In Which I Make Fun of Stupid Girls

This past Friday night, I learned something -- in today's society, there are two kinds of women: those who will go to singles bars and drunkenly hump a strange man's leg on the dance floor...and those who will simply point and laugh. I am one of the latter.

My husband and I went to a bar with his father on Friday night to hear a guitarist. It was a nice place, good food, good music, up until around 10 o'clock when it became the most depressingly raging singles bar I've ever seen.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe it's a nerd thing. Whatever the reason, I live a fairly quiet life and when I go to bars, it's usually to socialize with friends, watch sports and/or just drink like a Bukowski character. It's not to..what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, yes: solicit.

I was embarrassed for my gender. Tramp stamps everywhere, super tight jeans, pencil-thin heels, cleavage exploding out of t-shirts I'm fairly certain were manufactured for toddlers and the kind of sad make-up jobs that would make any self-respecting drag queen say, "Really? Are you sure about that?"

That wasn't the sad part, though. The sad part was watching them all standing at the bar as if they were in a police line-up or waiting to get picked for dodge ball. They all had these hopeful, if not glazed, looks in their eyes, mentally pleading, "Choose me! Choose me!" And yet the men kept walking by.

A lot of the girls put in a good effort. There was the blonde who stood on the edge of the dance floor with her breasts stacked in front of her like two apples on a chin-high tray. Eventually, when no one came up to talk to her, she just started looking down at her cleavage sadly, as if chastising it for a job poorly done. Then there was the small brunette girl who danced with six or seven different guys, which is great. Good for her. Except when I use the word "dance," I mean she was pulled drunkenly out onto the dance floor where she mounted her partner's thigh and then seemed to lose all muscle control, flailing her arms and legs around like the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz," if he were, you know, humping a guy's leg to techno.

I'm not saying all this to be mean. Okay, I'm saying a little bit of it to be mean, but mostly I'm saying it because I felt embarrassed for my own kind. There was no individuality, no self-respect, no dignity. And it should be pointed out that the one women in the bar who was surrounded by men the whole night was a girl wearing glasses and having an actual conversation. Score one for the fellow nerd. I would have waved at her in unity, but I didn't want to ruin her mojo.

I think this may be what separates the nerdy women from the rest of the pack. Sure, we may lose our capacity for speech or fall down in the presence of attractive men, but nine times out of ten, we'd rather make that kind of spectacle of ourselves rather than the kind that was going on in that bar. In general, I believe nerdy women date with dignity. It may take us a while to find our prince because we're not trolling every Saturday night, but when we do, we know he'll be a guy who respects a woman, especially one in glasses.