baserinstincts

The 50’s Are Back on The Bachelor

image via e online

There are many things wrong with this show before we even get to what happened last night. Chief among these are its perpetuation of an impossible fairy tale paradigm in relationships, its dramatization of what’s supposed to be a quest for true love, it’s focus on the shallower aspects of love, its seeming to take the issue of marriage so lightly, and its placing its couples in circumstances that aren’t reflective of real life.

I mean, I can go on and on here.

But I don’t judge or start a public outcry simply because the show happens to be one of my guilty pleasures. I view it as entertainment and not in any way indicative of the real world.

But last night’s show went somewhere that really pissed me off.

There are four girls left and the Bachelor, Jake has just finished visiting each of the girls’ hometowns and meeting with their families. The day of the rose ceremony comes around and one of the girls, Allie (admittedly my least favorite of the girls left) comes a’knocking on Jake’s door in tears. She sits down and tells him that she has a choice to make between staying there with him and going back to work.

Read: “I’m going to get fired if I stay here any longer.”

Now let me give a quick tutorial to those who aren’t familiar with the premise of the show.  The show picks a male or female each season who is supposedly looking for the love of his or her life. The show chooses from presumably thousands of contestants and picks around 25 men or women and places them all in a house and essentially the compete for the Bachelor or Bachelorette’s affections. At the end of each show the Bachelor or Bachelorette sends a person or persons home and at the end of the season there are two left standing. The Bachelor or Bachelorette then chooses between the two and gets engaged to that person.

I’ll wait for you to finish laughing.

Now at the time Allie drops this news, she’s left with three other girls, meaning she only has a 25 percent chance of ending up with Jake’s ring on her finger. She’s devastated saying she has to choose between the man she loves and the job she loves. She asks Jake to help her with the decision (read: “please tell me you’re gonna pick me”) and Jake says rather cautiously, “I can’t look at you and tell you for sure that I’m going to put a ring on your finger at the end of all this. But I also can’t tell you I’m not going to do that”

Noncommittal much?

I’m sure that helped a lot, Jake.

But in a way you can’t fault him because he has four sorta beautiful girls two steps from ripping each other’s throats out in order to be the last one standing, and as far as I can tell (read: as far as Jake’s acting has lead me to believe) he has roughly equal amounts of affection for all four. So of course he doesn’t want to reassure Allie.

Allie bawls and balws and when the rose ceremony comes around, she asks to speak to Jake in private and she bawls some more. Jake then tells her repeatedly that he doesn’t want her to go.

Hold the fuck up!

So this girl is supposed to give up her career (and let me just say here that in this economy the girl is beyond blessed to have ANY job much less one in her field and one that she enjoys) for a fucking maybe?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Jake should have stopped the show and told Allie that he was going to marry her. But the stand up thing would have been to tell her she should go home and go back to work.

For starters, do you think a man would ever let a woman come between him and his carrer? No matter how much he loved her?

Secondly, since when is it cool to let someone give up their life to be with you when you aren’t one hundred percent prepared to do the same? Suppose she stayed. And lost her job. And then Jake decided that what he really wants is to marry Vienna. Egg on your face doesn’t even begin to describe it. And he’d be ok with that because in the end, well, it was Allie who made the choice to stay.

Third, has Jake ever heard of a telephone? Email? Twitter? If he cares so much for this girl then letting her give up her career might not be the best way to show it. So what if she goes back home? If he misses her,  then he can call her. I doubt ABC will sue.

But what’s really got my goat is that the scenario once again reinforces the notion that women have to make a choice that men just aren’t forced to make in our society. We are constantly split between going out and making out way in the public domain and holding it down in the private domain.

And here it is again. Allie can either be a career woman or she can be a wife.

Have I suddenly landed in the 1950’s?

Would Jake give up flying planes for Allie, or for any one of them for that matter? Hell no! Would we expect him to? Hell no!

So why does Allie have to give up a part of herself for a man who may not even choose her in the end? For love? That special reality TV brand of love? Give me a break.

And I, for one, would not at all be surprised if woman who suddenly finds herself aimless in life ends up being decidedly less attractive to our little Bachelor.

In the end, Allie went home.

I was so glad. I think she did the right thing. She said to him “if you were mine it’d be a different story, the choice would be easy”

You got it all wrong girlfriend.

If he was yours, really yours, you shouldn’t have had to make a choice in the first place.

If I’m ever reincarnated as a man…

…someone please remind me not to hang out of the window of my car(at 3 in the morning no less), yell “Hey girl” at a woman passing by and expect her to swoon.

Bush Revolution

I don’t shave my bush anymore.

There was a time that, and certainly more for whichever guy I was with more so than for myself, I’d diligently shave every week before graduating to dreaded Brazilian waxes every month (incidentally, if you must wax, I recommend J’adore Day Spa in midtown, great work for less than half the price of J sisters).

The effect was nice at first. I marveled at the smoothness of it, the utter exposure making me feel innocent and dirty at the same time.

But I got over that shit real fast.

Ingrown hairs are neither cute nor fun to have and it seemed I was prone to them despite my best efforts to follow the salon’s instructions. I misted with azulene oil and exflolited everyday. But inevitably, my cooch went from pretty and smooth to looking like an adolescent smack dab in the middle of a bad acne breakout.

And that’s before the itching starts.

The horrible, intense itching that will have you very tempted to put your hand down your pants in public places without shame. The itching that makes you walk funny or duck behind objects that you hope will obstruct the view as you reach under your skirt.

So why is a bald pussy so glamorized?

I read somewhere that beauty is pain. Oh well, guess I’ll be an ugly duckling then because after maybe a year of this I asked myself why I was torturing myself this way, especially when most men really don’t care if you’re bald or not. Sure they’ll notice, and yeah they like it and are excited by it but I’ve never once had a man say to me “Oh you’re not shaved, well then I just can’t fuck you”.

And if any of you ladies have heard something so vile, you’re better off without him.
If he doesn’t want you for you, bush and all, then do you really want to give it up to him?

The answer for me is no.

Take my hairy pussy or leave it.

• Crazy Eights psp
  • Frequency on dvd

Bicentennial Man movie full

Smile!

I know I run the risk of sounding like an angry black woman here.

But this is something that’s bothered me for ages.

An incident this morning on the train (ah yes, again with the lovely MTA) kicked off the whole thing.

So it’s about 4ish. I’m sitting and waiting for my train to
come. A gentleman comes along after awhile and he sits next to me.

I don’t look up but I can see out of my peripheral that he looks normal
enough.

He says good morning.

I mutter a barely audible good morning in reply.

He turns his head, his whole body even, toward me and, clearly
catching an attitude, repeats in a much louder voice, “I SAID good morning.”

I then, instantly annoyed, turn my head and torso toward him, look at him
dead on and said in the best angry black woman voice I can muster at 4
something in the fucking morning, “I SAID good morning as well.”

He retorts, “OK,that’s more like it.”

What the fuck?!?!

I mean if he was trying to get laid he just lost any slim chance he had to begin with.

I’m sure many other females have had this experience.

You’re having a not-so-bright-and-shiny day.

And it shows.

All over your face.

You walk by some man, who seems to think your sole existence on earth is to
smile at him as you go by and he says to you, “Smile.”

Am I the only one who finds this intensely annoying?

If I felt like smiling, then I’d smile.

I smile quite a lot in fact and all who know me can attest that I am generally a jovial sort of chick.

But I have my days, as anyone else does.

Give me that.

If I want to walk around with a screw face on well then that’s damn well my prerogative isn’t it?

If I don’t particularly want to engage in conversation with a complete stranger on the New York City subway at 4 in the morning, well you can understand that can’t you?

The thing that makes me bristle the most about this is that a man would never, ever say “Smile” to another man.

Another man can be angry, and men (and women) will just leave him be.

But I’m a woman, and so I must smile.

Some of y’all take this Adam’s rib business a bit too literally.

Woman is not an “extension of the man”. She’s an individual in her own right.

Meaning, if I don’t know you, especially if I don’t know you, I don’t owe you shit.

Not even a fucking smile.