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February 8th, 2011

08:25 am - Pretty Lady / ohprettylady.blogspot.com If you've ever wondered what it would be like to read the journal of a spoiled brat who defined enlightenment as being the willingness of others to satisy her every whim without question ... then I'm assuming that you weren't in the United States during the 1990s. No matter, if you missed that decade the first time around and for some reason regret the loss, the spirit of what should be a bygone and perhaps best forgotten cultural era lives on in this woman's writings. I tried to review one of the posts on this blog, one entitled On Picking Up Checks, but the Stumbleupon system wouldn't let me discover the site. I went there, clicked on the "thumbs down" button, and nothing happened. Then I found that somebody had discovered the blog itself, and decided that posting here would do. While reviewing an entire blog based on a single post might seem a little hasty, the post was so thoroughly obnoxious that I found myself feeling far more comfortable with the idea of doing that, than with that of crawling around in the muck of the author's mental world any more than I already had. The author writes: "Women, girls, self-described 'feminists' all: listen to the voice of experience. Check-paying has nothing to do with equality between the genders, good sex, or feminism. Check-paying is the simplest, most accurate method of ascertaining whether you are on a date with a man, or with a bizarre specimen of animated pond slime." going on to engage in a feeding frenzy like binge of character assassination directed against those men who ask the woman to split the check on a date, listing all of the distasteful things that they will supposedly do, and never mind the fact that plenty of couples can be found who have split the check, in which the men have done none of these things. The strikingly ugly "prettylady" goes on to write "A man who does not pick up the check is a man who values his pocketbook more than he values your opinion. ... In short, any man who does not appreciate the privilege of being allowed to take you to dinner for the simple glory of your lustrous presence should be shunned like the mutant he is." an arrogant remark that makes her remark about the "man whose ego is so out of control that he believes he is God's gift to promiscuous women" all the more amusingly ironic The question that she doesn't seem to grasp is a question is why the man should feel any more or less privileged to be on the date than the woman; is his company worth less than hers? One hears a demand that the man show his appreciation of the woman, but not even the slightest hint of how the woman ought to be reciprocating or even of any tolerance of the notion that she might; note the quoted comment about the man valuing his checkbook more than the woman's opinion. But in context, what is the woman's opinion about? Whether or not he ought to be opening his checkbook for her, in effect paying her for her company, and what was the technical term for that, again? We are left with a dire warning that such a man might respond to an unreasonable request with the word "no". As I mentioned on this page over at Google, the fact of the matter is that we do live in an era in which anti-male discrimination is rampant in the workplace, and so if anything, one could make a reasonable case that the woman should be the one picking up the check, in our (post-baby boomer) generation, because she is the one who has found the doors of opportunity being opened, instead of being slammed in her face and bolted shut. Were we living back in the world of years past, expecting the man to pay might have made some degree of sense, because the man was far likelier to have money to spend, but in a world which has radically changed and rendered those expectations obsolete, we have some like this author who, in a wholy unprincipled and adversarial way, is fighting to make sure that she keeps what's hers, and that other women don't undermine her by daring to act reasonably and taking present realities into account when making decisions in the present. I'm not surprised that her date abandoned her; I'm not sure why he asked her out in the first place. (Originally posted December 28, 2007 at 7:56 am)