I don’t often get asked for my opinion about
anything. I volunteer it way more often than anybody should. I don’t give
anybody a chance. When somebody actually asks me for my opinion, though? I
mean, that’s great. I love that.
Man. I just want to sit here and soak that
up. I feel like one of those middle-aged bathtub people from the dick pills
commercials right now. A nice chilled Chablis, a bathtub perched on the crest
of a cow pasture hillock, and my middle-aged wife I am now thanks to modern
chemistry physically capable of having sex with. We are going to slap our gross,
flabby bodies together out here in the open and then retire to the expensive B&B
where we are staying.
I’m stalling.
Kelly McClure just asked me to write
something from the perspective of a man about what it’s like to walk around all
day without anybody being a gross sex jerk to you. Apparently Kelly and her girlfriend
Lindsay can’t walk one inch without some dude commenting on their bodies, or
calling them “baby” or “beautiful,” or just generally reminding them that men
rape. Kelly wants to know what it’s like to “never have to worry about these
things, and literally be able to walk around, unbothered, at all times.”
So yeah.
It’s kind of like a “I want to know your
opinion,” and also kind of like a “here, I made you a salad, it has hand
grenades in it.”
Whatever. It’s nice. I walk around, nobody
generally bothers me. It’s nice. It’s how you’d think it would be. I don’t walk
around going “LA LA LEE, I AM ME” all day long, like I have my own walk-related
worries, akin to “What if that guy decided to beat the shit out of me for no
reason, could I hold my own long enough to jab him in the eye and run?” I also
have “Where’s the best place to look when a woman with nice breasts is walking
towards me? I’m going to go with the ground, but maybe that’s a classic breast
perv move.” But those are total non-burdens that only feel like burdens because
they’re my only burdens.
I could talk about what a burden it is to try to always be a nice non-perv who doesn't creep people out when sometimes there are ATTRACTIVE WOMEN with NICE PARTS I WANT TO LOOK AT and they are OUTSIDE, but that's insulting. What am I supposed to do, openly masturbate every time I see a boob? I'm too much of an adult for that. I don't masturbate unless I am completely alone for FIVE MINUTES because that's called DIGNITY. It is a complete non-problem to walk and have to deal with a constant onslaught of mild worry about from how far away and for how long and if ever it's okay to look at a part of a stranger's body that helps me imagine having sex with that person.
There was that one time a guy walked up to me
and held a knife to my jugular. So there’s that. That can happen to anybody.
That guy didn’t want to rape me, though. He also didn’t want to rape my friend,
a woman who I was with at the time. And he didn’t hold a knife to her jugular
either. I think it was some street thug code about respect because the guy was
a street thug and he kept saying “it’s about respect.” But that was an isolated
incident. Nothing you can do about those. Maybe try to stay out of shitty
neighborhoods and don't walk through parks at night. General safety awareness minus
vagina. Yeah. I have to deal with an amount of that. But it pales in
comparison to "50 percent of the population has rape in their heart and, almost worse, a lot of them can't shut up about it."
Day-to-day I pretty much just walk around
worrying about other stuff. Like “what if I’m never more than this,” and “can I
ever forgive myself for being an incomplete person” and “hey I just met you and
this is crazy but here’s my number so call me maybe.” Regular good old
fashioned existential dread. On my way to and from Subway to get a sandwich I
will not enjoy. All day long. I guess that’s pretty good, I don’t know. I never
think about how much worse it could be. It’s one of those things you don’t have
to think about until somebody asks for your opinion about it.
Just one of those “oh yeah we’re different”
things, like how sometimes girls sit down to pee and then accidentally poop,
like a poop bonus, and that can just happen because the whole sit/stand thing
isn’t such an either/or proposition, and this feels like a summation of how
females are so flexible with the expression of their emotions, that shit and
piss are the same and not a fun one you can stand and have conversations about
baseball during and a lame one you have to sit and be patient for and pretend
isn’t happening, for women it’s just all one great necessary-to-sit-for purging, and one part
of the purging is occasional fucking vagina blood, and that’s another one where
it’s like “oh yeah, maybe that’s an anatomical metaphor for why my girlfriend can be SO HAPPY one minute and
then totally fucking furious in the next one” while being mermerizingly beautiful like time-lapse weather rolling across the savannah, and you marvel at primeval womanhood.
One of those differences.
Also, I don’t want to blame the victim here,
but maybe New York City is an overpopulated shithole that is going to fall into
the ocean within the next 20 years, and it’s already, constantly and always, operating
under Thunderdome rules, and you should consider not being in it if you want to
be a human.
