Thursday, May 6, 2010

Revenge rape - it's so punny!!

Another fairfax fail. A man was thrown out of a strip club in the wee hours of the morning. Upset about this, he went and got a nail gun from his ute, and fired four nails at the establishment's brick wall. Fairly boring, mundane news report. Yet Fairfax just couldn't help themselves but make a disgusting pun out of it: Strip club nailed by angry patron
Get it?! He 'nailed' them?! Cos they're slutty strippers?! It's so punny!!!

Fucking *headdesk*

Monday, May 3, 2010

Sick with (the idea of) love

Recently two of my girlfriends have gone through messy breakups from poor relationships. As I have listened to them (emphasis on the trying to listen and not trying to advise!) deconstruct their actions and emotions, I have noticed many similarities. So many similarities in fact, that since friend B has been slightly 'behind' friend A in her journey, I have been able to use friend A's experience to make awe-inspiring insights into friend B's situation.

Talking with these friends recently, and many friends over the years, I have noticed a worrying pattern. Of course there are probably only a few common paths relationships can take, and I don't know anything about the psychology of it all, but this is something I've noticed, and I wonder if it applies more often to women than to men.

What I've noticed is that some friends of mine, otherwise intelligent, savvy women, have a habit of behaving like idiots when it comes to men. And I'm not talking about hamming up their ditz credentials. I'm talking about a cascade of poor decisions that only end up hurting themselves. I know love is meant to make you crazy, but they're not sick with love, they seem to be sick with the idea of love. It sounds cliched, but they love being in love more than they love the guy, who more often than not turns out to be a dud, because they didn't have their brains on when they started seeing him.

This is how it goes, over and over again, and I'm sick of watching it happen: Boy meets girl. Girl is fantastic (all my friends are fantastic, that's why I'm friends with them). Boy likes girl. Boy has some kind of cool factor - maybe he's really hot, or plays guitar really well, or is a tortured intellectual. Or maybe girl's self esteem is low and just the fact that he's interested is very attractive to her. So girl likes boy, they go out. At which point, girl becomes infatuated with the idea that there is some magical wonderful powerful connection between them, and proceeds to lose any capacity she once had for character assessment. Boy, inevitably in these situations, turns out to be a dud for whatever reason, but girl just can't, or won't, see it.

So there our girl is, stuck in a relationship that is going downhill, fast. Her ability to attempt to salvage the relationship (if it had any potential to begin with) is utterly hampered by the fact that she has now lost herself in the idea of being with him, lost her sense of self, lost her belief in her own judgment, and is totally scared of being alone.

The key sign that your friend is in a relationship like this? She takes every opportunity she can to tell you just how fan-fugu-tastic her man is. She'll elaborate, ad nauseam, on how wonderful the connection they have is. She'll tell you over and over again just how fucking happy she is to be with him, how centered she feels, how it's not perfect but nothing is and she wouldn't want to brag but - you know - they're soul mates. Then when she gets drunk she'll cry to you that it's just not working and she doesn't know what to do. Then the next morning she'll pretend that conversation never happened, or that she was just being silly, that it was the wine talking.

The wine doesn't lie, take it from me.

It seems to me that what all these women have in common is that they are so attached to the idea of being with someone that they lose themselves. What they desire is a genuine, loving, intimate connection, but really, deep down, their lack of self esteem is telling them that they're not quite good enough. So when they get something that looks like it could be that relationship-that-is-meant-to-make-you-a-whole-person, they grasp on for dear life, and bugger the consequences. They refuse to a) use their judgment to assess whether the relationship and/or the man are right for them, and b) assert their own needs in the relationship.

What makes these two cognitive actions possible, it seems, is a) the pervasive idea that a woman is not worth anything until she is in a relationship, because sexual attractiveness is the marker of worth and also because she will never be happy unless she has this relationship; b) a discourse that women are physically unacceptable (we're never pretty enough, thin enough, tall enough, boobied enough etc etc) and emotionally neurotic or needy, which degrades women's sense of worth, and c) a discourse where women are obliged to give ourselves to men, physically and emotionally, so when a woman asserts that this relationship or this man isn't working out for her, she's seen as selfish.

So we have women who feel less-than to begin with, who are told they will only be worth something when they have a boyfriend, and that if they assert their needs in that relationship they are selfish bitches, thereby confirming that they were worthless in the first place. And no wonder its always such a cluster fuck.

I want to tell these gorgeous women that, hey, they're gorgeous. I want to tell them that it doesn't hurt to be a little critical in your appraisal of men before you get into a relationship with them. I want to tell them that it's ok to assert their needs in a relationship, and that if he can't take it he wasn't worth it. I want to tell them that it's ok to be single.

But you can't save people, same as for everything, people need to figure it out for themselves.

So my musings on this issue got me to thinking about my own relationship, and the relationships of my other girlfriends who don't have this pattern. I was reminded of something my Mum said to me a few years ago...

My parents split up when I was two. Mum had a few boyfriends when I was a kid. There was Spike, with his red beard. There was Alan, god he was sweet, he gave me rides in the laundry bucket and had a big garden. There was PK, the trendy Indian guy who took us on cool holidays to Sydney and took me for a ride in a water boat. There were a couple of other dates in there, I don't really remember. Then she met my stepdad when I was 9 :-) All in all not that many over a 7 year period! Yet she said to me once "God I used to worry when I dated men and we'd break-up, you'd take the break-ups so hard, I was so worried I was giving you a complex about men."

It's true that when she broke up with Alan, and then PK, I did take it pretty hard. Well, I cried once or twice, if you call that hard (I was happy when she broke up with Spike, I didn't like him lol). But I did not get a complex about men. In fact, what I think I got, was a healthy attitude towards relationships. My Mum's example showed me that the only reason you stay with someone is if it's working for you. You don't stay with someone to be with someone. You don't stay with someone out of guilt. She showed me that it's ok to break up with someone when it's not right, and that while it's hard, you get over it. And all of these things have made my relationship stronger, because I know I'm not with Mr T for any other reason than it is where I want to be, and that it's right for me.

(I don't want to make it sound like my Mum taught me to break up with someone the second it gets difficult, because that's not the case.)

I don't think that without my Mum's example I would have ended up where Friend A and B have ended up. I don't think that is my personality type at all, and I have plenty of other friends who aren't like that. But I have found all these musings on attitudes towards relationships interesting. Peace out.