Are women basically children?
And other questions feminists make us ask
Dear H,
Jack Nicholson was once asked, playing Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets, how his character was able to write women so well. I think of a man, he responded. And I take away reason and accountability.
I don't agree with him, here — but I think many women do; and we know they do because only three of the accusations against Russell Brand are serious. The rest are almost all hilarious.
According to The Daily Mail, one accusation, from some model he had a brief fling with, was that although he always treated her well (her words), he tried to lay his way through an entire modeling list. She also added (in a newspaper, I remind you) that his hair smelled bad. She also mentioned that “he’s definitely not the one that got away.” Hell hath no fury, they say.
Another woman said she brought her two teenage daughters around Brand (only one of legal age), and he said he wanted to bang them. Andrea Simmons says he called her “a sex bomb” (oh no!) and that he “wanted to go under the desk” while she was reporting. Another woman, who has never heard of walking out a door, said Brand “wouldn’t take no for an answer.” And probably most notoriously, bosses at the BBC and Channel 4 came under fire for allegations that Brand was getting women’s numbers in the audience, having them come into his room alone, and giving them a good dose of horndog. For these things he was called a “predator.”
“It was like we were taking lambs to the slaughter,” said one production worker there, implying women are as dumb as sheep. He said he’d get their numbers to Brand. He said the studio kept getting calls from women the day after. He said the sheep were upset Brand was a pig. The production worker kept passing the numbers on, though, probably because he assumed women were in charge of their own lives. A horrible mistake, which everybody involved apparently regrets.
But let’s say women are intelligent and responsible like men. If that was the case, we’d assume they’d know several things a priori. Chief among these are:
Unless you’re in Egypt, you're not going to get raped in public.
Going alone into a stranger’s room makes you vulnerable.
There’s no reason for any celebrity to contact you, a total stranger of the opposite sex, for any reasons other than sexual attraction.
Sexual attraction implies somebody wants to have sex with you.
You don’t have any reason, other than sexual attraction, to go alone into any random man’s bedroom.
You don’t have to give any random man your real phone number.
There are different approaches to dealing with irresponsible boobs who don’t know these things, though. In Saudi Arabia they’ve taken this to the logical conclusion: first they don’t let anybody drink at all. Then they cover the women up, take away the car keys, and let the men beat them. Such parenting is what you have to do when “a predator,” to a horde of fully-grown women, is a scrawny, silly, long-haired dandy who asks for her phone number and asks her into his room nicely. It’s a wonder, with our expectations so low, that anybody lets them out after dark.
But this leads us to ask, what does it look like when a woman isn’t an idiot?
Kristen Bell has a story about working with Russell on the set of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a film everyone forgot. Going on record for The Daily Mail, she said he tried to make a move on her. She told him she’d “knock his nuts off.” She didn’t go anywhere alone with him and he didn’t try to pull anything on her. She later said she loved working with him, and that she’d (quote) “shout it from the rooftops.”
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect picture of a man who isn’t a rapist getting along fine with a woman who isn’t a retard.
Yours,
-J
P.S. I’m not condoning Russell Brand’s behavior here at all. I’m making fun of the women who deserved it. The three most serious accusations, which were not mentioned here, and involved him committing acts after a woman claimed to say no, get off me, or was underage, can be dealt with in a court of law — not on this page.
Ideally, Brand shouldn’t have said the things he said. He shouldn’t have done the things he did. I agree with women he’s been a pig and that a man ought to treat a lady with respect. But here’s the catch. Not every woman is a lady. And if you ask her to act like one, a lot of horrible people will tar and feather you for it.
What exactly is a lady, then? A lady is a woman with dignity and manners and standards — two of which you can’t have if you throw away chastity. And most modern women have been telling us they don't care about it. They prize consent, of course; but the only way you can give consent is if somebody asks. And if your consent matters but your chastity doesn’t, then guess who’s going to start asking.
If women think their chastity doesn’t matter, why should Brand? A modern woman says it doesn’t matter who I’ve slept with before I married you. Okay, well then it must not matter if I try to sleep with you before you’re married. And it must not matter if Russell Brand sleeps with a thousand of you.
A modern woman wants to be attractive, but she can't handle the idea of most men being attracted. They say their chastity doesn’t matter, in theory, in public, and then get upset when a man tries to take it from them gently. She demands to be free of honor, and is genuinely surprised when a man treats her dishonorably.
*I’ve already dealt at length with the fact that human beings, who have sex whether anybody’s fertile or not, are almost the horniest beings in the animal kingdom. But I remind you that, also in our own way, our species finds the overwhelming majority of our species sexually disgusting. Thus what we exceeded on one end we cut back on the other.
But in a well-populated town of even 10,000, this last refuge of chastity — the sheer poverty of selection — is crashed through effectively and almost entirely; and the chance you could run into two or three possible new lovers an hour, maybe even during a mid-day stroll through (dare I say it) Walmart, is high: maybe high enough to destroy our chances at peace and quiet and stability forever. It’s not uncommon, working with the public, to hear a particularly young and healthy coworker say he’s fallen in love three, four, maybe five times that day — and only halfway through his shift.
Thus sociologists like to speak of the healthy “free-love” between savages. But we don’t live in the jungle anymore, and there are really only two perspectives in the so-called civilized world. The first is that a man shuts himself off to this smorgasbord of sexual gluttony — that he selects a single woman to exhaust his passions on; and the rest of society, and maybe even the laws, ruin him if he goes beyond her. This is the Christian path of chastity.
The other way is to give free vent to the unrelenting tide of amorous passions, until sex itself is like eating snacks, and the prospect of shutting off the flow of trysts is akin to going to prison, or on a hunger strike, or hanging oneself in the closet. This is the world of Tinder and club-humping, baby-mamas and deadbeat dads, mounting bills and dead ends, feral children, AIDS and herpes, and looking back your whole pathetic life on “the glory days of high school.” It is, in short, the way of the ghetto. It’s the pathway Russell Brand picked, and the path women picked who went into his room alone with him.
Thus our approach to sex isn’t just an approach to sex. It’s an approach to stability or poverty, to self-control or addiction, to ascendance or a crash-and-burn, to regret or to hope, to health or disease —to great safety or great risk — to a stable love you wake up to every morning, or a relentless emptiness you try and chase away. Maybe in the case of Russell Brand, an approach to jail. And you pick which one you want.
The feminists and Tinder say you can have love on the side. But like religion, the way you love isn’t a side-issue. They never told us that the way we love when we're young can leave us sidelined. And it's only by the grace of God many of us fools weren’t.