The Rawness

Unbeatable at spitting slang.

[Last week I promised a post that would go up on Monday and be controversial. As I started writing it, it kept getting longer and longer and was taking too much time to complete. So I decided to break it up instead, it will probably end up being three parts in total. Here's part 1:]

Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

I was about to find out.

Click Here For Part 2

I’ve been going through my old posts, looking for ideas for new ones and theories to expand on, and I’ve come to a realization.

I can’t front. My shit is brilliant. I am the shit.

That’s all.

P.S. I predict next Monday’s post is going to cause a lot of controversy. I encourage you to weigh in on it when it goes up.

Sometime in 2010 I plan to do a “Game for Women” month. But in the meantime this mini-linkblogging post should whet your appetites.

The accompanying article.

Also, an article from the Daily Mail in the UK. “The ego epidemic: How more and more of us women have an inflated sense of our own fabulousness.” Same dilemma across the pond.

A related article from the Atlantic, “In Search of Mr. Right.”

UPDATE: E-Sizz in the comments said:

Watch a little of the video with the sound off. She’s bug eyed manic. Whatever she’s saying she doesn’t strike me as a balanced person. She’s fanatical about what she’s saying, like Manson. From what I’ve read, her previous book was about her anorexia. I can totally believe it. This is a narcicistic, driven woman.

I note she smiles alot. Fake I assume. Her book/article seems pretty demanding and negative. She pretends to be affable and easy. Lots of dissonance there.

Is her book a long tirade to herself? A black hole of self absorbsion about why she shouldn’t be so self absorbed?

Interesting study for the professionals.

As far as her looking for a partner, the main quality that guy’s going to have is patience, or a long honed ability to just ignore what the people around him are screeching about.

Based on this article and this article, E-Sizz may indeed be right.

UPDATE 2: Americo added this link in the comments that I think is a great, great analysis of Gottlieb.

A common complaint from women today is how society, primarily through the media, promotes all these unrealistic expectations of women. Thanks to celebrity plastic surgery and airbrushing and photoshop in magazines and posters, a lot of men have delusions about what constitutes the average female body shape and typical cellulite levels. Plus feminists for the past few decades have been promoting this idea of the superwoman who can “have it all,” from the high powered career to the Prince Charming husband to the 3 kids to the Martha Stewart homemaking proficiency, all without missing a beat.  For these reasons, I agree with these female complaints to a degree, but they nonetheless become tiresome to me.  I’ll explain why.

One of the big problems I’ve complained about in this blog for a while is how much I hate the modern images of men we receive in the media, of the slacker slobs that often pass for protaganists in Apatow movies or the death of credible action heroes in today’s cinema. In the latter case, as I’ve pointed out in the past, how many (1) American (2) white men (3) under 35 outside of Channing Tatum can pass as credible action heroes? It’s for this reason I believe so many action heroes of yesteryear have been able to make credible comebacks: because Hollywood has yet to find any worthy successors. Despite being past their prime, we’ve seen recent successful action comebacks for Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 3), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa and John Rambo), Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls) and Bruce Willis (Live Free or Die Hard). Notice in these movies there was usually a man from the next generation as a sidekick who was either unconvincingly (I can’t stress that word enough) being groomed as the next action hero (like Shia LeBeouf in Indy) or blatantly being shown as not being cut out of the same rugged cloth as the tough guy cloth as the older mentor (Rocky’s son in Rocky Balboa, Hipster Mac Commercial Douche in Live Free or Die Hard). So it seemed like either way, the modern generation of 18-35 year olds was getting reminded of its inadequacies. We either had movies where we were the protaganists and reveling in our underachieving slacker slob status, or we had action movies with the male archetypes of yesteryear reminding us of our inadequacies, either explicitly by outright stating it or implicitly just by a comparison of respective actions shown on the screen. Also, look at a trailer for what’s being touted as the hottest coming action movie of 2010 and see what you notice:

I think a big reason people long for these old school types of movies is because they’ve long become bored with how politically correct and lowest common denominator movies have become.  Every non-kid movie is targeted to immature 18-34 year old beta males with ADD or to narcissistic, empowered feminist Sex and the City fans.  I myself have made a conscious effort in recent years to watch old movies, either through cable programming on AMC, Turner Classics and Fox Movie Channel or through DVDs, and it’s been a mostly rewarding experience, but not totally.  Because as a result of immersing myself in this old entertainment, I’ve realized a different set of problems arising from the ones I had when watching modern entertainment; problems that made me identify with yet at the same time have less sympathy for the “unrealistic standards for females” debate I mentioned earlier.

One weekend I was having a movie watching marathon. I watched some westerns like High Noon with Gary Cooper, My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda and Pale Rider with Clint Eastwood along with other classic movies. These were wonderful, inspiring movies but I noticed at the end of the day that I was feeling a little down and inadequate and felt existential angst building.

It took me a while but eventually I made the connection between my mood and the movies I watched earlier. I was feeling inadequate because I was doubting whether I was capable of doing the great acts of heroism and bravery these men onscreen were making look as natural as breathing. There were scenes where guys could easily have escaped to safety and taken the easy way out, but they decide to stick around and face down four guys singlehandedly in a gunfight. Or routinely walk into the heart of danger, outnumbers and outgunned, and win the encounter without even doing any violence, solely through masculine presence and badass intimidation. Walking through rooms of cutthroats and hired killers, right up to the boss of the crew, to tell him not to threaten women and children anymore or he’d have to answer to the hero. And no one raises a finger against him in the whole room, because he’s just that badass. Or on the flipside the guy who chooses practical self-preservation over commiting a suicide mission to preserve his honor and ends up getting shamed by his woman or by children into stepping up and doing the right thing, despite how impractical and suicidal it is. There were numerous times during these movies I found myself asking “Would I do that? Could I do that?” It’s hard to know exactly what you’d do in a crisis until you’re actually in it. You’d always like to believe the best about yourself, but you never actually know how you’ll perform until the moment of truth.

Or how about the suave guy who has a snappy retort for every verbal challenge  thrown at him by a male rival or a female target who is testing him and resisting his wooing?  Who never lets himself get flustered by anything?  Who bursts into the boardroom and delivers the crunchtime presentation that saves the company and gets him the promotion?  The guy who beats all the enemies, solves all the crises and always gets the girl in the end?

Basically, when did we get this idea that women have a monopoly on receiving impossible standards to meet from the media and society?  Men have been dealing with unrealistic standards and expectations from society and the media for as long as media and society have existed!  A lot of what women complain about with body image and superwoman pressures from media and society is not that different than the pressures men get in regards to being both hypermasculine, suave, yet also sensitive to women’s needs. In some ways it’s even worse because while we’ve reached a point where thanks to public sympathy the term “real women” now means America Ferrera or average, slightly chunky women in a Dove ad, while on the flip side the term “real men” still conjurs the image of the hypermasculine, perfect ideal from these old movies, even among people who consider themselves progressive, modern and liberal. And it’s also worse for men in that living up to that male ideal is much more likely to lead to bodily harm and death than what a woman faces living up to the feminine ideal.  I realize now that a lot of this beta male media glorification is probably for men a backlash to media pressure in the same way this “real woman” let’s-let-ourselves-get-fat-without-guilt movement is for women.

I’m conflicted about all this.  On one hand, I agree with the idea that delusionally unrealistic standards do need to be exposed.  For example it’s ridiculous when both men and women think a woman with just a little cellulite, so little cellulite that she still has less cellulite than 3/4 of the adult female population, is bashed for being fat because the average guy has no idea how common cellulite actually is on women thanks to rampant photoshopping of models and celebrities.  But likewise when single decent men feel inadequate if they aren’t perfection squared (have to be macho like Eastwood, stoic and unemotional like Robert Mitchum, suave like Cary Grant, yet sensitive and big-hearted like Jimmy Stewart, all with an Ivy League degree and six figure salary before 30), someone has to be the voice of reason in that case too.  So far, so good, right?

Where I draw the line though is that there seems to be a growing movement among both genders to respond to delusional standards by going too far to the the opposite extremes and celebrating mediocrity and averageness.  We keep downgrading expectations and lowering the standards for average and above average to the point where people are actually suffering from too much self esteem for no good reason.  And at the same time, people’s standards for people of the opposite sex remain higher than ever.  They’re only lowering expectations for themselves.  So now you have chunky or fat chicks or underemployed airheads who can’t cook or clean and only know how to spend money expecting to land Prince Charming.  And you have videogame playing, Maxim reading, flabby manchildren expecting to land Katherine Heigl caliber chicks like Seth Rogen did in Knocked Up.  Unwarranted narcissism along with entitlement are out of control.

My take on it is, as bad as delusionally high levels of role models can be for one’s self esteem, the overly relatable and pitifully average role model is immeasurably worse.  At the end of the day, even if you scale them back some from dangerously delusional levels, our role models still need to be at a healthy level of unattainability in order to keep us aspirational.  We should only accept breaking even after trying and failing to win the big jackpot.  We shouldn’t set out aiming to break even as our ultimate goal from the very beginning.  If you’re a young girl, hit the gym and try to look like a supermodel not America Ferrera.  Try to be Martha Stewart.  If you’re a young guy, work on your game and aim to be as smooth as James Bond; don’t aim to be adorably nerdy like Michael Cera.  If you don’t succeed in the long run, so be it.  Sometimes things don’t work out.  It’s not the end of the world, don’t beat yourself up, don’t kill yourself over it.  As you get older and wiser, scale back your goals and your expectations accordingly.