to hers, but with a different spelling, so that she would still have to change her--ok that won't work. Anyway, the femenism thing is out.
No, I am very much a fan of the new archetype of the strong female, who is able to both assert herself without being an annoying gay-ass hippie feminist, and is also able to be hot and beautiful without just being worthless eye candy. The kind of girl that fits as easily into a gun belt as she does a dress. Oh, and definitely doesn't have super short hair; girls like that always look like male cancer survivors. Pretty much every female character Joss Whedon writes, as well at the character Kate Becket from the tv series Castle (Nathan Fillion's new show) is such a character. I haven't confirmed any girls like this in real life though. All of the potentials are taken or live thousands of miles away.
So.....yeah, The Rules sucks. Just wanted to say that.
In other news, I am considering telling the hot girl that works here that she should dress up as Carmen Sandiego for Halloween. It is literally the only thing I can think of to say to her, besides stuff like "you're hot I want to make out with you" which Bridget tells me I shouldn't even think about saying. It is october, so the halloween costume thing isnt far off.
Whatever. There is a "monthly beer bash" party right now for the entire male-dominated software division I am a part of, so I am going to go drink a beer and pretend I'm interested in meeting these guys.
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It should be noted that, in general, women are not rewarded for their sexual prowess (as men often are). That is, if a woman follows the entirety of your "ideal [first] date" she would be considered a "slut": a form of social punishment, I guess. It's not women's fault that they often "choose" the role of prey. It is the incentive and punishment system we have created in our society. This issue comes into play in many aspects of life, which I won't go into now.
ReplyDelete"The Rules" and "The Game" express this same sort of idea, reinforced by society: men who don't get laid by lots of ladies are losers, women who get laid by lots of men are sluts.
On a similar note, I suspect your statement "...people who suck at statistics but claim women make less money than men", has to do with an assortment of factors, the largest of which being related to "women make less money than men, because they choose to work in positions that pay less" or "women make less money than men, because they take time out of their career to care for children" (if I recall correctly, unmarried child-free women earn closer to on-par with men). The question is not "why do women make less money than men" or even if they do. The real questions are: (1) why do women "choose" to work in careers that typically pay less than the careers men choose and (2) why do women "choose" to take on the brunt of the child-rearing responsibilities, and (3) how do we change these behaviors, and do we want to? "Educated in Romance" is a book that looks at a string of anthropological studies exploring this sort of thing.
re: gender neutral pronouns- It is poor English grammar to do the whole "he or she" thing, as you've already noted. However, choosing only the male pronoun, all the time, is indicative of the "male as default, female as secondary" idea. Like...the Facebook profile pic, if you don't have a photo, it [used to be] the silhouette of a man. Really, the default is a white male, but this racial-aspect is often easier to pick out in images moreso than in words. Sociological Images is a good blog for looking at images/media through a sociological lens. What if, when lacking an avatar, you were constantly represented by a female? Or what if there was a list of "Rulers of Science" that was entirely female, and then a list of "Male Rulers of Science"? I find these to be interesting thought questions. Why are these things the way they are? What does it say about our culture/society as a whole? Haven't we evolved past all this nonsense?
"I'm also a big fan of having girls that are not famous actresses change their last name when they get married, for no other reason that I grew up with it and I'm used to it." In certain disciplines, where you need consistency in your name, without celebrity status (i.e., academic publishing) it also makes practical sense for females to retain their surnames. I probably don't have to tell you that a woman changing her last name to her husband's is steeped in the "wife as property" and various religious traditions, which we probably should have evolved beyond as well.
Maybe I should "die in a fire", as you say, but I like to try my best to promote social equity, through my words as well as my actions. Haha, "annoying gay-ass hippie feminist" reminds me of being in middle school when the religious kids would tell me I was going to hell because I was an agnostic. It is so easy to condemn those we cannot understand, especially when we refuse to try to do so.