Something Stupid and Insulting
Hotmail provides a sidebar of article links for those days when my friends have neglected me. It seems like there was a time when those articles weren’t invariably inane. Not only that, but it also seemed like some smart cookie made note of the types of links I clicked, and then generated more on those topics for my clicking pleasure. Less dating and beauty. More wacky news, word games, and celebrities humiliating themselves.
Now they have a new cookie, specially designed to generate links to the articles that I will find most annoying. Every day, MSN Hotmail wants to tell me the very latest on Ashlee Simpson and Britney Spears. Also, it wants to help me find a man. But not just any man – no, MSN Hotmail, in partnership with Match.com, is committed to helping me become engaged to the biggest immature asshole frat boy obtainable by law. Here’s the latest, most technologically advanced dating advice, hot off the Hotmail: “Five things men can’t stand about your apartment,” by Randy B. Hecht.
I know that everything I’m about to say is stuff y’all already know and feel. However, I must say it, anyway, and in numbered item format.
1. Who gives a shit what men or some hypothetical man dislike about your apartment? Is this man paying your rent? Okay, then he needs to shut the hell up, doesn’t he?
2. How pathetic are you supposed to be, that you would change your apartment’s decor in order to catch a man? What is Match.com trying to tell us? That it’s not enough to be pretty and “height/weight proportionate,” or to pay whatever it costs to join their dating service, but that you also have to change your interior design concept so you can be good enough for a man to want to sleep with you? Jesus. Anything else? How about my pets – what kind of pets do men like, Randy B. Hecht? How about my car? What about my life insurance? Is there a certain kind of life insurance plan that men dislike? Oh, no! What kind should I buy? Is there a link somewhere near by so I can click it and buy whatever it takes to catch a man??? Help me! Tell me what to do!
3. Why does Randy B. Hecht feel the need to identify herself as female in her very first sentence? Is her sex supposed to lend more or less credibility to her assertion that my “apartment style may be giving him the jitters”?
4. Why does Randy B. Hecht (Please tell me this is a psuedonym disguising the identity of a writer who needs money so badly that he/she decided to sell out and write the kind of idiotic trash that people apparently can’t stop reading…) spend her first few paragraphs telling us that men dress worse than women and have uglier apartments than women, before telling us what we need to change to attract these sloppy, bad-taste-having penis wielders? Is she being ironic? Is she trying to test MSN/Hotmail/Match.com to see how nonsensical an article they will buy? Or is this just more of the “Men – so effing stupid but we gotta love ’em” comedy stylings that pervade America’s popular culture today?
5. I am warned that men are freaked out by excessive candles and potpourri, excessive pillows, excessive floral prints, stuffed animals, and “A hostess who can’t relax and hang out.” So, of course, I got rid of all that stuff. But there are other aspects of my living space that have me questioning my choices and myself, Randy. Please, tell me what men think of my bookshelf full of material designed to help me change myself enough to catch a man. Too cluttered? Too threateningly literary? Or will they welcome those little signs that I’m so afraid of being alone, I’ll do anything a man tells me to do? Or that I’ll do anything a woman or a media conglomerate tells me to do, as long as it might help me avoid a lifetime of living all by my miserable self? Just curious.
I know I’m picking on Randy B. Hecht disproportionately here and that there are plenty more insipid, offensive pieces of dumbassery where that came from. This is the one that happened to catch my eye this morning, though, while I was in the mood to update my blog.
I should note that Randy/MSN/Hotmail/Match.com doesn’t want me to worry – they “haven’t forgotten to tell him which aspects of his apartment drive [me] nuts,” presumably with another “article” to which they neglected to link or which hasn’t yet been written.
Y’all, please don’t go through the trouble. I can speak for myself, should a man’s apartment style ever become a deal breaker in our relationship. Besides – I have a feeling I’ve read that article before, and tongue-in-cheek scoldings to men for being dirty, nasty, adorable little piggies just aren’t that funny to me.
