Boys are gross

Ok so I know that the kiss of death for blogs is infrequent postings... so, sorry loyal followers. Maybe Jacqui has stories of her exciting dating life in NYC she can regale us with? Also, it's hard to post consistent stories of your dating life that are funny, yet tinged with bitterness when you are getting laid... Also, it's summer. You know how it is.

First, an update: So I Facebook friended that guy I was in love with last year who fled my apartment. He accepted my request and now I can cyber stalk him whenever I want. However, reminding him of my existence did not cause him to fall madly in love with me and come crawling back. Weird. Not at all what I expected...

On to the real post: This is actually more of a rant and I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this phenomenon and offer theories on why it happens. It can be both a red flag and a deal breaker. I call it "Boys are disgusting and they have the squalorific living conditions to prove it."

So, I dated this guy once who was really gross.* The first clue was the first time I went over to his apartment and it was in a state of disarray. But I figured since he was in the process of moving, I would cut him some slack. The second clue was when I told a work friend who I was dating, and before she could censor herself, she involuntarily gasped and blurted out, "He's a slob!" The third clue was when I went to his house and the bathroom smelled like a port-a-potty. The fourth (and what should have been final) clue was the first night I stayed over at his house, his bed was dirty. Like sandy. Like there was beach sand in his bed. Like someone dumped a shoe full of beach sand in his bed. Truth. (I mean, if you know that a girl you are dating is likely to stay the night for the first time, and you are presumably going to be having sex in your bed, which you must be aware is full of sand since you sleep in it, and I think this would be a situation you could spot coming from at least a couple of hours away since you were probably the one who did the inviting her over, CHANGE YOUR FUCKING SHEETS in preparation for your night together.) Also, there was mold in his shower. Oh, and he had mice.**

So he moved into his boss's house because his boss was taking his whole family to Alaska for the winter and wanted someone to house sit. After a few months, this place was so trashed, it would have been unrecognizable to the boss. It's like a college frat house. The floors are sticky and there are flies and an unpleasant smell emanating from the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. There are glasses scattered about, half-full of an unidentifiable liquid. This is how you treat a place that's not even yours? And this wasn't a house full of boys living there. There was just one.

I figure if we are going to be hanging out at his house, (he did have a TV, after all) I'm going to need to give it a good once-over so I don't have to feel the need to shower immediately after I leave the place. So I go home and gather up all my cleaning supplies. Then I go to the drug store and buy one of those masks that people use for painting or working with toxic chemicals. Not kidding.

So I get to his house all ready to get down to business and clean the shit out of that place. I ask him where the vacuum is. He says he doesn't know. I'm sorry, what? He had been living there for three months at this point. And he had never seen the need to vacuum? And showing him where it was kept was apparently deemed unimportant in the instructions/grand tour from the homeowners.

Whatever. I move on to the bathroom. After scrubbing for 30 minutes, that bathroom is fucking spotless. I come out, and the boyfriend says, "Hey, did you notice the bathroom kinda smelled like urine?" I'm sorry, what? All this time I had assumed that he had some kind of nasal medical condition that prevented him from noticing that his bathroom smelled like urine, because why would a grown-up knowingly let his bathroom go on smelling like urine if they were aware of it, especially if their own inaccurate aim was probably the cause of said urine smell?

This was simply too much for me. It hurt my brain. I left. But I also left behind the cleaning supplies, as a gesture of goodwill.

So, with the guy I am dating now, I am having flashbacks to that first dirty boyfriend. He's 33 years old and doesn't own a vacuum. And half of his apartment is carpet so it's not like he can sweep. And he's lived there for a year and a half. He says he borrows one when he needs to vacuum, but I can pretty much guarantee that floor has not seen a vacuum in 18 months. Also, (boys take note! write this down!) when your toilet and sink start getting that bright pinkish, orangish mold around the edges, (you know what I'm talking about) it's time to bust out the fucking Soft Scrub.

*Let me just say that I have pretty low standards when it comes to housekeeping. There are often dog fur tumble weeds rolling around the hallways before I will pick up a vacuum. Former roommates can attest to my disregard for neatness. Sometimes my bedroom floor is not visible because of all the clothes in various stages of dirty on the floor. About a week after I moved in with the only boyfriend I have ever lived with, we had dinner with my parents. My dad turned to my boyfriend and said, "So, how do you like living with a slob?" The point is: My standards are so low that to not be able to meet them puts you on a whole 'nother level of disgusting.

**In his defense, everyone had mice. It was a really bad (or good?) year for mice in the ADKs.

I got mansplained

Ok so I signed up for online dating. And by I signed up, I mean that drunk me let sober me be talked into it by one of my friends. But I'm on there nonetheless, proclaiming for the world wide web that I am single and ready to mingle. I had second thoughts when the first person to message me was a 35-year-old divorced Catholic with two kids, a place in suburbia and tons of shirtless photos of his tattooed chest. If this is the kind of person who thinks I would date them, Match.com had best review the way it calculates its compatibility algorithms...

One of the guys who messaged me soon after seemed cool enough. We had things in common, he looked really cute in his pics and he was a doctor. I do not see dollar signs when a guy is a doctor, I just figured it meant he was really smart and probably a good person. But I began to get red flags from this guy almost immediately. Douchey red flags.

He asked if I wanted to meet up so I gave him my number so he could call me expressly for that purpose. Instead, he begins texting me really stupid, inane, boring small talk while I'm busy at work. How's your day? Whatcha doing? I'm in Chicago, etc. (Here's the thing: If I have never met you, it's safe to say I do not care what you are up to and do not want to expend the time and brain power on coming up with funny/cute/coy responses to your texts while I'm on deadline. When we've met in real life and I see if you are indeed as hot as your pics suggest, then maybe I will engage in witty repartee. But not before.) I responded to his texts, but curtly.

Three days and 20 texts later, he finally decides on a place and time to meet up. I say, ok, great, see you tomorrow night. The next day he texts me to make sure we are still on. Uh... yeah. We just agreed on this 12 hours ago, remember? Then half an hour before we are supposed to meet he texts and says for me text him when I get to the place so we can walk in together. Hmm... I thought it was understood that when meeting someone, anyone, even friends, the first person to get there generally goes into the establishment, gets a drink or a table or whatever and waits for the other person. But I play along and text him when I get there, then I stand around awkwardly outside a trendy, hip bar while he keeps me waiting for 10 minutes. His douchbaggery thus far has sufficiently turned me off to the point that I no longer even want to meet him, but I silence the voice in my head that is screaming at me to run away while I still can.

Things went downhill from there. Five minutes in I knew I had made a mistake. The "date" consisted of me getting mansplained. For one hour. All men mansplain at one time or another and all women have been mansplained. Boyfriends do it, dads do it, strangers do it. Here's what it looks like: the man stands up taller and puffs out his chest so he can literally talk down to you, his body language suggests he knows waaaay more about whatever topic you are discussing than you do. He's an expert in fact. He sticks his chin in the air. Sometimes he closes his eyes while speaking, dismissing your thoughts and opinions while seething with condescension, all in a tone of voice that says, sit down, silly little girl, let me handle this, you don't want to hurt yourself by thinking complicated thoughts. When guys try to manage your expectations, it's a form of mansplaining.

He lectured to me, talked at me, talked over me, telling me how the world works. For one solid hour.

Here were his major points: Boulder is full of communists who hate dogs, doctors and journalists are a lot alike because they are both dying professions, (couldn't really make the leap on that one) the universal health care bill is bad because (sick) people will be getting something for free, because people are dumb and don't know any better they will go to physicians assistants and nurse practitioners instead of doctors, the city is not friendly to businesses and sets business owners up for failure, he lived in boston, hated it, he lived in the carribean, hated it, he doesn't have all the numbers on the economics of it, but he's SURE composting is bad, people who don't go to college deserve to make $15 an hour (this part was really funny to me, because I would sell my soul for $15 an hour. And although a few of those years were a little fuzzy due to all the 40s we drank, I'm pretty sure I actually went to, and graduated from, college. If he thinks $15 an hour is what people who don't go to college make, he is pretty out of touch with reality. Or at least my reality) Oh and because of some reason, blah, blah, I'd stopped listening, his income goes down by five percent every year. Oh yeah, ouch. I feel for you, doctor.

And here's the kicker: He does surgeries to implant some kind of spinal cord stimulator into people who have chronic pain. (Although he likes this kind of surgery, it's not worth it to him because he has to drive to a different hospital and doesn't get paid enough for it. You can see he went into medicine for all the right reasons.) Then he mentioned that a woman once asked him if he was able to implant one that would allow her to have orgasms whenever she wanted. He said yes, he was able to, but no, he didn't do it.

He would ask me questions about myself and then interrupt me to mansplain how I was wrong or interject his opinion on something he was clueless about. It was especially comical when he started mansplaining all about the journalism industry and how it works and what's wrong with it. He just kept talking. And talking. It was like he paid someone (me) by buying them one drink to sit there and listen to his lectures. And I'm pretty sure his hatred of me was equal, judging by his chilly good-bye as he sent me packing, although I can't figure out why since I barely got one word in the entire time and dutifully nodded my head and pretended to listen...

But here's the best part: As we were leaving he actually said, as if he had some kind of ESP: "You aren't one of those people who writes about their dates and how full of themselves they are, are you?"

No, of course not. You mean people do that?

The pickins, they are slim, and it's 50 percent our fault

Ok girls, listen up. I have figured out how we are going to get guys to grow up and start acting like responsible adults worthy of dating us. But first, you must read this article from Slate that explains it all quite nicely. If me telling you to read it isn't enough, this is the title: "Sex is cheap: Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life." Got your attention now? Read it. I'll wait.*

So, for those of you who still didn't read the Slate article despite my first footnote not making any sense, let me sum it up for you. Men like sex more than women like sex. (I'm inclined to disagree, but then when you've been involuntarily celibate for close to a year, your memories of sex are so distant they are probably skewed... so who knows.) In a society where women are plentiful, (and have lots of autonomy and authority) men don't have to be successful or commit because if their girlfriend dumps them, there's always another girl who will have sex with them. In a society (like engineering colleges) where the women are few and are in high demand, they can be choosy so the men compete for them, and so have to be more successful and driven and willing to commit or the women will not have sex with them.

So did most of my ex's friends at the aforementioned engineering college get married to their college girlfriends soon after graduating because they were in love? Of course not! It's because after four years in a girl desert they had no clue that in the real world women actually comprise 50 percent of the general population and thought that if they didn't marry the one they have now, they might not get to have sex ever again. Suckers.

Here's the kicker: While young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success is hindering their drive to achieve in life. It's kind of like why buy the cow (stop playing video games/trying to "find" yourself and get a real job already) when they can get the milk (attractive women will still have sex with them despite the video game playing habit/lack of employment) for free.

Here's the take-away: Women, if we want to date men who are successful, driven and don't live in their minivans or parent's basements, WE NEED TO STOP REWARDING THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR. Like Jacqui says, the pickins, they are slim and it's 50 percent our fault.

I've never liked the Lysistrata approach to solving anything, because, well, I like sex, too. However, desperate times call for desperate measures. So from now on, women of the world, let's band together on this. It's called raising the bar. We need to NOT have sex with losers who exhibit ANY of the following red flags:

He lives in a vehicle and thinks it's cool. Living in vehicles is for homeless people.

He lives in the basement of his parents' house/Craigslist stranger's house

He is unemployed**

He calls you "chief"

He smells bad and/or has greasy hair. If these things alone are not enough of a deal breaker, they could also be indications he lives in a vehicle/his parents' basement.

He has four children with three different women, none of whom he was married to. (This is not (only) because children are monsters and what new girlfriend wants to deal with four of them, it's because he exhibits poor decision making skills/a troubling inability to wrap it the the fuck up.)

When you ask him what he does, he says he makes candy. (He does not make candy. In fact, it's his father's company in another state that makes the candy and ships it to him, which he then sells at farmers markets. Except that he doesn't really sell it at farmers markets. It just piles up in his house because he did not submit the proper paperwork on time to legally sell it at farmers markets. He is afraid to tell his dad about this situation so he makes his living waiting tables and selling weed. When his friends come over to smoke the weed, they eat the candy.) The not-having-sex goes double for this person.

He has aspirations of being a ski bum/river raft guide.

He has a fake wall to pretend he isn't living in a studio with a roommate***

He sleeps on a futon/couch/sleeping bag on the floor. Grown-ups sleep in beds. Fact.

This is not an exhaustive list, so feel free to add to it. The most important thing to remember, girls, is that if you have sex with any of these guys, you are fucking everything up for the rest of us. And you won't be doing them any favors either. How are they ever going to learn how to be productive members of society if you are having sex with them? So don't. Thanks in advance.

*Who are these women that say no when an attractive, young stranger approaches them while walking down the street and proposes casual sex?! This is basically my dream come true. And I would probably cry when they said "just kidding!" and I found out we were not, in fact, about to hoof it to their apartment for some afternoon delight, but that I was just a statistic in their stupid little graduate student psychology research project. That is just plain cruel.

**Since this is a recession and I'm not totally heartless, if the guy was recently let go, seems upset and a little worried that he was recently let go and is actively trying to find a new job, you may have sex with him. Especially if he has a job interview this week. But proceed with caution.

***This doesn't apply in Manhattan