Men are the new women

Among  all the eye rolling insults used to dismiss men on the basis of looks, personality, and frame — bitch, slut, ugly,  round and excessive, to name a few favorites — there was never such an insidiously life-changing word as: frumpy.

For the last two weeks, before going out to the bar to be judged, my friends judged themselves, first.

And, “I just don’t want to look frumpy” was the common fear factor.

To date in a world where fat made you not applicable, frumpy was the new fat and a somehow the new worst case scenario.

You can be a sexy bitch; a cool bitch; you can even be cool-if-you-weren’t-such-a-bitch, but there is nothing cool or sexy about being frumpy.

Like “mushy” and “slimy,” when you use the word “frumpy” you already have general idea of what you will be looking at.  It’s not so much whether they are good looking but if they have stimulating qualities. It is the male version of homely, with the usual bad clothes and muffin tops.

Twenty pounds less, or even 10, and some guys will be in the “hott” zone and on their way to a dim life of shallow happiness and lavish dinner parties where wine is the main caloric intake and food is meant to complement the atmosphere, not to be eaten: the materialist’s American dream.

Weight is an outward problem that can be rectified with a mixture of diet, dieting and more dieting, but if you are frumpy, you could stand to lose a little more than pounds.

What makes frumpy so hard to digest is its loaded recipe of judgment:  take career, add looks, sprinkle with personality, and top off with sex appeal as needed. It is an insult based on your total package — your life.

And the dating standards have changed.

Men are the new women, and those poor straight women are now basically fembots. Men should be high maintenance but masculine; fashionable but masculine; emotional but masculine; outgoing but masculine; skinny but masculine; have a nice ass, but a masculine ass. The constant switch between who we are and who we should be to be “dateable” eventually makes us neurotic enough to be girls.

But most importantly, men should have a plan: How do you plan to make your date’s life better?

It turns out, in a state suffering so severely such as Michigan, where people are lucky to have a job, the question of, “What do you do?” is more important than ever. And whatever you do, you better have a good reason for doing it, because everything has an expiration date.

Students are easy.

Being a student is the easiest excuse to explain why you are a barista or a delivery driver. A recent college graduate who works at Starbucks has potential. He is getting his life together.

Graduate two years ago and still work at Starbucks? What happened? Did you decide coffee was your real passion?

We need to be doing something other than work with our lives so when your date is talking about you to his friends, you sound good, at least on paper or at the very least better than his ex-boyfriend. Oh how gays love guys who are involved.

[“This guy volunteers where? Oh He is a keeper.”]

When it comes to dating there are two types of men: the men we want, and the men we can get.

Of course you know what I am talking about because your last date probably fell into the latter category.

But don’t write your date off as frumpy just yet.

Everyone knows good jobs take time and great jobs take effort. There is a reason you are splitting the bill at dinner. There is a reason they had to show up in their work clothes. There is a reason their car is making that awful sound. There is a reason they live in a room and not an apartment or house. They could be going through an increasingly popular recession inspired “rough patch.”

Wait, so what are they doing on a date?

Goodnight

xo