#18 Battle of the Sexists
I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to read my column about inspiration, but I’m saddened by the number of people out there who don’t see a problem with leaving the lint in the lint trap. This reluctance to embrace appropriate behavior reinforces the fact that I need to be more patient and understanding of others, as I wait for the civilized world to make the final push towards social perfection in regards to awareness of others. I think that the same day people uniformly begin to clean out the lint trap after using the dryer, Bush will openly apologize to the world for, uh, everything, and Osama Bin Laden will appear that evening on Larry King Live, to announce World Peace, as he and Bush hold hands and take a bow, while Saddam Hussein plays the Beatles’ “Let It Be” on the piano, as the Palestinian and Israeli armies square dance with each other. The theme of the show will be ‘Let Bygones Be Bygones’ and with five minutes left to go, Barbara Walters will promise to shut up forever, to seal the deal. Hey, a man can dream, right?
I don’t get nearly enough hate mail to allow me to feel that I’m doing a good enough job of stretching people’s boundaries of thought, so this week, I’m selling out, and writing my version of “The Battle of the Sexists”. But I don’t think there’s really much of a battle. I mean, clearly, men won that battle, publicly, around the time when “we” decided that only men should rule and lead the nation-states. Granted, some states have relaxed their standards and allowed women to rule (see the United Kingdom, Thailand, and Germany), but for the most part, the civilized and uncivilized worlds have agreed for centuries that if we want to continue war-mongering, hating, and killing each other, it is pertinent that men remain in power, and women; you gals got to try the first apple ever!
I mean, what would happen if a mature and responsible woman were elected to the oval office. You know what, I don’t really care, because power corrupts, and I think the same sense of power could corrupt a woman as easily as it can a man, so I think you still have to vote for who you think is less likely to get greedy and drunk with so much power; man or woman. With that said, I’d like to compare nuances about men and women, instead of grandiose ideals. So I will limit this discussion to drinking, cell phones, and emotions.
Men and women act very differently when they are drunk. I am referring to drunken people—Not tipsy people, but people so drunk that even if they wanted to drive, they can’t stop giggling or hold their car keys long enough to unlock the car door. I’ve noticed that when girls get this drunk, they have a tendency to fondle each other and take pictures with their digital cameras, and they therefore appear to me to be lesbians, but they’re actually just friends, drunkenly showing their appreciation of one another. But you never, ever see two drunken men taking pictures of themselves in lewd poses, grabbing each other’s butts and hugging for prolonged periods of time, unless you watch the NFL. I doubt that you’ve seen this sort of behavior between two straight men, because alcohol lessens inhibitions, and there are no social inhibitions between men that keep us from acting on an inner desire to grope each other and take pictures. We’d rather drunkenly call our friends that are asleep, to announce how drunk we are, and celebrate.
I really, truly, deeply, and utterly hate the cell phone mania that is taking over the entire world. I think it’s fair to say that men and women alike suffer from drunken dialing. So give it up to the Korean company that just came out with a phone that will analyze your breath and tell you whether you are okay to drive or not. (Thanks, “DanFrye”). If the user of this new phone registers a reading higher than 0.08%, then the cell phone blocks any previously registered number from being dialed that the user has selected as a ‘do not dial when drunk’ phone number. This includes parents, bosses, ex-girlfriends or boyfriends, and of course, old crushes that you never had the nerve to tell how you really feel about, until four shots of Patron tequila that shrink your brain and enlarge your testicles allot you the self confidence and self-perceived savvy to finally make the call and ruin any chance you may have. Funny, steroids do just the opposite of tequila; they shrink your balls and make your head big – I guess this means that Barry Bonds can cure his ailment with some tequila shots to counteract the effects of his BALCO supplements.
Cell phone companies officially crossed the line between trendy gadget and total rip-off when they started soliciting television viewers to pay to download advertisements for upcoming episodes of a television show. The point of advertising is that it costs the company money to advertise, and you, the subject of said ad, pay them back with the loss of brain cells, which ensues from watching the pathetically out of touch advertisements that ad execs get paid for writing and producing. It blows my mind that American consumers are now willing to pay money, in addition to lost brain cells, to watch advertisements, and to watch them on their 1” cell phone screens, nonetheless! To me, this is the equivalent to a scenario in which I were to send you a wedding invitation that advertises my wedding, but in order to read the invitation, you have to first wire me cash.
And why are people paying money to download annoying ring tones and songs? Do you really want everyone that doesn’t know you to think that you’re a huge Bon Jovi fan every time your boyfriend calls you and your phone blares out an elevator music version of “Bed of Roses?” It’s unfair to punish the rest us with your poor taste in music. It’s especially unfair when I’m behind you in line, and you don’t answer your phone, because it’s rude to talk in doors, but you don’t think to silence your annoying ring song, and so I have to hear the same four bars of an Amy Grant song about eight times. For shame!
But my least favorite cell phone innovation are those creepy microphones and ear pieces, the ones that you honestly can’t see, because they’re so small and usually tucked inside someone’s monkey suit and tie. I would just like to let everyone who uses these to know that when you use them, to me, you look just like Robin Williams in “The Fisher King” and since crazy people who talk aloud can have violent tendencies, when I see you people talking to yourself, I’m seriously tempted to call human services, or the police, to have your gibberish talking insane butt carted off to the local mental ward. Be warned.
So I just got all emotional, and ranted, right? Well, I’ve noticed that women and men do not handle their emotions in even remotely similar ways. For example, if a woman is pissed off, she’ll get quiet, and immediately revert to performing some task that requires solitude and concentration, like washing dishes, sweeping floors, rearranging her desk, or running errands (this is not to imply that women are into housekeeping, I just have noticed that most women, when upset, tend to perform useful tasks). When a man is upset, everyone in the whole world has to know about it. We’ll stomp around, slam doors, curse aloud, and kick things over, so that everyone knows how we feel, without having to share or connect with our feelings. And when a man or woman calms down, women have men beat, because they’ve turned their anger into a cleaning machine, and now the dishes are done, laundry is clean, and the shower tiles are devoid of fungus. Meanwhile, men exit their state of anger only to find that they’ve broken all their favorite and useful possessions, taught their children seven new cuss words to spread at school the next day, and now they have to spend their next weekend repairing the door jams they busted and painting over the kick marks they left on the doors. If I have a son, I’m going to teach him to study or do homework with his adolescent anger; if I’d learned to do this, I could’ve gone to Harvard, instead, I embrace writing, frugality, laziness, and paranoia.
And so I bring to you this week, an Oppenheim “Frugal Tip of the Week,” which until now has been a guarded secret of mine. If you want to save money the next time you buy clothes, all you have to do is shop in the fat kids section of most department stores. I needed a new tank top for the heat wave we had last week, so I went to Target, where a men’s medium was $9.99, but the XXL kids shirt, of roughly the same size, was only $7.99, because it’s a kid’s sized t-shirt. So next time you want to save a couple of bucks, suck it up, and pretend that you’re shopping for your son. But I do not know if this same trick will work for women, since I never have and never will shop for women’s clothes.
Mike, you sexist bastard, I thought that you were all for equal rights, why would you never shop for women’s clothes? I’ll spend money on clothes for any girl I care about, but would I go shopping for them? I’d rather be drafted and sent to war. This is because the women’s section in most stores is so cluttered, messy, and full of stressed out women, that it causes me to nearly faint, just thinking about it. When I’m amidst sale-frenzied women shopping for shoes, I begin to feel like I’m running a marathon in Death Valley– The room starts to swell, I sweat, and I see mirages everywhere. And in the desert, at least I don’t run the risk of getting my eye put out by an unwanted, flying high heel shoe. Just go to a Target, and stroll through the women’s shoe section, if you don’t believe me. WWI trenches have nothing on women’s shoes isles; where women push and shove to find the holy grail of shoes; a size eight, on sale, that looks like a size five, and looks just like several shoes that they already own, only they’re new, and somehow therapeutic.
But when it comes down to it, gender roles are ephemeral, and the way I see it, as gender specifics decline, women gain position in the Battle of the Sexists. Take for instance, the use of button flies on jeans. Button flies are incredibly annoying for men because every time we use a urinal, we look like a little kid, as we pull our pants down to pee, because it’s time consuming, and difficult, to unbutton three of the four buttons and leave the pants at the waist, as you would with a zipper. The other day at Target, I bought some nice looking jeans, without trying them on, because I don’t try on clothes (I may write a column on why I don’t try on clothes). At home, I put them on for the first time, and they fit just fine, but to my horror; I noticed that they have a button fly, but if I were a woman, I wouldn’t care. Oh well, by being born a male, on average, I will work eight hours less per week than women, and make $10,000 more a year, and every time I get up to stretch, I won’t hit my head on that annoying glass ceiling, which must hurt, and cause brain damage. Sexism is Adam getting even with Eve for getting to try the apple before him.
