Damsels, distressing.
Romantic Realism and its virtues.
I was deeply asocial as a child, with no friends. I knew nothing about the world, about people. Nothing. No birds, no bees. I had a mild, occasionally profound stammer, which didn’t help my general inarticulateness.
My parents were far too busy in making each other’s lives violently miserable to take a moment to give me some clue as to what to expect of any aspect of life. I lived in a fantasy world of comic books, television, movies, and carbohydrates, my only true sources of pleasure.
When I say nothing, I am not fucking around. Trust me on this.
I had barely any idea what other boys liked or were like, let alone any understanding of the impenetrable mystery that was girls. When, at the age of ten, in my sixth grade class, I learned to my utter shock that girls farted too, I was genuinely stunned. While others laughed in typically childish cruelty at this girl’s embarrassment, I was too stunned, and frankly too awkward myself, to be even vaguely amused.
Again, trust me on this.
Laugh all you like at my ignorance, my naivete. For me, it was neither funny nor fun. That asocial state left me completely separate from both boys and girls of my and any age, except for the very few other oddballs who read comic books with the same committed and obsessive seriousness as I did, with whom I found fellowship and the beginnings of an understanding of how to be a person, despite being raised by wolves.
Neither phrase existed then, but those comic book reading kids made up an echo chamber and a bubble, enabling me to survive, while at the same time, speaking the same language as we did, burdened with much the same social limitations as we were, denying me any access to a more conventional life and a legitimate way out of that all pervasive awkwardness.
In retrospect, that separation, that not in any way being a part of, as painful and difficult to navigate as it was as a boy, has given me a deeply satisfying and crystal clear perspective on reality. I remain profoundly grateful for this, despite never being invited to a party until I was out of high school and getting high, and looking like a blurry and uneasy thumbprint with glasses in my high school yearbook photo.
To be completely honest my day to day experience of life sucked back then, in a big and deeply painful way. In that above mentioned retrospect, it better prepared me for adulthood. That said, getting there wasn’t half the fun.
And as for my romantic notions of, well romance, comics in particular, and popular culture in general, conspired to convince me that women operated on and from a higher moral standard than men. That damsel in distress narrative informed much of my ideas about relationships, real, potential, or completely out of reach. And don’t get me started on how much the American Popular Songbook exacerbated all of this.
It was implicit that boys and men were utterly base of behavior, of hunger, of desire, and that girls were all too often the victims of that base behavior. Think about all those Tex Avery wolf cartoons for example, just off the top my head, as an indicator of where this misunderstanding arose.
As I hit my teens, I and discovered marijuana, I suddenly and recklessly grew into myself, developing something like looks, a presentation, and an actual personality, with, dare I say, a touch of charm and a gift for thinking fast and on my feet. I was, to be sure, pretty damned base, to be honest. I say this without pride, but without regret, either.
When, some ten or so years later, even after, thanks to what had become daily application of drugs and alcohol, I had socialized far more than was deemed necessary by many or most, I finally came to realize that my idealized vision of women was nonsense.
Again, call me naïve, call me ignorant, or call me a romantic dumb ass, but even after diving into the easy depravity that was the early 1970s, it was a revelation to me that women were as banal in their moral compromises as men were, despairing as it might have been to my delusional romantic notions of the world as I misread it.
And I had only just begun my decades of serial matrimony. Imagine that.
These ages ago educational experiences, the coming to understand that as different as men and women were, the sexes shared a moral compass with which neither ever found true north, have come to mind recently, thanks to the emergence of that headline gargoyle Marjorie Taylor Greene, her altogether ghastly behavior, her Jew baiting pronunciamentos and her all around general loathsomeness.
Who could have guessed that this idiotic and heavily armed shambling mockery of life would come along and up the crazy ass game as played by that exquisite pair of the vilely moronic Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who now seem almost comically innocent in their lunatic perfidia?
For all that, I have an odd kind of relief, a near gratitude, about what begins to appear to be the leveling of the playing field between the sexes, in a curious, unexpected and yes, simultaneously terrifying and satisfying way, thanks to Greene and her insurrectionist sorority sisters.
After what feels like an eternity of the endless scolding, not to mention the performative morality, of the sweeping, accusatory and all purpose shut down an argument generalizations of “Toxic Masculinity,” “The Male Gaze,” “Mansplaining,” and more, this Greene monster and her fellow pistol packing Wicked Witches of Western Civilization have really and finally confirmed, for those paying attention at any rate, that we have moved past those cliches and evolved to a state more specifically identified as Toxic Humanity, and that the banality of evil, and evil itself, is apparently gender binary.
Yes, indeed. Sisters are doing it for themselves…just not in the way it was assumed they’d be doing it, whatever “it” might be.
And despite all this, those incels still won’t be getting laid.