Tom Perrota has an uninteresting-yet-interesting piece in Slate on the Sexy Puritan:

I didn’t think too much about Sexy Puritans as a type until I began looking into the abstinence-only sex-education movement while researching my novel, The Abstinence Teacher. I expected to encounter a lot of stern James Dobson-style scolds warning teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex—and there were a few of those—but what I found over and over again were thoughtful, attractive, downright sexy young women talking about their personal decision to remain pure until marriage. Erika Harold, Miss America of 2003 (the right sure loves beauty queens), is probably the best-known to the wider public, but no abstinence rally is complete without the testimony of a very pretty virgin in her early- to mid-20s. At a Silver Ring Thing event I attended in New Jersey in 2007, a slender young blond woman in tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt—she wouldn’t have looked out of place at a frat kegger—bragged about all the college boys who’d tried and failed to talk her into their beds. She reveled in her ability to resist them, to stand alone until she’d found the perfect guy, the fiancé with whom she would soon share a lifetime full of amazing sex. While her explicit message was forceful and empowering—virginity is a form of strength and self-sufficiency—the implicit one was clear as well: Abstinence isn’t just sour grapes for losers, a consolation prize for girls who can’t get a date anyway.

The surprising thing about the article to me is that people bought into some archetype of the physically plain and quiet abstinant. That’s never come even close to what pops into my mind when I think about a girl that proclaims that she’s saving herself for marriage. It seems to me that the ability to make that claim – and make it loudly – requires certain things that beautiful and popular people have in spades. Eccentricity is something that only bulletproof people can get away with and that has serious social repercussions for anyone without that kind of insulation.

Take two people that I’m going to name Betty and Edna. Betty is pretty and popular and Edna is quiet and bookish. If Betty loudly proclaims that abstinence is the way to go, she will either live up to her proclamation or she won’t. If she does, she will still get dates. Guys will date her thinking that they can change her mind or because for one reason or another they care because she brings enough else to the table. If she is a hypocrite, her popularity will insulate her from accusations of hypocrisy. Guys that talk about sleeping with her will be disbelieved by large segments of the student population. Guys that badmouth her will face social costs unless they’re on better footing than she is, and since she’s on good footing, that’s not terribly likely, so a lot will stay quiet.

Edna is a different story. She doesn’t bring enough to the table socially for guys that want to sleep with her to be willing to go through the time and effort of trying to manipulate her into doing so. They’ll just move on to the next person. Guys that do date her and don’t sleep with her will badmouth her. Many will be able to use her insecurities to get her to fall down on her convictions and many will probably say they slept with her anyway just to save face. Guys that do sleep with her will brag about it with impunity once they move on or even before they move on because there isn’t much social cost to losing her anyway. It all matters less. The costs are less severe for treating her badly. She is uninsulated and unprotected by the friends and social reputation that she doesn’t have.

All of this pertains to high school and social networks in college, but dynamics from those days continue forward. Those that got away with it in high school will be more cavalier about it afterwards. Those that paid a price for it will be more quiet. The dating situation changes substantially after college, but on the all one of the things that has surprised me is how relatively rarely sexual attitudes did.

A not-so-hypothetical question:

Let’s say that you are taking a political science class and you wrote a paper that you considered to be A- material. You get it back and it you actually got a 98 on it. You’re initially thrilled, but then you look and see you got deducted two points for a factual inaccuracy that was not only true but provably so. The professor isn’t there when you get your paper back and before he gets back from appearing on The O’Reilly Factor you get your grade for the course, which is an “A”.

Do you:
(a) Track the professor down, point out his error, and ask for the two points back? After all, that non-error was all that stood between you and a perfect paper.
(b) Realize that you got the best grade you could for the course and that there isn’t any point going through the hassle of tracking him down for the sake of something that doesn’t make a material difference.

A while back in a conversation about sexism in advertising, Brandon Berg commented:

IMO, the value in pointing out stuff like this is not to advance the idea that men are oppressed and reviled, but to rebut the idea that misogyny pervades American culture. As Peter points out, women are a protected class, and ads that played to negative stereotypes about women would not be tolerated.

In retrospect, I was too dismissive in my response. There was an underlying point worthy of consideration. It was explored a little bit later when there was a meme going around regarding “female privilege”, a sort of rejoinder to the feminist notion of “male privilege” which allegedly pervades our entire culture with the effect of favoring men. The idea was that men would list out ways in which women have it better than men. Berg threw in twelve of his own. Here are the first couple:

1. If I marry, there is a very good chance that I will be given the option to quit my job and live off my husband’s* income without having my femininity questioned.
2. If I become pregnant, I and I alone choose whether to terminate the pregnancy or have the baby. As a result, I can be reasonably certain that I will never be held financially responsible for a child I didn’t want to have, and that I will never have my unborn child aborted without my consent.

I agree with some of them and don’t entirely agree with the premise of others, but given his list and others it really is undeniable that there are circumstances where it appears to men (even men that are not closet misogynistic pigs that secretly hate all women) that it is advantageous to be female. And these areas extend much further than having to smash bugs and mow lawns.

None of this negates the fact that male privilege does exist. There are ways in which we are advantaged merely because we are male. These things can be chalked up not just to biology, but also to social norms and traditions that have outlived the circumstances that originally spawned them.

What it does mean, I think, is that we should bear in mind that male privilege is not true as a broad statement that men are privileged in all ways or all ways deemed important. Such a thing would negate even the possibility of female privilege except as a canard to avoid the issue at hand which is men disadvantaging women and that doesn’t seem quite right. I think that there’s a lot more to it than that.

It seems to me that male privilege and female privilege can simultaneously exist because they pertain to different things. Ways that are surprisingly difficult to weigh against one another and come up with a universal statement that on the whole, men/women are actually the favored ones or that it pushes enough in both directions to even out.

I’ve commented before that as far as relationships go if you are socially charismatic but ugly it’s better to be male but if you are attractive and socially awkward it’s more advantageous to be female. This can lead to arguments about which is the harder cliff to climb. Men might say that women can at least make themselves look better with dieting while it’s much more difficult for a person to change their personality. Women can point out that there’s a lot about your appearance that you can’t change and it is quite possible to at least gain enough social skills to improve your station. At the end of the day I would say that whether it is better to be male or female in the dating market depends on what your baseline attributes are.

As it is with the dating market I think it is with life in general. Sort of. While the dating market has more to do with what you’re bringing to the table, I think that life in general has somewhat more to do with what you want to take from it. Whether it is advantageous to be male or female depends, I think, on what exactly one wants from life. This can apply to a whole lot of things, but for this post I am going to focus on work and family.

If you want a demanding career balanced with a family our social structure is far more beneficial to men than to women. A lot of men puncture holes in the whole “Women make 75% as much as men” by pointing out that if you control for various factors that it’s fair to control for that gap disappears. And that’s true. On the other hand, that’s only taking one step back while looking at the disparity. Take another step back and it becomes apparent that our social structures, by tradition and in some cases but not all biological necessity, make it so that women on the whole have to concede to the circumstances that justify the disparity or they will pay a price for it that men don’t.

The entire structure is set up to assume that between the ages of 18 and 50-something, a person is able to devote most of their uninterrupted energy towards school and the workplace and it extracts penalties if you deviate from this path. From an employer’s standpoint this makes a lot of sense. Skills are lost when people leave the workforce. Continuity is better if you can have one person working 40 hours a week than two people working 20.

That’s a lot of it, though some of it is simply because that’s the way it has always been and it’s always been that way because it could always be that way and it could always be that way because it primarily concerned men. In other words, there are things that could change without great efficiency costs but they don’t change out of inertia. While typing this, I think of the whole residency situation for doctors, which is twice as inhospitable for women as it is for men.

But whatever the cause, at the end of the day it leaves men at a competitive advantage in the workplace in ways that women didn’t choose. Or, if they did choose, they had to make choices that the men never really had to make. Men can have the career and leave the household to be run by their girlfriends/fiances/wives. That’s more difficult for women not only because they have to find a guy that will play a long for reasons other than crass laziness but also because out of biological necessity they have to take it easy during pregnancy and for a span afterwards which can put a strain on a household’s finances that the inverse couple never would because the man can just keep on working. It’s no coincidence that almost all of the male residents that Clancy worked with had wives and kids while that wasn’t true of a substantial portion of her female coworkers.

But if someone is not ambitious it forces men into situations that their female counterparts can much more easily sidestep. Ambitious men are more comfortable with unambitious (career-wise) women than vice-versa. Ambitious women are often suspicious of unambitious men. Some of it has to do with the social norms which say that a man should want to provide for the family and whatnot, though some of it also has to do with what I believe to be the fact that men that buck this norm are generally more likely to be moochers than their female counterparts. I say this because some men that want a breadwinning wife simultaneously object to having children and this only very rarely seems true of women (in fact, I’ve never seen it, though I’m sure it exists).

Slightly more simply put, if a woman’s primary social value is in her ability to bear and raise children, and it is much more likely to be the case than with a man (replacing “bear” with “sire”), then the less emphasis she places on her primary value the less valuable she ultimately is, on the whole, as far as the relationship market is concerned. Similarly, if a man’s primary social value is to be able to provide for the family, the less interested he is in that the less valuable he is in the social market on the whole.

I am oversimplifying by reducing it all to “staying at home with the kids” vs. “working long hours to provide for the kids”, but less extreme variations also ring true. Even if a woman doesn’t want kids or doesn’t want to stay at home with them, if she wants a career that wouldn’t bring home enough money to support the family but keeps her busy and satisfied that’s easier for her to do than it is for him. To pick an example, one of Clancy’s fellow residents in Deseret had a wife that had a little catering business that she took care of while the kids were in school. I think that it’s often harder for a man to pull off that kind of part-time arrangement. On the other hand, there is an easier place for women to do such things at least in part because it is more difficult for her to avoid having to take some time off work or with greatly reduced hours, so it cuts both ways though notably does so in ways that favor men and women that want traditionally male and female things and leaving those with non-traditional aspirations a tougher and less likely road with more sacrifice required.

Another way of looking at all of this is to say that generally speaking it is advantageous to want what other people like you want. Bucking norms comes at a cost. Hardly news, I know, but I think that it’s generally pertinent to the discussion. For women, I think more of them would like to become successes in the workplace than would men like to have less workplace success in favor of more time with the little ones and I think the fact that women want this in larger numbers (and it’s among the more vocal men that want it) that makes the discussion focus a lot more on what men can do more easily than women. On the other hand, for the fewer men that do buck the traditions they can have a much harder time of it at least in part because while a woman can succeed in the workplace without a man, a man cannot have a family without a woman.

Politico ran a rather vapid-yet-interesting article on the hair (and/or lack thereof) of would-be vice president Joe Biden:

The most common hypothesis is that he received a hair transplant, where follicles from the bushier back of the head are grafted onto fading spots closer to the front of the dome.

In 1987, a Washington Post reporter asked him to confirm the theory. “Guess,” he responded. “I’ve got to keep some mystery in my life.”

A quick Politico survey of stylists and hair transplant surgeons — some of whom have followed Biden’s career path for years, while others didn’t know about him until yesterday — found that there was little mystery.

“When he had darker hair it was pretty obvious, he had larger plugs,” said Dr. Michael Beehner, medical director of the Saratoga Hair Transplant Center in New York. “With the lightening of his hair, it looks much, much better now.”

The article was originally interesting to me because I’ve always found the notion of people (by which I mean men, because it’s so commonly accepted of women) bolstering their appearance in ways that are supposed to look natural and yet pretty transparently isn’t. I am thinking of an old Colosse County Commissioner who was 80 and looked it but nonetheless colored his hair a very implausible dark shade of brown. Or people that after having gone gray suddenly come in to work with brown or black or whatever hair. Or comb-overs in general.

I decided when I was young that if I was ever going to color my hair, I’d do it in a transparently fake color like light blue or purple. Ironically, the only two times I ever have colored my hair was once gray for a costume (though it stayed gray for weeks) and once brown for odd work-related reasons that may warrant its own post at some point. On the other hand, I can also think of it like a tattoo or some other body decoration wherein if the guy thinks that he looks better with it than without it who am I to argue?

But then I saw pictures of Biden at the convention with Obama and my mind went off on a different trajectory altogether. Even though I follow politics relatively closely and knew who Biden was and all that, most of the pictures I’d seen of him were from the front. I hadn’t realized that despite the fact that he looks full-headed (with assistance, of course) from the front, the entire crown of his head is shiny-bald.

So that got me thinking… if he’s going to go to the trouble of covering up his baldness in front, why do it so half-assed? Particularly in this age of Rogaine which covers precisely the part of the head where Biden remains bald. Biden would look much better bald than in his current state. At some point in the 2000 election, Gore mysteriously lost the growing bald patch in the back of his head and you know what? It worked! The bald patch was far more conspicuous and distracting than its mysterious disappearance.

Then again, maybe I’m the only person that finds the bald patch so distracting. For some reason, I find that style of baldness the be by far the most unsettling. Far moreso than horseshoe hair, excessive devil’s peaks, or pure baldness. There’s something weird to me about a person appearing not-bald from one angle and then obviously bald from another. Or maybe it’s sorta like the first paragraph of this post… the trying to cover something up (the goingness of bald) and yet doing so unconvincingly. So much worse to try and fail at such things than not to try at all. Yet for the most part they aren’t even trying. Except for cases like Biden, they’re not planting hair in the front it’s simply still existing there (at least for the time being) and they’re simply declining to take it off. Though then again, isn’t that essentially what a combover wearer is doing?

Me? If it comes down to it, I’ll actually cut the front off before I’ll sport a bald crown with hair surrounding it. I’ve already decided this, probably about the time I was deciding on the blue/purple that I never followed through on. I’m not too proud to try Rogaine first, but if that doesn’t work I’ll shave it all off or get a buzzcut before I let a bald crown empire slowly overtake the rest of my head. I guess that’s my personality… either do it completely or not at all.

If Biden does become Vice President, it’s really going to be oddly difficult for me to stomach his differing point of view on this particular issue.

Probably a year or so ago, I was in a company-wide meeting at Soyokaze where the CEO made a joke about how management screws up and it’s the employees that have to work late and put it all back together ha ha ha. It was intended as self-deprecating humor though it didn’t get the laughter that he was looking for. I don’t even remember the precise joke, but I remember writing a little note on my pad and passing it to my coworker Pat that read:

“Sharp humor is less funny to those doing the bleeding.”

What I meant by that was that if a joke is being made about something that is intrinsically unfunny to you it doesn’t matter if you’re not the intended target of the joke (if the joke is made by someone that isn’t bleeding).

I was thinking about this the other day when I was watching a movie. The film was a harrowing drama about a character being stalked and terrorized by an obsessive ex-lover wherein he flees for his life with his life in peril at every step. Well, okay, it actually wasn’t a drama, it was a comedy. The movie was My Super Ex-Girlfriend. And it was quite funny.

Nonetheless, the thought occurred to me as Uma Thurmon dropped a shark in Luke Wilson’s living room that it shouldn’t be funny to have a guy being terrorized by a vindictive ex and that if the genders were reversed the movie never would have been made. Well, maybe as a Lifetime Movie or something starring Julia Roberts, but not as a comedy. It wouldn’t be the slightest bit funny.

Then of course I asked myself “Why not?” After all, it makes no real pretense of realism. No one would watch the movie and think “Gosh, I wonder if everyone will make it out of this okay!” It’s a light comedy and obviously so from the outset. But the comedy only works if the victim is male and the opposite’s redemption at the end could only take place with a female character. In any other case, it would be lambasted as making light of the serious issue of domestic violence.

That’s what reminded me of my little note at the Soyokaze meeting. That kind of humor only works at an emotional distance. Only if you feel safe and it doesn’t bring to mind some traumatic experience. Men don’t generally have a whole lot to fear from violent women, so we can laugh. Women can laugh too because the victim in the movie is male. So it works.

It reminds me of a thread on Bobvis about a rape joke. Dizzy’s reaction to the joke and to anyone that would forward the joke (or find it funny) was fierce. My position was that you can’t help what you find funny, but you can help what tasteless jokes you pass along. Anyway, Dizzy made what I thought was a strange comment about how men wouldn’t laugh at a rape joke if involved a man getting raped in prison.

In fact, many such jokes are told. At least two comedians I know of (Chris Rock and Ron White) have routines that involve prison rape and “federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison” was an ongoing joke in Office Space. So I commented that prison rape isn’t nearly as off-limits generally because there is this (misguided) sense that the victims have it coming. But Spungen made what I thought was a much better point:

Guys would think [a joke about prison rape or a man getting raped by many women] was hilarious, because it never happens. Or at least, seldom enough that they never worry about it. Guys will even joke about homosexual rape, because they just don’t worry about it.

Guys can afford to keep a distance from the subject material because it’s something that we so seldom have to worry about. I actually did have a possibly dangerous ex-girlfriend at one point and even feared for my (and Evangeline’s and later Clancy’s) safety at least a little, but it was this weird freak thing (or this thing with this weird freak) and so once that passed that was the last I would ever have to think about it. Don’t have to worry about my friends, either. May have to worry about my female friends, though, which is why a My Super Ex-Boyfriend movie would be less funny even to me.

This post was originally going to be a review of Abel Keogh‘s book but instead it’s mostly just a collection of thoughts and impressions. The book is called Room for Two and explores the aftermath of his wife’s suicide.

Suicide is probably the most emotionally complicated way to lose a loved one or even an acquaintance. If someone dies in a protracted manner, you can say that the death was the easing of their suffering. If they die suddenly and unexpectedly, you can remember them as the vibrant person that they were. You can tell yourself that they’re in a better place now and that maybe you’ll see them around the corner (which, paradoxically, you hope is a very long ways away). Whatever the case, it’s a tragedy but it’s a tragedy not without its comforts.

Suicide, though, is different. It does more than take them away from you, it mars your very memory of the person. It leads to doubts and recriminations. What did you know and when did you know it? What could you have known earlier if you’d just been paying more attention? You drift in this vague selfish feeling of wondering why you weren’t enough, of anger at the turmoil they left behind, and of the natural sadness of knowing that they’re not there anymore.

As many of you know, I had a really good friend named Walt that killed himself. I also had a former acquaintance do the same long after she had alienated me and everybody else. I’m not even going to begin suggesting that what he went through and what I went through are the same thing. Indeed most of the book I couldn’t relate to with my own experience. But the emotional confusion was something that I could.

There is a great book by Haruki Murakami called Norwegian Wood that explores the suicide epidemic in Japan many years ago. I remember as I read the book how angry I was at the characters that killed themselves and how scornful I was of Naoko, the lead female character who I knew by the nature of the book would do the same. I can’t remember hating a character so much. It made me think of Caitlyn, the former friend who was not Walter who killed herself. It was, to me, her last gasp of narcissism. The last best way that she could make those of us that had long stopped caring about her care once again.

The thing about Naoko and Caitlyn is that they were easy to hate. They were easy objects of scorn. My guard was up against ever liking the former and I’d long since stopped liking the latter. No emotional investment. In fact, not only could I cavalierly declare their actions selfish and cruel, I could redirect all the residual anger I had at Walt and redirect it towards them. They were such a convenient outlet. As such, as I gradually got over Walt’s death, my anger against Naoko and Caitlyn subsided.

All of this talk about friends and former friends and fictional characters doesn’t do the slightest bit of justice to the idea of losing what Abel did, the woman to whom he had dedicated the rest of his life to. At the outset, I wondered how he would express his anger in addition to his grief. Particularly when she took the life of their unborn child with her. Everybody will tell you how you shouldn’t feel, but it’s something that simply has to be confronted and dealt with.

In writing such a book, I imagine that most writers would be tempted to gloss over this part. Who wants to present themselves as being someone angry at someone that was such a mess that they killed themselves. One of the more refreshing aspects of the book was the even-handed manner in which Abel presents himself. He neither presents himself as the tragic victim who had done nothing to deserve his wretched fate nor go too far in the other direction by trying to elicit sympathy as the guy that feels responsible for something that was obviously not his fault.

On the whole, the book is a surprisingly quick read, both because it’s relatively short but also because it moves along quickly. He doesn’t get bogged down with details or the desire to express every thought and emotion perfectly. It provided some thought-fodder and then moved on before you got tired of thinking about it.

Abel is a friend to Hit Coffee and as such it’s unlikely that if I didn’t enjoy his book that I would actually say so. On the other hand, if I hadn’t enjoyed it, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all. So consider these 800 words an endorsement.

Jerry Seinfeld had a stand-up monologue in one of his shows about how our ability to put the man on the moon became a rallying cry for dissatisfaction with the limitations of modern society technology. You know, as in “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t get our dang restaurants to hold the tomato on an order like I ask!” or something equally inane. He said that Neil Armstrong should have said, “This is one small step for man, and one giant leap for every malcontented SOB in our country for decades to come!” I’m not getting what he said exactly right, but you get the gist.

—

In a lot of public restrooms, in lieu of a faucet the sinks have a button. You push the button and some water comes out as the button comes back up. If you need more water, you push the button again. More water comes out, the button comes back up.

—

When Clancy and I lived in Deseret, our apartment shower-head and/or pipes became clogged. Over weeks the water deliver became increasingly less forceful until it, as I put it, started moving less water than a rat terrier urinating. Then it stopped altogether. Until they could fix it, we had to use gallon water jugs to take our morning showers. It took her four and me two. She was more vigorous about washing her hair than I was and she had more hair to wash. You’d dump yourself with maybe 2/3 of a gallon to get yourself wet, lather down with soap, then finish the bottle washing the soap off. Then you’d do your hair, then maybe another round on your body, then again in your hair to take care of the shampoo, then your hair again for the conditioner.

It was slow, but it got the job done. Frankly, it got the job down better than those damnable low-flow shower heads.

—

I think that both Married With Children and Unhappily Ever After (one of the most tragically underappreciated family sitcoms in my lifetime) both had an episode with the main plot being the family becoming smugglers from Canada. If I recall, the Bundys smuggled toilets and the Malloys shower heads. Canada, in the show if not in real life (it seems unlikely that our environmental regulations exceed theirs in just about any respect), hadn’t banned low-flow toilets and shower-heads. There was an increasing demand because Canadian showerheads and toilets refrained from being so pansy-ass.

So yeah, count me among those that say “screw the environment and let my toilet FLUUUUUUUUUSH!!!!” Who doesn’t hate having to flush two or three times to get everything down or see it get clogged in circumstances where you suspect that a real toilet wouldn’t have. And what can you do with a shower-head that’s too weak to get the shampoo off your darn head?

But does it really have to be either-or? I mean, the environmentalists are right that flushing so much water is often unnecessary and having the shower at full blast while you’re standing away from the water soaping yourself down is unnecessarily wasteful. So how come, instead of the government regulating our water-expending apparatii somewhat useless, we haven’t instead come up with a solution?

For example, why must there be one strength of flush? Why can’t we have one flush that assumes that there is no solid waste matter, but then when there is have a “mega-flush” that loads some extra water into the toilet to prevent clogging and then swooshes it all down with a manly-man flush? If we can put a man on the moon…

For showers, we can use the aforementioned public restroom sink button. When we need some extra power with which to get the shampoo out of our hair or the soap off our bodies, we press the button and get some extra force. Because we have two faucets, it’s kind of difficult to easily change the force of the water without changing the temperature. If the power of the shower can be dictated by the showerhead (in addition to the faucets), surely there can be some sort of filter we can put before the showerhead to slow it down except when we press the button.

We can, after all, put a man on the moon.

One of the best emails I ever read was to my friend Kelvin to the lady friend I was attempting reconciliation with. Before she and I or she and someone else got back together (she was choosing between exes), he threw his hat into the ring. He declared his love for her in some of the most eloquent and engaging prose I have ever read. At the end of it he made one request. She could choose him and they could live happily ever after, she could choose someone else and things would (eventually) return to normal… but the one thing that he absolutely, positively, did not want her to say was “Maybe” and leave him twisting in the wind.

To which she responded, over the next few months, with a series of proclamations of “Maybe”.

—

A while back, Megan McArdle put her finger on something rather important to young men or, at least, young men like I used to be:

There’s a phase most women probably go through in high school or college, when they realize that they have extraordinary power to get men to do things, and they see how many people they can get to chase them at once. Most of us, though, I think quickly realize how pointless it is. There’s something terribly lonely about interacting with someone when you know what’s really going on, and they don’t.

—

The notion of a “Friend Zone” is often fodder for sitcoms. It often goes like this: Guy is interested in girl. Girl might be interested in guy or might have been interested in guy, but they become friends and since they’re friends, she doesn’t want to wreck it by pursuing something more. Thus, he is in The Friend Zone. In the TV show Friends, Joey warns Ross in the first episode that he needs to make his move or he will be in the Friend Zone. In Scrubs, a corrolary is added that any aborted kiss must be rectified within 24 hours or you are relegated to the place where her shy or goofy Asian-American tutor in high school ended up… I don’t think they said The Friend Zone, but they might as well have.

I’ve heard it suggested by some that The Friend Zone (TFZ) is actually a myth. If a woman is interested in a guy, she will be interested in him. The fact that he’s her friend would make it more so rather than less so. the Myth of the Friend Zone exists because women say “Let’s be friends” or “I was interested in you, but now that I’ve gotten to know you I see you only as a friend” when they really mean “Ewwww…” and they don’t want to hurt the guy because he is nice and it’s not good to hurt nice people any more than you have to or they don’t want to hurt him because he’s not nice and they fear retaliation.

Women that say this are… well… correct much of the time. Sometimes guys are left with the impression that they might have had a shot but the friendship got in the way when in reality he never, ever, had anything resembling a shot. Maybe it’s the vast majority of guys that think that they’re in TFZ or maybe it’s just true some of the time. But it’s not true all of the time. Not completely as such, anyway.

It’s true that if you become genuinely close with a girl that would otherwise be interested in you, it’s unlikely or impossible that this will negatively affect her interest except in the outlier case where she’s just cruisin’ for an emotional bruisin’ (in which case the guy shouldn’t want to go there anyway and if he is he’s cruisin’ for the same bruisin’). But there is something else that does happen that young men ought to be on the lookout for.

There very frequently seems to be a time limit between the point where a guy says that he is interested and something actually happening. It’s not the 24 hours from Scrubs, but it’s not indefinite and this is true even if you are otherwise appropriate dating stock for the girl and not searching out of your station. You can glide your way out of this if you immediately start dating someone else or can accurately (and it must be accurately, faking is easy to spot) demonstrate that you have other options that are worthy of pursuit.

One of the worst positions for a guy to be in is to declare his interest and simply not be given any sort of definitive answer. Hearing “no” hurts, of course, but if you’re well-adjusted life goes on. Hearing “yes” rocks. If you get anywhere in between, you are effectively put on Reserve Status. You’re on a shelf. You’re a bone in her collection. This is what McArdle puts her finger on that I find so worthwhile. A lot of young women do this.

I have in the past called this Bone Collecting. The shorter version is that being a human her ego needs regular watering and having a guy interested in her helps supply that and having more guys interested supplies more of that. Logically, she can only be going out with one person at a time, but if she can manage to have a guy or two that are in the ballpark of worthy of her on stand-by, it can help keep her going in pursuit of the best guy that she can get. McArdle focuses squarely on the things that the guy will do for her, but one of the biggest such is emotional validation. That he may completely revoke this if she tells him it’s unlikely to happen or will only happen in the absence of any other immediate alternative provides incentive for her not to say anything even if he’s actually annoying her with his affections.

Note: This isn’t the same as saying she is not and never could be interested. If she feels nothing for the guy than his emotional validation actually means little. She feels (or has the capacity to feel) something, just not enough to forego all other opportunities.

For a lot of girls, once they have that emotional validation, they’ve already gotten everything they need from the romantic transaction. Foregoing other opportunities or engaging in romantic physical activity are costs that she doesn’t even have to bear. A lot of young ladies want more than validation, of course. A lot of young men want more than sex. Nonetheless, there is a not-insignificant portion of each population that is more singularly-minded and both genders should keep this into account.

The reason I can write with such confidence that the girl is interested in the guy and it’s not all a smokescreen for lack of interest is that various times when I’ve seen it happen the two do eventually get together. Importantly, though, this only happens after he has revoked his validation. Evangeline and Kelvin dated for two years before I ruined it. Tracey threw herself at my feet and for years said (to me and to others) that letting me go was the worst mistake that she had ever made.

I am not saying that these women are evil. Sometimes they don’t realize what they’re doing. Sometimes they do, but she just can’t seem to leverage any perspective with him hanging by so closely even as she doesn’t want him to go away.

Whether she admits it or not and whether he wants to or not, it seems to me that the best thing for the guy to do when he finds himself in reserve status is to go on his merry way. Do whatever it takes to move on. Stop seeing her, stop talking to her, find new friends. Whatever. She generally puts up a lot of resistance to this idea, partially because she loses that validation and partially because she likes him in some capacity (even if she’s unclear what that capacity is) and it hurts to see someone you care for go away and possibly hate you.

Prior to that worst case scenario, it really does pay for guys to be circumspect with their romantic intentions until they get some sort of reciprocation. I don’t mean never expressing interest, but I do mean never expressing interest more than one step ahead of what she has expressed and never stay on that limb for too long.

En route to Cascadia, we decided to swing back to Deseret and Zarahemla, the town we lived in while we were there.

Interestingly, when we got into town both of us independently had the same sort of feeling… “It feels like coming home”.

Had you asked either of us whether we’d ever really consider Zarahemla our home (or a home), we probably would have laughed. We didn’t really dislike the area (it is one of the more palatable cities in Deseret), it was just a place that was very different where we were from and a difficult place to assimilate into for reasons religious and cultural.

What’s sad is that Santomas, Estacado, never really became a home-type place for us. I absolutely love the state of Estacado which is why I am lobbying for her to keep working to get licensure there so we can settle down there… but not so much for Santomas, a city that I figured I would love. It sort of felt like we should be honored to live in such a hip place, which made relatively squarish Clancy and I feel rather… well… square.

It’s possible that the main difference is time. We were in Zarahemla a lot longer than we were in Santomas and it’s possible had we been plucked out of Zarahemla earlier we’d feel similarly indifferent. Another factor is that though we stayed in Estacado for two years, it was supposed to be one, which likely made us less likely to really get settled in.

Out plan is to be in Cascadia for a year. It’ll be interesting to see how well we take to Soundview.

Clancy and I took another two day trip to the Oasis on the Hill, which is a water park in Estacado. In addition to all the water rides, one of the things that we do is sit at this particular vantage point and look down at and on everybody while making snide comments about the tattoos they’re sporting and the bathing suits that they’re wearing, among other things. I’ve come to call this little perch the Judgment Point.

One of the observations that Clancy made this time around is girls wearing bikinis that are way too young to be wearing bikinis. I don’t meant early pubescent girls who, right or wrong, at least have something to demonstrate, but rather the pre-pubescent girls. The ones whose breasts are less substantial than their baby fat. I don’t mean fat girls, just girls that that haven’t grown into at least their pubescent figures (lest anyone think to bring it up, this post is not about AOC laws or teenage sex).

I can’t disagree with what she is saying, though I found a tangential thing that she brought up interesting because it was something that I hadn’t thought about.

I’ve always considered the one-piece bathing suit to be the standard and a bikini to deviate from that standard for the point of showing off. That’s one of the things that fueled my previous comments about how poorly some women perceive their bodies and think that bikinis are the optimal bathing suit even when they’re not. But bikinis it would seem offer more than just the ability to show off. Clancy pointed out that it’s much easier to use the restroom with a two-piece than a one-piece and that this could be important for younger girls that haven’t mastered control of their excretory systems yet. Logistically that’s so obviously true I can’t believe that I never considered it before.

Of course, she also pointed out that there are some types of bathing suits for younger girls that allow for the easy restroom usage without showing off the tummy. So I guess my earlier points still stand. It would seem to me that there are so many different ways that women can dress their bodies up in bathing suits. It remains such a tragedy that so many of them hover around one or two types whether it accentuates their positives or their negatives.

Then again, it’s worth pointing out that all of this is yet more demonstration of the pressure that women are under when it comes to presenting themselves. For most guys that really don’t care so much, it’s really nice only having a couple options.