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Held an interesting if brief chat with my friend Karl about dating and romance at lunch today. (Last names will never be used, in order to protect the innocent. If you know me, then you know who they are and I don't need to tell you their last name. If you don't know me, then their true identities are really not much of your business.) Anyway, he filled me in on a conversation held at the local diner on Friday night.
The gist? Well, according to Karl we need to eliminate the "bullshit" from the dating process. Come to think of it, he does have a pretty good point. So much of it is bullshit, designed to fake left while you punch right and try to trick someone you've genuinely come to care about into genuinely caring about you through ingenuine means. How would it work if I just approached someone I'm interested in and said, "Hey, I'm interested--let's go out on a date"? I bet it would fail. Hence, the bullshit: the courting, the flirting, the guessing as to what she's thinking, etc. I suppose that if you have to guess what the other person is thinking, then it's probably not gonna happen. On the other hand, the bullshit can be fun and rewarding in its own right. Just something to think about, I suppose.
Back to the Liz Phair/Rolling Stones issue. I think the question at the heart of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" and it's alleged attack on the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street" is this: are the Rolling Stones chauvinists? A big question, indeed. Perhaps too big for my resources. You could probably argue off the cuff that any band who'd record a song called "Bitch" is probably a bit chauvinist. Yet does that make Meredith Brooks a chauvinist? And if so, does that mean she has a penis?
Does one need a penis to be a chauvinist? Probably not; I'd bet really butch lesbians can be just as chauvinist to women as men can. But does all this mean that Mick Jagger (who may or may not have a penis) and Keith Richards (who may or may not still have a pulse) are women-hating chauvinistic bastards? I'm gonna say YES. It's not an aggressive chauvinism, but there's a nonchalance to their attitude toward women that suggests chauvinism. Of course, the chauvinism of the Stones harkens back several steps to the general hegemony of white men in rock, something else that I'm sure was on Liz Phair's mind when she wrote "Exile in Guyville."
Regardless, I can't get her song "Fuck and Run" out of my head. It's not exactly a tune you can sing out loud as you stride happily down the street. Made for some very embarrassing moments over the past day or two.