Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (23 page)

They are because you can get away with the former and you’ll lose your job at a dinky real estate website if you attempt the latter.

But it seems to me that a lot of the most uncool stuff happening around our country isn’t occurring anywhere in the South. Let’s pick two recent examples: the Ariel Castro sex dungeon in Cleveland and the Kermit Gosnell abortion house of horrors in Philly.

Both are not in the South. Both are in actual “cities”—places where people have full sets of teeth and pedigree dogs you carry when you’re shopping.

I didn’t pick those two horrible events out of thin air. I picked them because both abysmal stories unfolded in cities leisurely. These crimes occurred unabated for, like, ever.

How does that happen? Seriously, do you think you could run a rape dungeon in the South for a decade? I doubt it. People tend to visit their neighbors, hang around, and
know
the turf. I would expect in the South, as well, they’d pretty much glom on fast if an abortionist was murdering living, breathing kids. Southern hospitality means looking out for one another. Sure, they know when to mind their own business. But they also have a tight-knit community, often centered on a church. Some might call it nosy, but that nosiness can be lifesaving.

As once-vaunted cities decay and rust (the list is longer than my bar bill), and their once-bustling populations exit to safer places, we are left with urban dead zones—vast spaces where the people who live there keep to themselves. These are cities predicated on not making eye contact. Ever. We create invisibility for criminality by averting our own gazes.

An entire season’s plot of the HBO show
The Wire
was devoted to how gangs could dump bodies in abandoned houses in Baltimore, simply because
no one
noticed. Right now, Detroit is considering using goats and sheep to eat the overgrown grass swamping the desolate and deserted streets, avenues once populated by families. It’s not a city; it’s a postapocalyptic petting zoo. It’s not the South that’s uncool; it’s the tragic urban wastelands created by decades of liberal cronyism and corruption. Japan didn’t kill Detroit. Try Kwame Kilpatrick. The left has destroyed more cities than Godzilla.

On to Cleveland: How could Ariel Castro get away with his house of horrors for so long? Or his neighbor, too, who—months later—got charged with 4 counts of aggravated murder, 173 counts of rape, and 115 counts of kidnapping? Elias Acevedo Sr., who lived doors down from Castro, is accused of abusing three women for years.
What the hell is wrong with this place
? Ingrained in the city
life is this: If you see something, don’t say anything. The South was built on manners. In the North, it’s built on mayhem. In Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, the populations are sitting ducks for predators who prowl unabated because the neighborly concern of the South does not exist.

There is nothing sadder or more sickening than the Kermit Gosnell story. If you read it as fiction—an abortion doctor snapping the spines of weeping babies—you’d think it’s the plot for a
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
sequel. But it’s not Texas. It’s Philadelphia. There was no one there watching, worrying, or acting on a concern for others in that story.

This, in part, explains why suddenly the South seems so damn appealing, if still uncool. The South, in my mind, is the new black.

The neighbors there may have a funny drawl, but they won’t turn away when you scream for help. If that’s uncool, sign me up.

As the sibling of three sisters, I’m an expert on bad boyfriends. I saw every kind. Druggies. Jocks. Tennis players. Ruby Tuesday waiters. But growing up, girls are always told by their dads, brothers, and uncles to steer clear of the riffraff. The bad guys traffic in cool, mimicking the bad-boy persona glamorized in movies. Shorthand: a walking sulk. Your father, if he was smart, terrorized them with a glance.

Here’s what dads know: Cool is alluring when you’re young, but it’s not the best choice for marriage. When a man or woman settles down, they are instinctively programmed to seek out the mate that provides for them over the long term.

Yes, I know “provides” is some sexist code word for “misogynistic lady-hating bastard,” but that’s only because feminists made it so. Providing for someone is a sacrifice, and it’s mutually selfish. That’s the pact. You’re a team and you provide for each other. And then, later, provide for a family. True, it sets limits to other behaviors: You can’t stay out all night doing lines of coke anymore (well, unless you’ve got a nanny who wipes down
the mirror). Overall, though, the “settling down” thing is a good thing. It creates a long-term solution for something that requires a long-term solution: the mailing of your genes into the future, safely. It’s actually kind of cool. And it’s also pretty hard. Sometimes I think the reason why it’s denigrated so much is not that it’s dorky but that it’s difficult. You can never be perfect at it, so why bother with it at all? You’ll argue with your wife, your kids will annoy you, and it’s just easier to wake up in the morning with a hangover and a hooker than with a three-year-old bouncing on your bed demanding pancakes shaped like unicorn heads. (Some things you never grow out of.) Although I know a lot of cool dads who manage to be married and still have fun (or perhaps they’re just good actors). It takes the concentration, compartmentalization, and endurance of a pro athlete.

But our culture paints a picture of the stable earner husband as sooo boring (uncool). For a woman to link up with him is emotionally more devastating than the physical consequences reaped from hooking up with a freethinking activist with substance abuse problems. Face it, the paragons of pop culture (editors, artists, directors, reflexologists) really think you’d be better off marrying a goateed gun-running meth-head than the goofy husband parodied in every sitcom or crime drama. In Dick Wolf’s world of
Law & Order
, it was almost certain that the well-to-do husband was a murderous pedophile, played by Rob Lowe’s less successful brother. The fact that I can’t remember his name tells you I’m drunk.

Hollywood likes to think it bears no responsibility for changes in society, yet that doesn’t explain why it feels so strongly about calling whatever it makes “art.” Their livelihoods are predicated on people
believing
they influence your life. Especially when the same messages are delivered over and over again for years.

Which is why whenever I want to make an important point about something, I immediately refer to the movie
Grease
. In the 1978 film, Olivia Newton-John plays a Goody Two-shoes Sandy Olsen, who inevitably transforms into a leather-clad sexpot. It’s understood that leather thigh-highs are cooler than saddle shoes. Leather is shorthand for sex. But it’s also a declaration. It signifies that everything that came before was stupid and that risky behavior trumps sanity and safety.

But where does this transformation from prim to precarious lead? What happens when you abandon traditionally boring goody-goody behavior for recklessness and “freedom”? In my mind, ironically, it leads to dependence. By sacrificing one kind of system of provision, you are forced to embrace another. And the new one is a lot less nurturing.

That sacrifice leads directly to single women embracing big government and voting for it more and more. Apparently, rebelling against your stern upbringing seems cool, but blindly taking from the government isn’t. At least Mom and Dad and a husband really do honestly love you.

The original purpose of government—any government—is safety. That’s why people banded together ten thousand years ago. Today, so many of us take safety for granted that the government has gone from protection provider to love provider. But it’s more than that. In changing government from Mars to Venus, we’ve undermined Mars. He’s neutered, flaccid (especially if he went to Princeton). That’s the real problem, in the most basic terms. Government is spending all its money on a plethora of programs that do not really provide love or companionship. Plus, at some point the government won’t be able to provide protection anymore either. The resources won’t be there. Government won’t be there for you when the neighbors’ meth-head son climbs in
your bedroom window. Nor will it be there when the Islamist or anarchists or Putin or whoever goes medieval on America. People have grown falsely secure. Which means they slept through even more of history classes than I did.

Being a single woman, like being a single man, can be pretty awesome. The freedom to do what you want is invigorating. But for many, it’s a dead end, spiritually, morally, and financially. That’s because most single women do not have the luxury of being Olivia Newton-John, or Madonna, or Lady Gaga. Hell, they’re not even Kathy Griffin (a good thing). No, they’re just some girl who made some bad decisions, and on the precipice of forty is now staring at a cat and a worn-out woman’s magazine promising her eight steps to better self-esteem. Sure, she’s got the birth control and the abortions covered, but being childless and single isn’t as cool as promised. A desire to be cool, or accepted as cool by those who convinced you it’s superior, leaves you where we all end up: alone. You’re just there a heck of a lot sooner.

We tend to forget that one type of woman is still up for ridicule: the virgin. In the pantheon of uncool, they’re no better off than bearded ladies at the circus—and as rare. When you actually hear about a female virgin, it’s usually making headlines as a freakish anomaly. “You wouldn’t believe who’s a virgin,” the story screams, and then it treats the female like a frog being dissected in a lab by a group of gum-smacking students. A female virgin (especially if she’s attractive) is the modern woolly mammoth: usually found frozen, intact, in the Arctic. It used to be that doing something against the grain was the mark of a cool person. If the activity was something that rebelled against the rigid structure of society, it would be. And well, yeah, I guess it is. But the media refuses to see it that way. It’s no coincidence that
so many men decry virgins. The shorthand for the mockery is really, “Thanks for nothing, sweetie.”

You want to see a confused magazine editor? To induce the kind of cognitive dissonance that results in a
Scanners
-like head explosion? Pitch him or her a story about a hot, young, successful virgin. You’ll quickly find that editor’s mental hard drive approximating a Fukushima meltdown.

In the world of sex, alternative sexual practices are championed if they involve masks, restraints, and multiple partners. But having no partners at all? That’s the butt of withering jokes. Take the last summer Olympics, where an Olympic hurdler (and a really cute one at that) named Lolo Jones became the center of attention because of her creepy, abnormal lifestyle. In an interview on an HBO program, she admitted she was a virgin. A freakish being who decided she was not having sex until she had got a husband, because of her religious faith. Wow, a media twofer: religious
and
a virgin. Of course HBO promoted the heck out of her anomalies. The woman was suddenly the Olympian equivalent of a live yeti who plays the ukulele.

She made a choice. But it’s a choice a feminist hates to hear, which I never understand. Feminists prefer to view virgins as people who are repressed rather than a smart person avoiding the mistakes made by her peers. Shouldn’t they be saluting this girl for not falling prey to the male pig? Shouldn’t they be shouting, “Right on, sister!” to Lolo, since she’s
not
giving it to the man? Shouldn’t her strength, her independence, be championed?

The same press that idolizes people with dangerous lifestyles and destructive habits views Lolo as a goofball, despite the fact that her lifestyle is infinitely healthier than all the screwups around her. Furthermore, the press elevates those who adopt
healthy lifestyles in the areas of fitness and nutrition. But, if you play it totally safe—sexually, for the sake of a sound mind and body—then you’re actually
unhealthy
. Think about it: If an athlete says she eats nothing but organic vegetables and fresh fish, an interviewer would be like, “Yeah, me too! We’re so cool!” But say, “I’m saving myself till marriage,” and that’s oddly toxic. It’s the kind of logic that makes food products more expensive when they leave
out
an ingredient. It’s a scam, folks.

So where’s the danger in this? Well, any young girl watching how Lolo is portrayed might come away with the idea that having scruples is silly. If you’re having thoughts about sex when you’re in high school, and girls who abstain are viewed as freakishly uncool, then what are you going to do? Your inclination, if you don’t have a strong mom and dad, is to get the whole thing over with, with anyone, including a middle-aged talk show host who can buy you Zimas. (They still make Zima, right?) Being a virgin is a scarlet V, so you must lose it so you’re no longer freakishly uncool. I think this explains most premature loss of virginity. It’s obviously the same for guys too.

And so the concept of a great-looking woman in her late twenties saving herself for marriage seems as incongruent as a manatee in heels, and now a whole bunch of young girls might feel that way about their virginity too, especially young black women. Not that they are at risk or anything, of course.

In a book that celebrates Free Radicals, you can and should learn something by taking a deeper look into Jones’s life. Here is a woman whose incredible self-control led her on a path to ridiculous achievement. She is in the fucking Olympics (not the “fucking Olympics”). Do you know any Olympians offhand? No. They don’t socialize, they train. And they’re rare for a reason. They make choices that allow for success. They create an athletic life
that requires hard work, without temptation of weaker types who might mock them for their diligence (sounds familiar, no?). The path to glorious achievement was uninterrupted by all the crap that our insidious, shallow culture deems as cool or edgy. She adopted the hardest path and pretty much blew through the first part of her life without the usual bullshit the rest of us get mired in. Do you think she could train up to her level if she spent her weekends wrestling a has-been actor from
Entourage
in the backseat of a leased BMW? (This is why I never medalled in curling.)