Expansion (and Deflation)

I need to expand my comment on Pillow's "...Broad" post below into a proper post of my own. Because I just got sucked into reviewing several years worth of Vice Magazine (which I haven't read since 2005) "Do's and Don'ts," first looking at our old friend and then on and on and on. And though there are a few quirky old drunks and bums featured, like our Founding Father smelly aunt down there, most of the mugs are young girls and guys. A girl is a "Do" if she makes Vice's "pants tighter" or causes them to "whack off" or "think of getting married," a "Don't" if she dresses poorly or looks "diseased." A guy is a "Do" if the Vice fellas admire his estilo or otherwise find him relatable, a "Don't" if he dresses poorly or generally seems "normal" and "douchey."

The prose is pithy and fun-as-ever, and their opinions not always so predictable as one might imagine, and I don't really mind using sartorial choices as a major criteria for hotness, because clothes tell you a lot about a brother/sister. But I have new information since 2005—I've dated a couple of these Vice employee types, these blue-collar, over-the-hill skater, record collector, mannered, dinge-aesthetes (one of them was a featured "Do" back in '04). And it didn't go so well.

These hyper-specific, but all too common boyfriend-characters were (as the "Do and Don'ts" authors self-proclaim constantly) nerds in high school (but the kind that took a lot of acid in Jr. High...?). I know that there are sweet dudes who avoid this particular noose, but most high school nerds turn out to be whopping misogynists. Obviously, those who were jocks can also wear that mantle, but often, they do so openly. Nerd-turned-'hipster'-misogynists tend to hide their woman-hatred, born of painful memories of rejection and humiliation at the hands of pretty girls (I recall a drunken fight with an ex that began with him saying that he "would have hated me in high school."), beneath a frosting of liberality and "alternativeness."

These guys are obsessed with beautiful women in the shallowest way, as possible fixes for their public validation addiction, their crippling insecurity. The most dangerous of the species seek to belittle and punish these much-desired femmes once they've drawn them in with adoration and half-serious marriage proposals and mixed CD's. When you've actually loved and co-habitated with a textbook case, a deep suspicion of all men (especially the ones who ride bikes and wear beards and horn-rimmed glasses) sets in.

Today, in 2009, I still found Vice "Do's and Don'ts" amusing and absorbing, but my absorption was inflected with dreary recollections of waking up next to a guy who was jealous of me (inevitably these unions are rife with class issues), a guy who would essentially never stop hating the part of me that he imagined hated him.