Yeah, that's what Sadie said…

A couple of my last posts were stories about recent encounters I’ve had with men who were both, shall we say … stupid.

It’s okay to be stupid. We are all stupid sometimes. Yes, even me. Stupidity is Sadie’s surname on regular occasion but at least I will be the first to admit it. Okay the third. Fourth then. Well, I will admit it eventually.

I take issue, however, with stupidity that results in treating people poorly, or stupidity that manifests in manners of intolerance. The law student I met in San Francisco and ultimately hooked up with is stupid, 4.0 grade point average notwithstanding. He is stupid in the sense that he hasn’t learned how to treat people. Women especially. But I suspect he never will. Because he has instead discovered that, for whatever his debilitated reasons, he enjoys being manipulative and duplicitous. It has probably served him well. Perhaps it gives him a charge. Gets him off. I could, if I were generous, attribute his ignorance to his age (25) but I am not feeling quite so charitable this Sunday evening as I lie in my bed and ponder the sheer number of men I have allowed into my life and my bed who were so VERY undeserving of being there. Stupid, stupid me.

But back to the law student – Manipulation and pathological lying are not practices that are inherent to youth. There are plenty of young men who know how to respect women. What the law student exhibited are (in my view) maladaptive behaviors that were programmed in his childhood, to be certain, where he was likely taught that he wasn’t good enough so he has since spent his days exhausting his relationships attempting to prove otherwise by marginalizing the women involved. I suspect that the law student boy will grow into a deceitful and pompous old man. Which means he will probably make a fairly decent lawyer. One thing I did not mention in my story was that, when I questioned him about the fact he added me as a friend on Facebook the very day that I arrived in San Francisco – the very city in which he lives – he assured me that it was sheer coincidence.

Sadie’s stupidity showing – I believed him.  Now I wonder how long he had been Facebook stalking me.
And then there was the fucker who referred to my friend Janet as a whore because she likes sex. Where to begin on that one?

Manipulation and lying are shitty behaviors. They are direct and derivative and are therefore worthy of reproach. But intolerance of such regard? Where one automatically ascribes a label to someone else, someone whom they don’t even know, about whom they have only ONE piece of identifying information no less, and that information is that the person LIKES SEX? And, the assumption is that, because this person is a WOMAN, and this woman LIKES SEX… the designation whore, delivered with utter disgust and incredulity, is deemed appropriate?

No. It’s not appropriate. It’s not any more appropriate than me calling him an asshole because he has an asshole. He isn’t an asshole (or maybe he is but I don’t have enough information to discern.) What I do know is that he is stupid. And that is simply because he, for whatever reason, was not given enough information about the concept of a woman’s enjoyment of sex. He was not told enough times (if at all) that it is perfectly acceptable for a woman to LOVE sex as much as men do.

In fact, it’s encouraged! Or, at least it should be. ALWAYS!

So what is a woman who likes sex? Umm… she is a woman who likes sex! She is not a whore. A woman who performs a sexual service for money is a sex worker (not a whore) and if she enjoys the sex that she has while on the job then she is one lucky and fulfilled woman. But this classification – sex worker- doesn’t carry much capacity for contempt, does it? This is why words like whore and slut have endured – they act as quick, convenient verbal transmitters of misogyny and hostility.

Misogyny and hostility. Stupid, huh?

Oh, and, unsurprisingly, before I Facebook Blocked the law student, I perused his Wall, wherein I found a plethora of similar misogynistic missives – mostly directed at the cheerleaders of his college team’s rival school. And while that, too, is stupid, I think can conjure up some generosity and say… this can be attributed to his youth.

However, you can’t always fix stupid… and not everyone grows up, do they?