How To Not Get Laid, by Curt Smith

How does AskMen.com exist? No, seriously. This is literally the worst thing I've ever seen. It's basically the male equivalent of Cosmopolitan.com, except worse. 

My fellow werewolf directed my attention to this fantastic little nugget of an article entitled "The Fake Female Trap" by Curt Smith.  Basically, Mr. Smith here is explaining to men all over the world how women attempt to "trap" men by - you know what, I can't even finish this.  This is nuts. Also, buddy, you have a degree? You just seem so wise. I'm sure, since you know so much about women and their traps (like shaving our legs, and wrapping sweaters around our waists), you must be getting laid all of the fuck over the place right? Nice job, Curt. Also, apparently everything single thing I do is in some way an effort to trap a man into marrying me, after which I will eat my weight in pie on a daily basis, hate his friends, remain unemployed, and not make sandwiches for him or have sex with him. Ever. 

Oh, okay.  Well, see, now apparently I've just been severely misinformed, because I was under the impression that, ultimately, I lived my life for me, and I made decisions based on my judgment, my morals, and how they would effect those I cared about.

But some things I do, I do for me.  I shave my legs because I like my legs soft. Sue me.  I go to the gym because I like it.  I don't give a fuck what you think about my thighs touching.

But seriously, this is so wrong. As if women don't get screwed over enough by their own magazines (Hey, Cosmo, stop telling women how to please men like Curt), we have to get shit from the men's side too? Goddamn. Can someone write an article about how men can respect women by just being a person? 

It just scares me that this article can be written, and read, and enjoyed by so many guys out there.  And yeah, yeah, I know, there are a whole bunch of people who disagree with it, and a bunch of guys who aren't like that, but apparently not enough because this garbage is still read, and believed.

Oh wait, nevermind, I retract everything I said.  I just saw Curt's disclaimer about how it wasn't meant to offend anyone.  You wrote this knowing you were offending people? ...Dude.

An education

Don’t make me cry. Don’t tell me that I can’t cry. Don’t tell me that crying makes me crazy. Don’t pretend like we haven’t been introduced several times. Don’t pretend to not know my name when you have facebook stalked me at least ten times. Don’t call me fat behind my back. Don't call me ugly behind my back. Don't call me things, period. Don’t belittle me. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t fuck me up. Don’t call me stupid behind my back. Don’t treat me badly. Don’t ignore me. Don’t make up shit about me. Don’t make up anything about me. Don’t speak to me like you are better than me. Don’t think you are better than me. Don’t try to beat me. Don’t try to make me feel badly about myself. Don’t take the side of assholes. Don’t break my heart. Don’t hurt my feelings. Don’t kick me when I am down. Don’t mistreat me. Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t try to be me. Don’t tell me who I am. Don’t pretend you are my friend. Don’t pretend.

The “Proper” Way to Break Up With Somebody

        I have been watching reruns of Sex and the City for the past couple weeks for a number of reasons. Mostly, because I have an excess of free time now that I have gotten into a Master’s program for next year and work only part-time, but also because I have discovered that despite my distaste for the materialism the show promotes, the themes it presents resonate with me particularly now that I am 23 and have had some (pretty minimal but some) experiences dating. Today I came across the episode, “The Post-It Always Rings Twice,” where Carrie wakes up to find a post-it written by Jack Burger, her boyfriend of several months, that reads in screaming big, bold, black letters:

                             “I’M SORRY-I CAN’T – DON’T HATE ME.”

Though it is established earlier in the season that he makes his living as a writer, and thus, his livelihood is based on being a wordsmith, the most he can muster are those three terse, but loaded statements. Carrie’s immediate reaction is not so much sadness as it is utter disappointment and anger in the way in which it ended.  She recognized that their relationship was not necessarily meant to be everlasting, and thus, was mostly indignant over the lack of dignity that Burger granted to the end of their relationship.  They were facing some problems, and had been taking some time apart, but he came back to her apartment with pink carnations, a grand, romantic apology, ergo make-up sex ensued. Or so she thought. Turns out, he just needed to sleep with her one last time, give her the hope of continuing the relationship, only to bail without any real explanation.

This episode reminds me so much of when my boyfriend broke up with me through a Facebook inbox message, I suppose the twenty-something douche bag’s new go to break-up method of choice. Oh, and this happened the day after I went on a two-week cruise through the Caribbean with my family.  Family vacations are trying, emotion-fraught experiences without the added pain of constantly thinking about how your ex disposed of your relationship like it was nothing, and imagining how he is obviously immediately banging somebody cooler and hotter (my ego has inflated considerably since. I know this to be impossible now). Some might say being away from your ex-boyfriend, about to go on a sunny vacation to exotic places, would be the perfect escape. However, the sunny weather outside just reminded me that my mood did not reflect the weather at all. I almost wished that I were somewhere dark and dank to create some kind of pathetic fallacy and make poetry out of this situation and in turn, elevate its grander purpose in my life (you know, for my inevitable memoirs). But no. People told me my trip would “take my mind off things.” It didn’t. 

I was pretty reserved in high school. I didn’t date anyone and was convinced I would never fall for anybody, let alone date, until I was at least 30 and man’s emotional capacity had developed slightly.  Despite my better judgment, I let someone in. Guys I had dated before really meant nothing to me.  Breakups were easy and pain-free because I just did not care. Not like this one. This one gutted me, and left me pretty insecure about my self-worth for a while. He wrote to me on Facebook to tell me in a message replete with (ugh.) contemptuous emoticons that he “wants to be alone” and that he is “unhappy” and “going through some stuff,” when a couple days before he called me “family” and told me that I “was wonderful” and that he would miss me while I was away. I could not tell you if he was lying and I fell for it because as humans we tend to easily believe compliments, or if he was telling the truth, and in an instant changed his mind. Which is more terrifying, I could not tell you. 

I do not think I will ever really get what happened, why girls need the “proper” breakup, why guys feel the need to be dishonest, nor will I ever understand why it is that girls always seem to need the answers to these questions while guys tend to shrug these concerns off with a “who the fuck cares?” I am just glad that my friends, like Carrie’s, made everything better by finding a joint and smoking it with me, which most effectively numbs the questions in my head regarding life’s absurdities and enables me to laugh about them. For hours. With bread and cheese in hand. 

HBO's Girls (!)

I just watched the first episode of the new HBO series, Girls, written, directed and starring 25-year old explosion of awesome, Lena Dunham, and can I just say, WOW. I am pretty sure that Dunham just left a camera in my apartment for the last few months and through watching footage of me and my two friends through her spycam, created a show that provides a near perfect representation of the lives of 20-something girls with BAs. Here are the number of things that Girls gets so incredibly right about me and my twenty-something girlfriends (and as far as I can tell, everyone else) it is eerie:

1. we want guys who are not nice (or just plain treat us like shit)

Within the first few minutes, you can tell that Marnie (Allison Williams) hates her boyfriend not because he does anything particularly bad but because he is too nice. He gives her air kisses, and holds her retainer in the morning, but most disturbing, he sheepishly asks her what she wants him to do to turn her on. While ostensibly these are lovely things a good boyfriend on paper would do, we just do not want this and are very much turned off by this. Firstly, air kisses are just creepy, and retainers are gross and should not be happily held by anyone, let alone your boyfriend. Secondly, he should have not asked her so meekly what she wanted to have done to her sexually but just taken charge and pushed her against a wall (obviously not abusively but in a hot way). Marnie was right when she suggested that her "nice" boyfriend's touch felt like a "weird uncle, putting his hand on my knee on Thanksgiving."  While we search for boyfriends who will "treat us well"(don't even get me started on that loaded phrase), somehow it is impossible for us to view the excessively nice guys in a sexual way, as completely fucked up as that might sound. We get it, we know it doesn’t make all the sense. It is just how we feel.

2. We still love Sex and the city (ugh.)

I thought it was absolutely genius to have one of the characters (Mad Men’s Zosia Mamet) be obsessed with Sex and the City because though I hate to admit it, it still rules. As much as I hate how materialistic the show is, how one-dimensional the gay characters are, and just how immature Carrie can be, the show is unparalleled in its explanation of gender dynamics. Also, no group of girls has ever existed post SATC that has not contemplated its respective members’ character equivalents, even though each of its characters is rather flat and one-dimensional themselves if you think about it (Charlotte is the conservative beautiful one, Samantha the sexually-voracious one, Carrie the pensive, quirky yet fashion-forward artistic one, and then there is the one no one ever puts their friends, Miranda, because she is the butch, consistently angry one and the only one who actually ever works which is inconsistent with the fantasy). I am hoping that Girls does for 20-something girls what SATC did best, which is provide a real glimpse into their lives and conversations and reveal the universality of our problems.

3. We value our friendships above anything else

The second I heard Lena Dunham’s character Hannah say, “both of you are sex goddesses. When I look at both of you, a Coldplay song plays in my heart,” I immediately thought about how this is definitely something one of my friends has at least said in theory at some point in the last few months. It perfectly encapsulates the importance that awesome 20-something girls place on girl friendships. As we were born into the generation where gender relations are so fucked up, having a solid group of girlfriends I have come to realize is so important. We no longer get courted but rather, have to hope that a guy gets drunk or high enough to man up and get the balls (as the lovely proverb goes. There is really no better phrase) to drunkenly make out with you where you then have to contemplate whether this will be a one-night stand or materialize into a relationship. As a result of this messed up approach to “dating” that exists amongst our socially-awkward generation, it has been so key to have good girlfriends who act as the foil to the number of dysfunctional guys who do not have their shit together who constantly seem to enter our lives only to fuck with our minds.

4.  we love/hate our best friends who seemingly get everything effortlessly

I loved seeing the different characters reactions to Jessa (Jemima Kirke), the willowy, Blonde British chick who is immediately posited as the girl we are supposed to hate and rightfully so. She breezes into the show like the beautiful friend who never seems to work for what she has breezes through life, effortlessly. We learn that Jessa is a world traveler and has a lot of experience with men, and these are things that we are made to feel envious of. I am convinced that every group of early twenty-somethings has at least one person like this, someone who seemingly gets everything with so little effort. They seem to live their lives as if they belong in a script in a low-budget independent film scored by the hypothetical musical love child of Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard (may their relationship rip) and seemingly do so, while the rest of their friends struggle, work horrible, degrading jobs and have lackluster relationships. We love / hate these people, because having never not been the way they are, do not get what it is like for us. This results in us simultaneously loving them and hating them out of a mix of jealousy and pity that they will flit through their lives in such a naïve fashion that will never actually “get it.”

honourable mentions: playing Jay-Z in the background was pure genius. Despite its apparent misogyny, hip hop has become our music of choice and has become far more identifiable than the whiny, white-washed indie crap that pervaded prior.  Also, the choice of On to the Next One was just awesome and is pretty much the greatest post-break up /post asshole anthem that could ever exist.