Photo: Courtesy of the author
Don't date, kiss, screw, live with, try to love, procreate or put up with Stone Age douchebags.
By Serge Bielanko — Written on Nov 07, 2016
There's this guy in my town who rides around with a jail cell standing in the back of his pickup truck. It's a Hillary thing. He has an unflattering dummy of the female presidential candidate locked behind his private bars, homemade magic-markered signs taped all over the place.
"Jail for HELLary," one reads.
"HELL NO TO HELLARY," says another.
OK, I made that part up. I don't remember what his stupid signs actually say. I'm always too busy losing my mind whenever I pass the dude on the road. It's all I can do to not drive my Honda right off the road, straight through a fence, and directly into some damn innocent cow minding her own business as she chews her cud and wonders who has the time to erect a jail cell in the back of their truck.
You get the idea.
The guy hates Hillary Clinton. A lot. And yeah, it's possible that his animosity stems from the fact that he's a lifelong Republican. And yeah, there's a chance he has read up on the whole email drama, or on Benghazi, and has based his disdain for the first female Presidential candidate in American history on his deeper intellectual understanding of those particular situations.
It's not totally out of the question that the man who proudly displays an imprisoned lady as he cruises down to the post office or the supermarket has made up his mind about Mrs. Clinton based on methodical evaluation of a ton of dependable sources and information.
But I've been around the block a few times. And deep in my guts, I have a feeling I know what's up. Hell (Hellary!), you probably do too, right?
This fella is probably boggled out of his mind at the prospect of a supremely intelligent woman like Hillary merely existing. Just like he was rattled off his porch rocker by a super-sharp, ultra-qualified African-American man a few years back.
Some men — a LOT of men, it turns out — are not at all comfortable with intelligent, powerful, and accomplished women. Some dudes, it turns out, are f*cking straight-up scared of them to the point of obvious insanity.
In many ways, we have Mother Nature to blame for the lack of progress when it comes to gender equality.
Biology is a pain in the ass. Our DNA is etched in our bones and with it comes this zillion-year program of deeply engrained survival skills. Men, women, we're all preprogrammed with procreation in mind. We forget that a lot.
We tend to think of our lust as the fire in our bellies, as something brought on by the shining promise of getting lucky on a Friday night. Or later, as getting lucky after the kids are in bed, which, quite frankly, never happens. But you get what I'm saying.
Human beings are all wired up for strict competition with each other — and it's all in the name of making babies. But the men are the worst. We drag around these caveman chains with us from the moment we're born. We're anchored to the past because our urges are dictated more by ancient evolution than progressive thinking.
In other words, guys still have very deep longings to be the strongest and the fastest and, when you boil it all down, the one who's best at jumping up on a fleeing deer's back and sinking our sharp stone into it's mortified eyeball fifty times in the course of a minute until the thing collapses in a heap of meat for us to feed to our grubby caveman families for the next three nights.
Skills and powers that once made men the proverbial King of the Jungle or the Mountain? They're outdated as sh*t. But they're still there, still kicking around in our biology.
And these poor women. My god, my poor, poor daughter. This is what they have to deal with.
Time marches on. Females seize opportunities and fight for progress. They battle for the chance to learn and grow and be treated as equals by men. But the road is so long. The way forward is always being ticked back towards the past.
It's biology. Evolution is a con man, a snake oil dude. And everything progressive and good is taking forever. Just look at Tinder. (Actually, don't look at Tinder. You'll hate yourself if you do.)
***
A recent article in New York Magazine, titled "Men Love Smart Women Until They Actually Have to Talk to Them," talks about a study conducted by some respected institutions that reveal some alarming stuff. Without delving into the specifics, the study more or less found that while many men claim to support and feel attracted to intelligent, accomplished women, the truth is they really don't.
They talk a good game. They say that they find smart women to their liking. But when they are actually stood beside one — as in: "Hey man, this is Kate, and by all accounts and test scores, she's smarter than you," — they tend to move away.
I repeat: Many men tend to physically MOVE AWAY from a known intelligent woman who is standing in their midst. They move. Away. Like cowards. Like deer afraid of having their heads bashed in.
Isn't life crazy?
All hope isn't lost, though. We just need to understand what's at play here. And for the multitudes of women who keep an open eye as well as an open mind, I'm hopeful. Because smart women have always run the world and everyone knows that.
But emerging from the deep, dark shadows of the ancient sexism rooted in every single moment of human history doesn't happen overnight. It'd be cool if it did but that's not the way things work.
Still, more and more boys/men are born every day who are feeling the pull of forward motion.
But the way I see it, it's more or less up to the ladies to find these guys. It's up to the women now to think twice before surfing toward the sunset on their own antiquated biological tides.
Big muscles and chiseled cheekbones once meant a man was ready to eat the flesh straight off of a sabertooth tiger he had just killed with a heavy rock. And that was HOT, but we're trying to move forward. We're trying hard to get this Caveman Airlines jet off the ground finally, so we can soar it towards a better day and change the f*cking name.
Intelligent, awesome women, it turns out, deserve the smartest, most progressive guys they can possibly find. For love. For romance. For intellectual stimulation. For support. For babies who are born into a world where men don't create dummies of female presidential candidates just so they can lock them up in jail cells in the back of their pickup trucks and parade them all over town.
This is 2016. Ladies, I'm begging you. Don't date, kiss, screw, live with, try to love, procreate or put up with Stone Age douchebags anymore. We can do this. We can work together to make the world right. We only have 866,754,934,241 intellectual miles to go.
Kiss the boys who love NPR.
We're over here. I'm over here. And I'm not running away when I see you. I swear to God. (Who probably doesn't exist, by the way).
