500 Days Of Summer

movie still from 500 Days Of Summer

“500 Days Of Summer” is a romantic comedy, sorta, kinda.

The “Summer” in the title refers to the love interest of Tom, an architect by training working as a greeting card author. He meets Summer at work where she gets hired as an assistant to his boss.

The movie is fairly uncreative. I could see bits and pieces of other romantic comedies in this film. Yet, it had one big difference that makes me wish I saw this film when I was in my early twenties.

The star of this movie, the romance, failed.

Tom does indeed fall in love. Summer seems to be having fun too as the movie takes you through the usual scenes of the young, urban and in love frolicking through the big city. Toward the end of the frolicking scenes Summer tells Tom that she isn’t looking for anything serious. They continue the frolicking and begin sleeping with each other shortly afterward.

All seems well, but Summer refuses to call Tom her “boyfriend” insisting that she doesn’t believe in defining relationships.

One day, she disappears from the job and disappears from Tom’s life, devastating him. She reappears months later at the wedding of a common friend from work. They talk for a long time, they dance romantically and she invites him to party only for Tom to discover that she is recently engaged.

Months after that Summer finds Tom sitting in his favorite spot in a park. At last, she is honest. He asks her why she danced with him at the wedding. “Because I wanted to” is her only answer. She goes on to tell him that she learned from him and that she now does believe in love. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in defined relationships, she is married now, aferall, she just wasn’t sure that she was in love with Tom when they were together.

Oh man, where have we heard this bullshit before?

My first encounter with this idea of “not labeling relationships” was with a woman I had a crush on, Beth. Like Summer she didn’t like “labels” or “defined relationships”. Like summer she went on to have a very labeled and defined relationship with a guy she wanted as a boyfriend.

I was talking with a gal pal about this movie. The gal pal told me that she too did not like “labeling relationships” and didn’t believe in the idea of a boyfriend or primary guy in her life. When I reminded her that she recently had a boyfriend with whom she broke up with and an ex-husband she told me that they were “exceptions” and that she still held firm to her beliefs.

Translation?

When a woman tells you that she is not looking for anything serious or that she doesn’t like to “label relationships” what she really means is that you aren’t the right man for her.

She may be bullshitting you because she doesn’t have enough character to tell you flat out or she may be bullshitting you because she is not ready for the good times to end yet.

She also may not be bullshitting you at all. From her view she may be telling you the truth, but she just doesn’t know herself or life that well yet. No insult to anyone, we all find ourselves in spots in our life where we really don’t know what will work for us to make us happy.

I’m chagrined to write that after the lesson Beth taught me so long ago I went on to be made a fool of again. I believed that some people cared for me when they would not call me their boyfriend, citing their unique and erudite philosophy of “not labeling relationships”. I believed that “not looking for anything serious” could change…..courtesy loads of sappy romantic comedies I saw as a child.

Eventually I learned.

I would have liked to have seen this film a long time ago. I may have learned more quickly. I hope many people, especially young guys who are dumb enough to fall for this BS and sensitive enough for it to really hurt, see this movie.

Bottom line:
Exceptions aside, if someone isn’t looking for something serious, nothing serious is going to happen…..with you. If someone will not call you a BF or a GF after a certain amount of time in a relationship it isn’t going to happen. Move on, now.

Many people will let you go on believing something that will cause you pain just to avoid the momentary discomfort of telling you that they aren’t interested in you.

Hume

Going through some early early 90s stuff. I found this quote I saved from my grad school days. Dam. Was I radical or what?

“When we run over our libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

– David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Self Made Man

Picture of the book "Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent

 

“Self Made Man” is about journalist Norah Vincent’s year and a half living as a man. She got the idea after cross dressing for an evening with a drag king friend and seeing a reality show with a similar theme.

Vincent states that her book should be considered as being similar to a subjective “travel log” kept while taking a long journey abroad. She makes it clear that her book isn’t to be taken as a definitive treatise about all men. It is about her interpretation of her experiences, only.

I’ve seen so many reviews that evaluated her book in the exact opposite manner to her disclaimer and I enjoyed her book so much that I wanted to make that clear before writing about her book further.

Norah Vincent’s journey begins with choosing “Ned” to use as a name, working out to put on fifteen pounds, clothes shopping in drag, getting coaching from a makeup artist friend and getting lessons from a voice coach.

Thus, “Ned” was created. As Ned, Norah Vincent joined a blue collar bowling team, frequented strip clubs, dated straight women, lived in a monastery, held down a high pressure commission only door-to-door sales job and finally joined a Robert Bly styled men’s group.

The first thing that struck me about Norah Vincent’s book was just how feminine her narrative was. As you can see from the picture of her book above, Vincent’s appearance fits the stereotype of a manish lesbian. Indeed, in her book Vincent herself mentioned that all of her life she had been considered a masculine woman, but to her surprise, as “Ned”, she was found to be a little bit effeminate.

My favorite chapter was the one Vincent wrote about dating straight women disguised as “Ned”. Women’s frustrations about the dating scene are expressed copiously all over the place. TV talk shows, movies, magazines, books and even blogs. It is rare that you ever hear men’s frustrations with the dating scene expressed or hear those expressions given legitimacy. I experienced great joy in reading a woman give her account of how she experienced the same things that men do in dating. It was refreshing. In my opinion this chapter was one of the most insightful parts of the entire book. If I started quoting the good bits from that chapter I would end up posting the entire chapter. I think both single women and single men could benefit greatly by reading it. I will settle for posting one quote from that chapter, which I think is one of the most insightful out of the book:

pages 105 – 106

“Perhaps women have been guilty of hubris in this regard. We think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emotions, just as women do — it’s just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women’s eyes and ears. Tannen was right enough on that point. Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn’t there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.”

( the bolding is mine )

I also found her chapter on her time in the Robert Bly styled men’s group fascinating. I have long had the prejudice that such groups are silly and I had my suspicions mostly confirmed through Vincent posing as Ned. I found this chapter interesting because it was in this chapter I thought she struggled most with her bias as a woman, her bias from her education as a feminist and her strong desire as a journalist for intellectual honesty.

She wanted the leader of the group, a man of imposing stature, to turn out to be a narrow minded, angry, monster. When he turned out not to be, Vincent was still scared of and resentful of him. Yet at the same time in this chapter, she was being fair to both him and his group. Her internal struggle was fascinating to read.

Despite the subject of the book very little is actually written about crossdressing. There is however, this fascinating quote:

page 187

I was walking taller in my dress clothes. I felt entitled to respect, to command it and get it in a way that Ned never had in slob clothes. The blazer neatly covered any chest or shoulder worries I had, filing me out square and flat in all the right places, allowing me to act with near perfect confidence in my disguise. A suit is an impenetrable signifier of maleness every bit as blinding as the current signifiers of attractiveness in women: blond hair, heavy makeup, emaciated bodies and big tits. A woman can be downright ugly on close inspection, and every desirable part of her can be fake, the product of bleach, silicone and surgery, but if she’s sporting the right signifiers, she’s hot.

I can remember having the same thought in Junior High seeing guys go ape over girls who didn’t have the most pretty faces or interesting bodies, but who had blond hair, intense make-up and large breasts.

In her final chapter Norah Vincent recounts her struggle returning to her normal life after living as “Ned” for 18 months. She mentions that a number of times she let herself get lax in her disguise. Forgetting to apply her fake 5’oclock shadow, forgetting to strap her breasts down with her intentionally undersized sports bra or not wearing the most hyper masculine clothing. Yet, people still saw and treated her as a man.

Vincent credits this to living her role internally, she “became” Ned. After she became “Norah” again in her habits and in her thoughts, people began recognizing her as a woman again.

I thought this was an unappreciated discovery. Vincent in her stint as a door to door salesman also discovered that raw confidence in the face of uncertainty and a willingness to “take control of the situation” could turn failure into success in the absence of any other resources.

I think the golden lesson Vincent didn’t see as gold was that psychologically investing yourself into who you want to be can do a tremendous amount in taking you at least partially there. I’m not saying that you will perfectly reach any particular goal, but that if you throw enough against the wall, something will stick.

All in all, I would say “Self Made Man” was a fun, fascinating and thought provoking book to read. Norah Vincent is a professional writer and it shows. Her writing is skillful, her tone is down to Earth. Vincent had her biases, but she made a palpable struggle to be intellectually honest.

There are many more fascinating aspects to this book that I didn’t mention. I barely scratched a fraction of a percent. I recommend it to everyone.