In honor of Valentine's Day's recent coming, and in honor of my friend Evan who gave me flowers and made my year (gave me flowers and said, "this doesn't mean I'm going to hook up with you. Let's go to the Vagina Monologues"), I am basing my column around the theory that men are not the evil, indecipherable creatures I thought they were. In high school I prided myself on being able to talk to them without blushing. With my 3.5 male friends, I considered myself enlightened. Now I find that many of my close friends are, in fact, male. Occasionally they surprise me with insights like "it's too late for me to revert to objectifying women because I have too many female friends."
So I've decided to channel my inner college-age man for this column. [Fake editor's note: "channeling a man"? I'm concerned. This sounds like prostitution.] I feel that I am qualified because the Office of Residential Life keeps insisting that I am, in fact, a man, assigning me male roommates on a far too-regular basis.
So this inner-man -- his name is Robert. Not Bob or Bobby or Rob, but Robert. (Okay, his mother calls him Pooky.) He will be one of your friends this winter if you've lost all of yours to off-terms. If you need a visual -- he's the boy with shaggy hair who wrinkles his nose at Collis's vegetarian options and "alternative" desserts, but still eats there on a daily basis. He also sits behind you in class and cramps his too-large feet into the back of your chair. (He's one of those prep school kids -- a bit of a snob, but what could I do?)
"I went to an all- boys school. I boarded when I was 12 and 13. Now, as any guy can tell you, those years are pretty crucial in our adolescent development. There's all that, umm, hair and wet dreams. Anyway, the only contact I had with women was through our teachers. The only sexual contact I had was through music videos -- Paula Abdul and Madonna -- which were completely formative in the construction of my gender relations thing. Maybe that's why I peered through the hole in the shower wall to watch Mrs. Flanagan get changed in the teacher's dressing room after she took us swimming.
"In any case, even after I met girls, they were pretty much just sex objects to me. This phase lasted from 14-17.
"But it got so dull. I grew tired of not hooking up. All these annoying love songs kept playing on the radio; I began to wonder what was going on. So I decided to take some chances on the most tolerable girls I knew. And funnily enough, they were wicked cool. They were kind and thoughtful and funny without being obscene, and calming, and they had about a billion other good qualities that weren't in men.
"There is, however, this one '01 here (I have always had a thing for seniors, as everyone does), who is so mean, she looks away from me when I walk by. Not only looks away, but she looks away and looks down her nose at me at the same time. She is very dexterous -- it is quite a feat. Other people have verified that this phenomenon is not just aimed at me, but a universal blessing. Anyway, because she is mean, I choose to objectify her. She is, for me, the hottest girl on campus. She looks stupid when she smiles (not very used to doing it, the cow), but when she pouts, my goodness, I can't get enough of it. I am sure if I got to know her, she would be perfectly nice and a good girl, but I would no longer be able to objectify her. But I choose not to because, er ... this isn't making me sound like a very nice guy. Never mind.
"But on reflection, I no longer tend to objectify girls. Women seem to make a huge mistake in thinking that men have no control over their objectification of women. Of course we do. Do women think that even the horribly chauvinistic men think of their mothers as 'hardbodies?' No, my friend.
"We choose when we want to see past the aesthetic appeal of a girl into her personality. We also choose whether to attach any sexual value to this aesthetic appeal.
"The problem is becoming friends. How can you think of a girl as 'a nice bit of fluff' if she's your bud? How can you comment on the size, shape and perkiness of her boobs if you have spent time with her arguing about why girls lie about not farting or masturbating? You can't, not without feeling like a complete jerk by living a contradiction that is directly insulting to a friend. I'm hungry. This has worn me out. Let's go get pizza and play Wrestlemania."
Of course, this is just me channeling a man, Dionne Warwick-style ... But 4 actual XY-chromosomed men grunted approval. Our lesson? Men: not just for watching Jackass and scratching themselves. Well, not sometimes.