intensity

Becky: Men don’t want intense women.

Andrew: Yes, we do.

Becky: You think you do, but you don’t.

You know when you have those “A-ha!” moments, when somebody says exactly what you’re thinking?  I had one of those moments last night, when the above lines of dialogue were spoken during The Wilma Theater’s production of Becky Shaw, my new favorite play by my new favorite playwright, Gina Gionfriddo.  (Becky Shaw closes this Sunday, but if you are in the Philadelphia area and are not blocked in your house by 8 feet of snow, go see it.  Seriously.)

But back to my “A-ha!” moment.  In that scene, Becky, a 35-year-old emotionally fragile secretary, is confiding the secrets of her traumatic past to her friend and co-worker Andrew, who is trying his best to convince Becky that she’s not as damaged as she thinks, and if she is, well, that’s ok.  Like many women (this blogger included), Becky sees her intensity as a detriment in her quest to find love – that no matter what men say, if she was just a little less neurotic, a little less aggressive, a little easier, finding a man to love her would be that much easier, too.

Of course, what really rang true to me is Becky’s acknowledgment of the contradiction in men’s words and actions.  Swap out “intense” for any number of adjectives – “strong,” “intelligent,” “not crazy,” – and you have a list of attributes men always say they look for in a partner.  And maybe that’s what they think they want, but when the time comes to choose, men have an uncanny habit of going with the needy, simple, make-up eating girl.  I know this, men know this, Gina Gionfriddo knows this and she put it in her play, and that’s why she’s the shit.

However, if you want to be really analytical, and fair and objective, which I always strive to be, the lines can be interpreted as Becky condescending herself, and all intense women – basically saying, “You think you want an intense woman, but you don’t because we’re not worth having.”  This interpretation would fit in with Becky’s distorted self-image and low self-esteem, but given the way the line was delivered, causing the audience to laugh instead of pitying Becky, I’m going to stick with my argument that my first interpretation is accurate.  And that is a good feeling, to know that someone else feels the way I do – in a world where women are constantly told they don’t know what they want, men can have motives just as confused (and confusing) as they say we are.

In an unrelated but completely amusing note, audience members at the annual Wing Bowl at the Wachovia Center gave Jersey Shore guidette Snooki a proper Philadelphia welcome this morning, to which she gave a proper Jersey response.  Normally my tree-hugging hippie self would make an impassioned plea of “Why can’t we all just get along?” but given my unabashed loathing of Snooki and all girls like her, all I can say is, “Way to go, Philly!”

and another thing…

While I don’t want to get sucked into a downward spiral of discussing nothing but Jersey Shore, there is one other comment I have to make, which I realize I didn’t include in my previous post.

So the episode of Jersey Shore that I happened to catch last weekend was the now-infamous  “Nicole a.k.a. ‘Snooki’ gets clocked by a drunk meathead for being an obnoxious whore” episode, right?  Now, for those of you who haven’t seen the episode (spoiler alert) you don’t actually see the punch being thrown.  You see everything leading up to the altercation, and the events immediately following, but for the 10 or so seconds it takes for the meathead’s fist to come in contact with Snooki’s leather-hide tanned face, the screen goes black, with only the sound playing.  Apparently the suits at MTV, under the pressure of public outcry preceding the airing of the episode, decided that showing the actual punch would condone and promote violence against women.  Or Guido whores.  Or something.  I don’t know.  All I know is that it’s a crock of shit.

If that would have been a fight between two men, no one would have batted an eye. If it was a fight between two women, the MTV execs would have creamed themselves from excitement at the prospect of an on-air catfight, and it would have been played ad nauseum.  But a girl getting punched by a guy – no, no, no, our viewers are far too delicate for that, we’d better black it out and hope no one realizes what is happening.

I am not saying it’s ok for a man to hit a woman.  Nor is it ok for a man to hit a man, or a woman to hit a woman.  Violence is violence, and it is wrong, regardless of who is perpetrating it, and who is being victimized by it, which is why MTV would have taken a bigger stand by airing all the gritty details, to show what extremely negative consequences bad behavior and bad decisions can have.  Blacking it out only continues to make the subject taboo.  If the American viewing public can handle the rest of the atrocious behavior on that show, then they sure as hell better be able to stomach the sight of Snooki getting a right hook to the jaw.  After all, if you’re going to take the time to watch something, shouldn’t it open your eyes?

reaching new depths of shallowness

So, I know the Internets have been blowing up lately with comments and commentary regarding MTV’s latest reality shitshow, Jersey Shore, and it was for that very reason that I was going to keep my hat out of the ring, not wanting to dignify what essentially amounts to The Real World: New Jersey with even a millisecond of my precious brainpower.  I was going to rise above, keep my mouth shut, and treat the show the way its castmembers treat self-respect – like there is no such thing.  I was doing a pretty good job until Saturday morning, when, in a post-New Year’s Day food-and-drink coma, I stumbled upon an episode.  And not just any episode, mind you, but the now-infamous  “Nicole a.k.a. ‘Snooki’ gets clocked by a drunk meathead for being an obnoxious whore” episode.  Once I gathered up what remained of my integrity and staunched the bleeding from my eyes, all I could do was sit there and say, “Wow.”

There are a lot of faults I can point out about this hodgepodge of stereotypes (how they have three brain cells and 3,000 STDS among the eight of them, how they manage to reinforce every negative stereotype about Italian-Americans and humanity simultaneously with every breath they inhale, how only one of them is actually from New Jersey), but those have all been enumerated at great length elsewhere in the blogosphere, I’m sure.  Instead, what really made me want to break out my soapbox and scream bloody murder was the reaction the male castmembers had to the clock-cleaning incident.  They were furious, they were outraged, they were “heated” (their words, not mine).  They vowed revenge and pontificated about how a man does not hit a woman, does not disrespect a woman like that.  Which would be all well and good and make perfect sense, if these sentiments were not coming from the same guys who had spent the previous 55 minutes of the episode relentlessly disrespecting women in their endless quest for pussy.  Two of the castmembers even went so far as to pick up two girls from a bar, ditch them on the walk home for two seemingly “cooler” girls in a convertible, then decide to trade in the Convertible Girls for the two original also-rans after the Convertible Girls did not drop trou quickly enough, all the while smack-talking one or other of the girls for some offense, mainly related to not sucking one or both of their penises.  But hey, that’s all part of the game.  Hitting a woman, though, now that’s unforgivable.

What really bothers – and frightens -  me, is that these…specimans (I can’t bring myself to call them people) are so shallow, the lack of distinction between these two behaviors is completely lost on them.  I truly believe that even if I were to locate these specimans, sit them down, and explain to them why giving a girl 10 minutes to give you head, or you give her the boot, is equally as disrespectful as popping her in the nose, they would not get it.  This sort of ass-grabbing, pussy-chasing behavior is engrained in them as proof of their masculinity, and with good reason.  After all, the girls on Jersey Shore – black-eyed Snooki included – do nothing to disabuse the men of the notion that women are there simply to be divided and conquered.  Not that I’m saying that’s any reason to punch a woman, but hey, we can at least hope she got some sense knocked into her.

I doubt it, though.