#22 I Want Everything Girls

Kurt Vonnegut said he was always amazed by the fervor with which women fought for the right to put themselves in impossible and sometimes dangerous situations. He meant by this things like “Take Back The Night” marches on college campuses where like 95% of the reported sexual assaults occurred at either the lacrosse and football fraternity house. If you’re lying alone in your fourth floor dorm bed, marcher shouts bouncing off your four dark walls, you can help but think, “Won’t it save everyone a lot of effort and emotion just to avoid those two fraternities?” and you also can’t help, like Vonnegut, but be impressed by how balsy a tactic it is, the basic message being: “Hey, you! I don’t want to hang out with you, you’re a dweeb, instead I want to hang out with Them - Them is SO dreamy - but Them often mistreats me, verbally and physically, so I want you - a person of no social significance - to force Them to be nice to me. Come on!”

For reasons that do not require much analysis the more educated and moneyed a girl gets - the more access or at least exposure she has to life’s myriad and multitudinous possibilities - the more likely she is to want Everything, in all its forms, together at once, and the more she demands that the world bend to her will. The more, in truth, the world WILL bend to her will. This is why Vonnegut thought female insistence for finding good even in evil astonishing or at least daring, since it’s essentially predicated on a borderline insane and sort of childish belief in the perfectabilty of man, a belief that in tiny increments in certain specific situations actually kind of works.

San Francisco has more I Want Everything Girls than anywhere on the planet. SF women say they don’t expect much, just a guy who is smart, funny, confident, humble, charming, brave, narcissistic and giving, such as the Rock if he was Ryan Gosling in The Notebook.

In San Francisco the I Want Everything Girls put special focus on a requirement that guys be cute around the edges. SF women want a Democrat who dresses well, who is sensitive to the needs of others. The guy with a trendy hair cut, tailored pants and two pockets of flattery.

And there ARE straight guys like that. It’s a perfectly plausible aspiration. Guys can drink green tea and take Jack Russell Terriers for walks. But having all those characteristics means lacking others. It means, for instance, they aren’t tough guys. It means they aren’t Humphrey Bogart grabbing you tightly and kissing you with cigarette breath. The human condition just happens to be that way. We have to make choices. A guy can choose to be a muscle-bound bouncer who takes notes on his reps or an i-banker who runs triathlons or a vegan artist who weighs 145 pounds, but if he is to be any good at what he does, he can only be one. The smooth talkers are lotharios and the charmless awkward men (that girls avoid at parties) are loyal. That’s how life works out - and, more importantly, the way it should work out - not just with respect to boyfriends but to jobs, vacations, pets, and dinners at a Vegas buffet. You can’t choose to have everything because, in the end, that’s choosing nothing. And this is what makes life interesting, it’s why there’s mystery and why it matters. As Epstein says in Biloxi Blues, “You have to get in the middle of it. You have to take sides. [Pick your] fight. The one you believe in.”