New Perspectives

A friend of mine send me a link to her blog tonight. Not bad. Mostly it was just really interesting to read a female’s perspective on certain things. Apparently men are pieces of crap. Who knew? Anyway, she wrote several entries in which the guy was cast in the role of villain. The storyline typically goes like this.

1. Boy meets girl.
2. Boy is charming and if you squint looks kind of like Orlando Bloom.
3. Boy gets girl’s number.
4. Boy becomes increasingly creepy/awkward/morally repugnant. Typically boy’s ethical and social deficiencies manifest themselves in the form of paying attention to other girl(s) and/or drinking too much.
5. Girl gets mad at self for allowing boy to trick her.

When I was reading her entries about crappy guys there were definitely a few moments when I recognized myself. “He did this not only once, not twice, but three times. Apparently, I was cute enough to talk to, but not enough to remember.” Oh yeah. That sounds about right.

Men (including your’s truly) often do treat the fairer sex poorly. This is old news though. I might as well tell you that getting kicked in the genitals is unpleasant. The interesting thing about the girl’s perspective (and perhaps I am over-generalizing) was the fact that she blamed herself for a lot of this stuff. Of course the truly outrageous asshole was appropriately mocked, but for any guy that got past the initial bullshit test and got under her skin I think the blame equation changed. Not that the boy isn’t a prick, but the ultimate responsibility for any emotional distress belongs to the girl. (Yikes right? Accountability is for chumps.)

Naturally, I think a completely unsupportable/offensive theory is in order. My thinking is as follows:

The male agenda is pretty transparent. (Approximately the opacity of air)

Females are not stupid. (Ok… Mea Culpa… A subset of females are not stupid).

It follows that when a female ignores her wiser instincts and is “taken advantage of” by a guy she kicks herself for it rather than holding the dirtbag accountable.

This is just a working theorem, plenty of room for improvement. I think it has a certain amount of explanatory power though. This little formula also ignores that fact that men can be decent human beings, but some people also win at roulette, and that’s a sucker game too.

Anyway, to conclude, for every story a woman tells about the male species failing her I know there is one from some poor bastard that was mistreated by a woman. (Ok maybe it’s not an exact 1-to-1 ratio. I think team dong probably has a comfortable lead, but I made my point.) Males and females hurt each other. Both sides take damage. You take the good, You take the bad, You take them both and there you have the facts of life. The facts of life.

There's a time you gotta go and show. You're growin' now, You know about the facts of life. The facts of life. When the world never seems, To be living up to your dreams. And suddenly you're finding out, The facts of life are all about you. All about you. You-u-u-u, A-ll about you. It takes a lot to get ‘em right, But you're learnin’ the facts of life. Learnin’ the facts of life. Learnin’ the facts of life. Learnin’ the facts of liiiiiiiife.