By staff writer Simonne Cullen
January 7, 2007
Let’s take a moment to play a game we all used to play when we were little. It’s called “pretend,” and in the land of pretend anything can happen. A little girl can tape strands of toilet paper to a Styrofoam plate and suddenly she’s a bride. A little boy can steal that makeshift toilet paper veil, wrap it around his body, and shazaam, he’s a mummy. It’s a catch-22 to play pretend as an adult though. Because it’s fun to fantasize about being with the spankalicious hottie from down the hall, but quite another to actually believe that something truly wonderful will blossom.
Everything gets so complicated when you’re an adult. Relationships are especially impossible to understand. The misunderstanding has become so burdensome for men, that they are creating safe havens away from women: Home Depot, Hooters, football games. Men even have men-only parties where they invite only one woman—and while it’s true they’re paying her to seductively take off her clothes, they’re also paying her not to talk.
But not all men hire strippers for old-fashioned interaction, and not all women purchase Jude Law look-a-likes to cuddle and talk to them all night; that’s why men fear their fraternity’s yearly bachelor auction. Especially overly-hormonal pledges. “What? You’re selling us to the female student body for the evening? From the moment I am sold until midnight? Any chance we can start the auction at a quarter to twelve? No? Fuck. Alright, two slow dances and 20 minutes of small talk is my final offer. Any more and my manhood may very well fall off.” Because it’s basically an unwritten rule that if you buy a guy for the sake of charity, he’s your sexual or conversational minion for the bargain price of 26 dollars.
“Why put on a one-person act if you’re just going to strip the next person that walks by?”
What really pisses a lot of women off though is the one guy who’s so popular he’s unattainable. And while there really isn’t anything special about the way he looks, women just naturally gravitate towards him. I’m sure that right now, somewhere in Peru a woman has picked up this guy’s scent, immediately thrown her Sunday dress and a couple pounds of maize into a suitcase and started hitchhiking her way up to America just to see where this overwhelming sexual decadence trail will lead her.
The scent thing is true though. One psychological study had ten different men wear the same shirt for ten days straight. They then took those shirts and presented them to a hundred women. Each woman had to determine by scent which one she preferred and something like sixty percent of them picked the same one. Not surprisingly it belonged to a major boozehound on campus. Causing scientists to believe that a majority of women find the mix of stale beer, pizza, sport-sweat with a slight hint of chronic masturbation extremely appealing.
It’s funny how sometimes after you start to like someone, and seem to pique their interest at the same time, out of nowhere that person will do something so unbelievable that it makes you wonder why he or she ever put forth the effort in the first place. It starts out like any other party: you’re making sweet eye contact, throwing secret smiles, conveniently ending up in an empty room, and eventually making out like two horny soap opera stars. It’s passionate, it’s sweaty, it’s hot. Then, for a moment, you suddenly become acutely aware of the fact that your breath reeks of peanuts, so you excuse yourself. You head to the bathroom, create some makeshift mouthwash from toothpaste and sink water, smell your pits, and ba-da-bing! Less than 10 minutes later you head back to the room—only the door is locked. Odd. You shimmy it open to find your make-out buddy has turned into a make-out bandit, now half naked with someone else.
So why all the prep work? Why the notes slipped to you after class? Why the sexy winks at parties? Why do lunch? Why put on a one-person act if you’re just going to strip the next person that walks by? Why break out all the props when at the final scene your hottie ends up in the dark with someone else? As a true act of revenge, why not just shove all their toilet paper in the tub and let the shower run all night, instead. ‘Cause sometimes that’s why being an adult sucks. There’s no more pretend. And all reality offers you is cold, wet, unusable toilet paper.