CSotD: Patterns, not incidents
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It's all laid out in today's Candorville.
I started to say that I think a lot of guys are going through this mental inventory, but, in light of that last panel, let me switch it to "I hope a lot of guys are going through this mental inventory."
We all ought to be.
We should be reassessing our own actions, because we're being asked to assess the actions of others, and we can't do that without some frank perspective.
And, first of all, I would like to thank all the young women who chose the chair, because it's that many fewer encounters that I need to ponder.
My apartment had a chair and a couch, and, when we'd come back to the apartment, I would hang up coats while she made herself comfortable. If that meant she sat in the chair, it was a pretty clear message of where we were at, and that was fine. It would have been unspeakably uncool to sit on the couch begging "Why don't you come over here?"
If she sat on the couch, however, things were less clear, because it suggested, but did not declare, some interest in physical contact. And even if a little smooching was welcome, it didn't mean anything more than that.
So there was less clarity, and let me put that in a way that will piss off some people: "No" means "no," agreed, but "tee hee" doesn't mean a goddam thing.
More specifically, saying "Let's slow down," buttoning your shirt and moving to the chair was cool and clear and, as said, I wasn't a whiner or beggar.
But neither was I a mind reader.
Men don't often pick up on nuance, and, the less experience they have, the more clueless they seem to be.
Not evil. Not manipulative. Certainly not cunning. Just utterly devoid of clues.
Which reminds me of a funny story, or, at least, of something relevant to the comic strip.
There was a self-published book advertised in the classified sections of magazines called "How To Pick Up Girls," and while it was the subject of a lot of jokes, the guy must have been selling them because his ads were everywhere.
So I wrote a piece for the college paper called "How To Score With A Saint Mary's Girl," a parody which incorporated all the complaints and snickering I had heard from female friends.
It was not subtle. Nor was it particularly good. It was your basic sledge-hammer collegiate humor.
That is, however, the point, as you will see. Here's one excerpt:
And then this …
Nothing brilliant, but a few women told me it gave them a chuckle and I gather it got passed around a bit.
Then, about two weeks after it ran, a female friend spotted me on the quad and began laughing so hard she could barely tell me why.
She had been on a hopelessly miserable blind date with a guy who kept pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolding it, reading it and shoving it back.
Finally, she demanded a look at it. Yes, that's what it was.
There is no level of absurdity you can satirize that some fool will not take seriously, no level of idiocy you can invent that does not exist in real life. Look how many times you've seen someone repost an Andy Borowitz piece on Facebook, thinking it's genuine.
Given the number of dweebish over-achievers on our campus, her one-time date is probably an executive somewhere and, if so, I hope he either smartened up or that some of his employees are coming forward because — whether they are evil or just clueless — guys like that need to be culled from the herd.
Now, let's go back to Candorville and all those worried guys.
There were almost certainly some women I knew in my youth who, if I ran into one of them today, might say, "You know, you were a real jerk." Or she'd at least be thinking it.
We all have bad, regrettable moments.
But what I'm finding is that, when there is one of those seemingly inconsequential "he touched my butt" stories in the news about a prominent person, it doesn't take much Googling to find the rest of the iceberg.
Once or twice could be a mistake, but honest people learn from their mistakes.
We're not talking incidents, then. We're talking patterns.
Don't sweat the incidents. Sweat the patterns.
My guess is that the guys with patterns aren't the ones with the sense to be worried.
On a completely different toxicity issue
Here's an interesting graphic essay whose title explains it: "An Equal Opportunity Lie': How Housing Discrimination Led to the Flint Water Crisis."
I've read enough about Flint that, first of all, I was a little burned out on it, and, second, I was tired of hearing it blamed on racism.
However, there's good journalism and research behind this take and they make their point convincingly. It's well worth reading because it shows not just a crisis, but the patterns of unfairness — including racism — that led to that crisis.
It's not just the water, though it would be good to fix the water problem.
But that would only be a patch, not a repair, and we can't expect Flint to fix it, or, perhaps, even Michigan.
Nor is Flint the only place that needs fixing.
And this
Steve Breen asks the question graphically, while, in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson goes into depth, asking "Is Bitcoin the Most Obvious Bubble Ever?"
I almost went off the road when I heard that bitcoins were going to be traded on the commodities market, and I particularly like Thompson's piece because he compares them to Beanie Babies, which have value because people claim they have value.
And he grants that much in our world, including gold, is that way. But he outlines how this is different.
It's a little wonkish, but, then, the entire concept is a little wonkish and I think relies on people only thinking they understand how it works.
So it's a bit like sex then, innit?
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