Girls Rule, Boys Drool—or, “How Hollywood and the Marketing Machine Nearly Ruined my Love Life”

McLove 

Love is an archaic notion, says the repressed pragmatic within

the girl whose wrecked, red heart still burns from the wounds of your words.

Why, how could love

possibly exist in a world

where you can pick up your marriage vows as easily

as you’d pick up a Big Mac

(I do, drive thru)

and chuck those

sacred promises

out your window & across the highway to blow and scatter like

barren, disconsolate french fry cartons?

She’s begun to think that love must have been battered

and fried then stuffed into a 100% recyclable carton

and sold with fries and a drink for $3.99

long before she was in line.

People will tell her not to give up, for perhaps

there is still love to be found

in rice cakes and cottage cheese,

but it doesn’t matter-

she hates rice and she’s lactose intolerant.

In my years upon this earth, I have had the privilege of walking in a dozen different countries and sampling the travel experiences of a lifetime—from exploring the exquisite details of Europe to lounging upon the beaches of remote tropical islands, I have been one lucky, hopefully-not-too-ugly-American abroad.  But I can say without a hint of pretense that continental road trips with my husband are among the highlights of my explorative journeys of this globe.

He and I recently had the luxury of an eight+ hour drive to our family vacation destination.  Our kids are at the delightfully distractible age where copious amounts of Spongebob DVDs, unlimited Peanut M & M’s, and heaps of fuzzy blankets turn the back half of the minivan (which, incidentally, my husband so endearingly refers to as the “scrotum scruncher”—the joke lying within the assumption that he feels emasculated to be seen perched within its confines) into a fantastical fortress of pre-adolescent adventure, allowing their father and I unadulterated chunks of time for chatting and catching up with one another, reflecting on our escapades over the eighteen years we’ve shared together.

If you know anything about my husband and I, you know that we are more than polar-opposites—we don’t even originate from the same solar system.  Him: Über-pragmatic-hard-headed-technologically-driven-conservative-fundamentalist.  Me: Utterly-over-emotional-free-thinking-head-in-the-clouds-liberal-artist.  We’re kind of two bizarre halves of one unholy whole—his chocolate is always in my peanut butter and without me, he’s just macaroni with no cheese.  (I’m hungry as I’m writing—please forgive the gastronomical digressions.)  Fortunately, our studies in opposition have never failed to provide us with endless subject matter for contradictions…er…discussions in our lifetime together: each landmark upon the highway, a new point to exchange perspectives—each song upon the radio, a veritable symposium for survey and analysis.

In the sixteen+ roundtrip hours we recently spent together upon the highways, we heard the new Katy Perry song “Wide Awake” exactly twenty seven times.  While I could enjoy taking pot shots at contemporary music in general or top-40 radio play, I’ll avoid the easy and the obvious and, instead, share how this particular song became the grist for setting the mill of my memories to work.  After over eighteen years together (barring a couple of brief breaks for singlehood sanity) my husband and I are fortunate to have an honesty between us that allows us to discuss the relative merits and disadvantages of our two decades together rationally—and often entertainingly.

Don’t roll your eyes quite yet—this is no tribute to connubial bliss or testament to the glory of married life.  Far be it for me to give anyone else in this world advice—especially on how to better their lives…I mean, a single candid glance at my life behind-the-scenes would send the viewer clawing at his or her eyes, screaming for the sweet sanctuary of their mothers.  While I believe whole-heartedly in serial-monogamy, I am no fan of the contractual nature of marriage (just ask my husband about the twelve years we spent together before being married—he’ll fill volumes for you with my thoughts on the historical oppression of marital design.)  However, having lived it, I do know a thing or two about surviving the years with the person you fell in love with…even when you don’t really recognize them—or yourself—any longer.

So, after hearing the song several times, I casually asked my ordinarily dispassionate husband what he thought.  Without hesitating, he quietly replied: “Men are assholes.”

This blew my mind.  There was no self-pity, no opposite sex recrimination—he simply believes that men are shit by their very nature.  My first response was to chuckle—but the horror slowly trickled in.  He accepted this as fact.  How did he come to this understanding?  Have several millennia of being the oppressive force standing on the wrong side of history brought about the evolution of a cultured, neutered, homogenized hybrid of masculinity whose knee-jerk reaction to being castigated (if not emotionally castrated) is to mildly reply: “Yes, dear”???

You see, I think what began to gnaw at me was the complete exoneration that this lovely song “Wide Awake” affords Ms. Perry and the  thorough evisceration that it awards Ms. Perry’s ex, my beloved Russell Brand.  (Ahhh, now you think that because I’ve exposed my bias, I cannot be fair—but I’ve been a member of “Team: Girl” far longer than I’ve been a fan of Mr. Brand—so, despite my proclivity to find him fabulous, I do not find him without fault.  Bear with me.)

Women have come so far in the past century—we are empowered in ways that our foremothers could only have dreamed possible: we now embody the majority of those seeking and achieving higher education, our career opportunities are abundant (although we still struggle to swallow the bitter pill of our failure to achieve economic parity with our male counterparts), and our voices are growing stronger and more recognizable with every leader we create, every obstacle we overcome.

Please don’t misunderstand me—we all need emblematic anthems to buoy our spirits and rally our camaraderie in times of instability—but instead of dancing upon the ashes of our past, why can’t we shoulder some measure of responsibility for our own happiness (and the periodic causes of its loss)?  Believe me—I get it.  When I was a young girl, I bellowed “I Will Survive”, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, and “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves”—and championed a life without love after every single break-up because, in the immortal words of Nazareth, “Love Hurts”.  When we get hurt, we need something to blame and what was once the source of our joy, is reallocated to the wellspring of our pain.

This is all nothing new.  We each suffer heartbreak at the hands of someone at some time—the industries of reality television, wine coolers, Fifty Shades of Grey publications, and Ryan Gosling’s film career depend upon our torment to feed upon the emotional decomposition.  Relationships have been falling apart since Adam first blamed Eve for tying him up and shoving that apple down his protesting throat, effectively bouncing them out of paradise.  (That’s how it all went down, right?)  The divorce rate in our country has hovered around the fifty/fifty mark for decades—and predatory pundits rub their hands together in anticipatory glee at the emerging reports that, post-recession, the billion-dollar divorce economy numbers are predicted to boom.

These thoughts tumbled through my head upon the dozenth (not a word, but remember, I am a licensed neologist) time Perry’s new ode to herself slipped through our speakers before I really began pondering the lyrics.  Now, before you laugh about how shallow the waters were that I was panning for philosophy, you should be aware of how fiercely the kids of today ascribe to this kind of thinking.  I cannot even count the times I’ve overheard the brilliant, beautiful young ladies in conversations in my classrooms or seen their status updates and tweets verbally gutting and filleting the boys in their lives for being less than what they had expected of them—punishing them publicly for being every bit of what they had always been: teenage boys.  Millions of young people look to Katy Perry as an inspiration and a role model.  Her songs are omnipresent—but I would risk to venture that the themes they are being championed for are troublesome.  While “Wide Awake” appears to be a glossy epic to regaining individual identity after a harrowing incarceration, it sends a clear message: that the only true, worthy love is one that is so powerful and all-consuming and benevolent that it should never, ever hurt you or bruise you or make any mistake of any kind.

That’s just bullshit, and it feeds the absolute wrong message to its audience.

I will pause to confirm that this is not to speak for the countless innocents who are held captive in hostile, abusive relationships—to them I give my tears, my empathy, and my permission to burn the house down the next time the bastard lays a hand upon you.  But for any person who has spent a single penny on a Chris Brown track in the last three years (you know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourselves) who coincidentally belts out the lyrics to this Katy Perry song like a tattoo straight from their hearts, I can only say: “What. The. Hell?”  As an wizened member of this “air-your-dirty-laundry-publicly-for-everyone-to-read-and-see-and-hear-and-comment-upon” twitter/facebook generation, I recognize that wagging my finger at such blatant narcissism and selective memory is a waste of energy—but do we really need to flood the airwaves with self-righteous odes that completely eliminate complicity in the demise of a relationship?  Sure, Adele and Taylor Swift’s careers would come to an abrupt halt…but what is the alternative?  To continue creating a soundtrack for the generation of blame-shifting, self-aggrandizing young people we’re breeding?  Eek. 

Even Gotye had the balls to let Kimbra come aboard, giving her side of their fictional fallout and calling him out for his bullshit in “Somebody that I Used to Know”—the nascent qualities that Katy Perry gives herself in “Wide Awake” and the complete culpability she censures her real-life former husband with are brutally misleading to her young fans.  It stirs a bitter bitchiness in me—and I can’t help but to wonder if she had put half the time and attention into her marriage as she did her albums, videos, tours, promotions, and film—well…we might not be having this discussion at all.

None of us legitimately knows what goes on behind someone else’s doors—we can only presume and postulate.  But Katy Perry and Russell Brand’s inalienable right to publicly discard their marital commitment after little more than a year awakens a profound resentment in me. Societally, we can’t seem to put aside our bigotry and agree that two consenting adults who love one another should have the right to legally wed in our country, regardless of sex or orientation—but these two can so quickly dishonor the privilege that they never even had to lift a finger to earn?  It’s appalling.

Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’m not demonizing the little pop tart or her satyr-suitor, but they represent a machine that as a young person, I would never have even recognized or acknowledged and I wish someone had pointed out to me before I entered the harpy/crone phase of my life.  That we even look to celebrities as role models or to be the architects of modern societal norms is patently absurd—but the fact remains that they are the pulse in the beating heart of pop culture.  The troves of magazines, films, albums, and merchandise we purchase prove our compulsions; we drink from their veins, we feed from their waste, and—like it or not—they influence more of our lives than we may [ever] be ready to admit.  We bring our precious children into the world, nurture them, teach them right from wrong—then, somewhere along the road, we step back and allow the cult of personality to determine the rest.

“But, it’s just so HARD!” the young lovers cry.

 

“Love isn’t supposed to be this difficult…” they sniffle.

Pssst.  Hey kids, lemme let you in on a little secret: YES, IT IS.  Here are a few little nuggets of wisdom that no one ever tells you and you’d be lucky to learn before you reach my ancient age.  I bequeath to you my four epistles, certified authentic by my husband:

1)      Sometimes, when you most want to scream or throw something or throw something while screaming, the best thing to do is just shut the hell up.  Silence is a remarkable salve to the savaged soul.  Your brain continues firing off the violent missives that you long to spew aloud, but you have the space and the silence to edit and construct the clearest distillations of your feelings instead of flying off hot-headed, slinging out verbal arrows that you can never retrieve.  (Just ask my husband—those suckers stay lodged and infect for years—I’ve got festering sores from 1994 still splintered in my head to pick at on the slow nights…)

2)      Ingrain the following into your brainà not every affront to what you thought the relationship was or should be is a reason to fall out of love.  Not every series of affronts to what you thought the relationship was or should be is a reason to fall out of love.  If you are looking for a reason to get out anyway (perhaps you are bored or you are simply ready to find something new) then you don’t need to find some fault of theirs to give you permission to go—just open the door.  If those are truly the extent of your reasons, you’ll be doing them the favor.

3)      BELIEVE this—while the grass may be greener over there, it has its own lawn shed full of insecurities, inhibitions, and a cargo-hold full of its own baggage.  Are new relationships fun—is it refreshing to be dazzled by the tummy-butterflies and stars-in-your-eyes antics of bourgeoning love?  Absolutely.  But you will eventually unlock the metaphorical shed on the other side and, when you do, I can promise you that what you find may make what you have now look like Eden before the fall.

4)      If you leave, you leave with you.  You’ll wake up with you.  You’ll fall asleep with you.  Before you tip too many cocktails with your friends or chug too many beers with your bros, regaling them with the horror that was your previous relationship, remember: you’re the common denominator in all of your own messes.  What are you doing to make yourself any better before the next new beginning comes along…?  Nothing?  History repeats itself for a reason—you’ve heard the clichés.  Don’t doom yourself to repeat your own mistakes.

Toward the end of her song, Katy warbles that she is “letting go of illusion”—and you know what?  THAT is a great message.  Truly.  But the thing is, you don’t have to let go of a relationship simply because you grow up a bit.  We should all let go of the expectations we built about someone and love them for who they are…if we don’t, the love isn’t unconditional… and if it isn’t unconditional, what is the damn point?  Frankly, I’m simply scared for how this will add to the screwed up template that has been created for the young people today.  My god—we are told to accept and love complicated, brooding, despondent men in fiction—the Fitzwilliam Darcys, the Tyler Durdens, the Mr. Bigs, the Christian Greys—but when the real men in our lives fail to measure up to the image issued to us by Hollywood and marketing geniuses, we are disgusted, disappointed, and…disinterested???  The potent cocktail of mixed messages that they serve us roofie our better judgment and feed upon our insecurities about our bodies, our intelligence, our worthiness—and then we invert these fears and wreck the real relationships in our lives for…WHAT???  The pattern is so dysfunctional that it needs its own syndicated talk show.

Men have illusions and expectations, too, you know.  They believe that the Victoria Secret commercials do not lie and that it will be this way forever—and that you want it to be.  (Any young lady who wants to get inside their heads—even a wee fraction—should read Nick Hornby’s hilarious and painfully honest “High Fidelity”—or you could always cheat and see the film, they’re both great.)  Men are perpetually fifteen year old boys inside their lovely heads.  Watch any Kevin Smith film and smoosh all the male characters into one and you’ve got the idea.  They think you will desire them as much eighteen years from now as you did eight minutes ago.  And heaven help them, they WILL want a trophy for their sympathy for your cramps or picking up a box of tampons.  But, you see—just wait.  You’ll get your laughs when they’re there for your tonsillectomies or episiotomies or lumpectomies—that is, if they’re even there then.  That’s my point.  Whether you push them away or you leave, they will not be there for you if you won’t let them be there for you.

Hmmm…I think Epistle #1 needs a subsection, for clarity.  Be aware: sometimes the person you have loved and given yourself to will not be enough.  Sometimes they will fail you.  Sometimes they will make you cry and ache and wish you had never even laid eyes upon them.  Sometimes they will make you question every choice you have made since being with them.  They will learn your buttons and they will push them when you least need them to—and you will want to hurt them.  Wound them.  Strike out for the things in your life that hurt you.  So you will want to run, this is a given.  But know this—running away when it gets hard is the EASY thing to do.  That’s the surest route to leave the pain of the past, right?  Because these things will never come back to haunt you, will they?  Oh wait…

Katy wails that she’s “falling from cloud nine”—and this absolutely needs to happen…you can’t walk beside someone if you’re on a damn cloud.  Put your feet on the ground, bear down, and work your shit out.  Sometimes, no matter how much you put into something you love, you will fail—but will you honestly be able to say that you gave it everything you had?  If you can, if the scars you bear script a roadmap of the routes in your struggle to stay alive in a relationship, then you have earned your right to a reprieve.  Right this way, next exit.  But if not, sit the fuck down and study the map again.  TOGETHER.  And pardon my expletives, but if you have kids, man the fuck up.  Enough of this “right to personal happiness”-crack pipe that every overindulged American has been sucking upon for the last couple of decades.  Give in before you get out—what will it cost you?  A little pride?  A little time?  A mere pittance.

Please trust me when I say that I know what I’m talking about.  The poem earlier was written by a puerile nineteen year old girl who didn’t know shit about love (and still needs a lifetime to learn, if we’re going to be discursive.)  I was a calf fattened on a steady diet of films like Say Anything, Pretty Woman, and Ghost, listening to Bono crooning to me in one ear that he can’t live with or without me and Bret Michaels caressing the other ear about every rose having its thorn—so is it any wonder why I so willingly laid myself at “true” love’s altar like an ancient vestal virgin?  I didn’t want to be someone’s “bitch” or to feign indifference to the “boys will be boys” antics of the potential suitors out there—I wanted the pure, transcendental, magical love of Lloyd Dobler (look it up if you must—but really, you should know better).  Unfortunately, it didn’t hit me for about another decade that the “magical love” guys weren’t that great either—didn’t Richard Gere originally only want Julia Roberts because she rocked the slutty dress and the hooker-heeled, thigh-high boots…and didn’t Patrick Swayze have to be dead for days before he could finally utter the words to Demi Moore that he loved her?  Hell, even Bret Michaels took twenty five years of hard partying with bus-loads of syphilitic strippers before he was finally ready to put a ring on the mother of his children.  Prince Charmings all around.

I was naïve, but in a way, triumphant.  In our years together, my husband and I have put each other through a lot—I do mean a lot, the details of which might send the average tender-hearted youngster crying to the nearest monastery or convent, disavowing the notion of “love” forever—but we are still here, better together than apart.  If we fail or do not make it to the end of our journey together, we may rest assured that it will not be for lack of effort.

Though she may balk at the kind of investment I’ve made in my relationship, today’s young girl isn’t so terribly different—whether she wants to admit it or not.  She is infinitely more sophisticated than the young ladies of my generation—and while I am sad that she had to cut her teeth on role models like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or sisters Kardashian, she was blessed to have had a Hermione Granger, a Natalie Portman, and a Chelsea Clinton to look to for balance.  Weaned from the bittersweet milk of her empowering godmothers Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, she may have had her naïveté stripped from her early-on, but not her tenacity nor her confidence in herself: she has been directed to embrace her superiority as a member of the sisterhood.  However, to be clear, while I am thrilled that turnaround has become fair play between the sexes—I do not believe that this self-entitled hubris has done much (at least, so far) for the young women of today—that is, other than to make them as irascible and unyielding as their male counterparts have been for centuries.  In fact, in a sense, she is even more torn than before because she is constantly warring with the lack of limitations for what society says she can be, what she wants to be, and how she wants to be perceived.  Unfortunately, these are rarely aligned.

From my observations, I sense that today’s young woman wants to author her own sexual identity—a confusing and contemporary blend of virgin, harlot, mother, or crone—but blanches at even the gentlest suggestion that she cannot authentically be all these things at once.  She resents being labeled, but the moment a companion or love interest fails to meet whatever impossible archetypal amalgam of Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic”, Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook”, or Rob Pattinson in the “Twilight” films that she has been fed or constructed, she feels betrayed—and likely has no idea why she even feels this way.

I suppose this is an extreme oversimplification of human needs—no two people want the exact same thing.  While some desire to be comforted and treasured, others want to be challenged and dominated.  Personally, I hate games—I value honesty and directness, but the unfortunate fact is that love is indeed a game and the rules are completely arbitrary. Now I think Epistle #4 needs an amended subsection: If you don’t know who you are, what you believe in, or what you want to do in this world yourself, how in the name of Aphrodite can you expect another person to be able to navigate the uncharted expectations inside YOUR head successfully?

As the road trip relationship revelations continued, I focused on the half-dozen or so people I know personally who carry songs like Katy Perry’s as badges—as power ballad-token tributes to their unbearable first-world problems of not being loved enough or treasured enough or supported enough by the mates they couldn’t bear to stand beside long enough to earn their survival together.  I know this sounds harsh—but there are truly abused, truly heartbroken, truly empty and alone people out there…and to them I say—I am so sorry.  As for the rest of you, if you need a song like this to empower you to get on to something or someone newer or hotter, I hope you find what you seek—and I think you’ll deserve what you find.  People’s affections are not used cars…you don’t trade them in for better models with newer features.  And you certainly can’t pay a mechanic to do the work for you—you have to stick around and write the manual together.

In defense, I will say that the video for “Wide Awake” gets one thing right: it is time for us, as a society, to collectively train our daughters to abandon the antiquated idea that perfect men will arrive upon their alabaster steeds to rescue them from their own lives.  But while it is time to embrace the beauty of independence and self-worth, we must be careful not to berate the opposite sex or push the young people to live lives free of partnerships.  That isn’t right either.  Life’s journey is made better by companionship—but we must seek partners who enrich our identities, not serve as scapegoats for our own incomplete selves.

As for our two young daughters, half-unconscious in the back seat, drenched in their respective chocolate and Spongebob fogs?  I hope they find partners that make them laugh and make them feel good about themselves…always.  I hope they find people who give to their lives more than they take, and make each moment they share together better than the moments that came before.  I hope they have confidence in themselves to stand beside someone—but are unafraid to stand alone until that person comes along.  I hope they never think themselves above or better than anyone else—but never accept ever being treated as less than they deserve.  I hope when they commit themselves to something—a hobby, a career, a relationship—they will see it through, even when it isn’t always as fun or as easy or as charming as it once was.  I hope they will have the good judgment to know the difference between giving in and giving up.  Finally, I hope they learn that life isn’t supposed to be a party—it’s a trip.  I hope they stay the course and enjoy the ride. 

Arriving safely at home, my husband and I wearily carry the precious sleeping bodies of the children we created in the life we’ve made together into our house—and I steal a quick glance at my travel companion.  I’m wide awake, and you know what?  The view is pretty damn good.