The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: NY

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New York Wimmen • Dean Borok New York City has got the loudest, pushiest women in the world. Mostly, they have got trumpet voices that can break glass like a Memorex commercial. I used to believe that all that screaming hysteria was counterproductive. My idea was to draft these broads into federal charm schools to teach them to talk like normal women and use the traditional female qualities of charm to achieve their aims.

In addition, they would learn what to do with their hair, and learn not to go into the subway with sleeveless blouses exposing huge glops of roll-on deodorant when they lift their arms to hold the rail. Ugh! It’s not an appealing package. It’s not exactly a European runway show, y’know what I mean?

The prevailing view held among New York girls is: I’m tough. Why should I resort to decadent European subterfuge when I can get right in your face and scare the shit out of you with my big mouth? God gave me a powerful set of lungs and two fists. You don’t like it? Forget you!

Now, like so much of female delirium, this used to amount to a bunch of deluded nonsense. They are never going to get the edge on a 220 lb. male dummy with pierced ears and a fistful of silver rings. Nevertheless, in the last few years, due to the enhanced police procedures established by Police Commissioners William Bratton and Ray Kelly, most of the bad guys are in jail cells up in Poughkeepsie and Ossining, turning New York City into a mostly demilitarized zone. This has opened up vast opportunities for the biggest mouth to prevail. And nobody can touch the women of New York for bone-chilling loudmouth screaming.

You think I’m kidding? Then you obviously haven’t seen the Internet video showing ex-Mets superstar Art Shamsky being chased down the street by his ex-wife, Kim, who is being forced by court order to pay him millions in alimony after he divorced her, citing (what else?) hysterical screaming fits. She is getting a taste of what women have been doing to men since time immemorial, taking them to the cleaners. And she is finding it a very bad fit.

"You degenerate piece of garbage,!" she is seen to be screaming. "I had to have my uterus removed because of the unholy sexual diseases you transmitted to me, you bastard!" In court papers she filed against him, Kim Shamsky accuses Art Shamsky of engaging in sexual improprieties involving women, men and any various combination of the denizens of the Bronx Zoo.

Hey, why not? All’s fair in love and war. The days of Ralph Kramden threatening Alice with a one-way flight to the moon are anthropological history. Art Shamsky is running away and not even talking back. Only, this peaceable reaction on the part of the men is not being reciprocated by a lessening of the volume on the part of the females. Indeed, they have seized the initiative. Translation: the women win. Men are anthropologically too stupid to learn how to talk back. I see the evidence of men’s brutish incompetence everywhere I look. The women have got all the money and all the power. The men are getting their salaries attached to pay child support, and they still get daily phone calls from the mothers of their children drafting them into involuntary servitude. "Pick up your daughter from school, you knucklehead, I’m going out with my girlfriends."

I used to do the payroll, and I know how many guys are having their salaries attached to pay child support. It’s not a pretty picture. Men are working two jobs, and they are still broke and living in dingy basement apartments, and sweating it out. It shouldn’t have to be that way. In Scandinavian countries the state picks up the majority of the expenses for bringing up kids in one-parent families. People are always screaming about the population decline and the future projected manpower shortage, but they are allowing kids to suffer and holding a gun to the fathers’ heads.

We are living according to the law of the jungle, rich people being off the hook for paying their fair share for social welfare. They say, "Why should I pay if that guy can’t keep it in his pants?" Well, I’ll tell you why: in a civilized society everybody has to pay to give children a decent life without subjecting the father to a lifetime of slavery. As Hillary Clinton wrote, "It Takes A Village". Forcing one guy to pay the whole cost of a kid from a failed relationship for his entire life, while hedge fund traders are paying taxes at the rate of 15% is an abomination, and the voracious mendacity of some women to intentionally trap guys into a life of servitude just makes it worse.

When times were good, the women were more discriminating about the suckers they chose. In order to get a date you practically needed to have a tee-shirt printed up showing your financial statement. Now that times are tough, any idiot can get a date so long as he has a paying job. Forget about cigarette boats and a house in the Hamptons. The dividing line today is job or no job. But the rule is the same – the girl has got a crowbar to pry you loose from your money. Nothing personal…

You don’t hear too much any more about woman saying "I’m high maintenance" One time I had this ol’girl tell me "I’m high maintenance." I told her, "I got a horse that’s high maintenance". These days women are happy to latch on to any maintenance. Forget about a guy who’s suave and debonair. These days a guy could have an extra foot growing out of his head, but if he’s got a paying job he’s suddenly appealing. A blue collar is all of a sudden a sought-after fashion accessory. Bond traders and bankers are out and butchers are in. Especially butchers: a scientific study from France (where else?) recently showed that female chimpanzees are more inclined to give sex to males who give them meat, which motivates the males to be more aggressive hunters. Give them some meat, and they’ll treat you good. Since our females are themselves not too far removed from the animal kingdom, this is a good reason to show up for your next date with a couple of nice, thick rib steaks instead of clutching a bouquet of useless flowers.
I know I’m not politically correct, but political correctness is going to be the next victim of the economy, as people find they have more pressing issues to worry about. May it die and never return.

As if to add insult to injury, women have also taken over the news media 100%. Every time you pick up a newspaper, you end up getting a lesson in civilized behavior from some nitwit female. From The New York Post, you get: a daily morality lecture from Andrea Peyser reflecting 50 year-old blue collar Queens moral values; a calcified, sclerotic Cindy Adams referring to Icelandic composer-singer-musician Bjork as an immoral "piece of excrement"; Michele Malkin excoriating liberals and waxing nostalgic for the administration of Big Dummy Supremo George W. Bush.

OK, what do you expect? At 50¢ it’s cheaper than a comic book. The Post itself admits it’s a piece of worthless horseshit. Recently, in response to a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled former employee (what other kind is there?), The Post was forced to admit in a court filing that it encouraged its "journalists" to accept graft in order to keep salaries low. It’s pay to play all the way, which is so hysterical about The Post complaining about grafting politicians. That’s what keeps publicists in business, cash payments to Cindy Adams and Page Six to give a favorable plug to a new show or restaurant. Last year, when Yanks slugger Jason Giambi admitted to a web site that the Yanks were prancing around the locker room like a bunch of sissies in gold lamé thong panties, the Post sportswriters killed the story, which is a good joke if I ever saw one, when the Swinebrenner brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledumber, threatened to cut off their free Yankee passes.

But if The Post is a useless piece of fish wrapping, The New York Times is infinitely more invidious because it masquerades as a serious news organ. Never mind that The Times long ago lost its marbles. Controlled by the Sulzberger family. The Times is hemorrhaging money faster than a sieve, and since people under pressure are inclined to say extraordinary things, its editorial policy has adopted a more convoluted grab bag of politically correct constructions than a Prospect Park parenting website is able to conceive. It’s a mess, with female rabbis and gay marriage announcements competing for space with a stable of brain-addled neo-conservative columnists who leave even Republicans holding their heads in amazement.

Naturally, right at the top is a myopic insistence on gender-bending role equality that flies in the face of hundreds of millions of years of sexual evolution. I don’t have anything against sexual equality issues, aside from a distaste for the whole concept of identity politics per se, and the idea that a news organization would attempt to peddle them so aggressively in an effort to mainstream what I essentially believe to be fringe attitudes, I find not only counterproductive but also endlessly tedious. Maybe I have fallen behind the times, but I’m comfortable with the Clinton-era concept of "don’t ask don’t tell" and Obama’s program of civil unions between consenting adults (including men and women, like me and my girlfriend). But The Times, with its unhinged insistence on exploration of new frontiers of social irrelevance, is a total bore.

Maybe the writers there feel bad that they had missed out on the culture wars by playing it too safe, and are now trying belatedly to assert their relevance, even as the rest of us have passed along to something else. Basically, The Times employs mediocre writers of both genders. It’s criteria for hiring staff rest on their academic credentials, an Ivy League diploma seeming to be the standard, even as they admit that due to grade inflation a high grade-point average in school is indicative of nothing more than assiduous attendance in class, which any idiot can achieve.

But The Times’ stated goal of leveling the playing field in favor of promoting women and minorities has led to some astounding gaffes, which reflect on the reliability of their reporting and commentary. Jayson Blair, the reporter exposed for deranged fabrication of front-page news stories comes to mind. More recently, the bizarre case of Judith Miller, who was found to have acted as a conscious shill for the Bush administration’s campaign of disinformation, published a whole series of fictitious front-page articles relating to Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capacity that The Times endorsed even though she was blatantly deranged. "I do what I want", she bragged.

The Times was finally forced to unceremoniously kick Miller out the back door, even as they were covering up another tacky story concerning Susan Sachs, the Baghdad bureau chief who, finding herself on the losing of bureaucratic infighting, decided to send some "anonymous" emails to the wives of Times reporters, informing them that their husbands were involved in a little extracurricular hanky-panky with Iraqi women. These "anonymous" missives were traced back to her in about a New York minute, and she as well ended up with boot prints on her butt.

I once had a female colleague who thought she was a freakin genius. She was pushy, and when she spoke she honked like a flock of wild geese flying over Rockaway. She was a typical blowhard New Yorker in the mould of Eliot "I am a fuckin bulldozer" Spitzer.
Just for fun, I asked her, "Did it ever occur to you that you might be able to accomplish more just using intelligence and charm to achieve your goals?"
She replied, "That would be dishonesty".

Naked aggression and coarse intimidation dressed up as honesty and tough love are the standard operating procedures of the day. Remember Sarah Palin’s line about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull terrier being the lipstick? Obama’s rejoinder: dress up a pig with lipstick and it’s still a pig.

Speaking of screaming, pushy females, here is one last example from the hallowed corridors of The New York Times. Managing editor Jill Abramson was reported by Page Six of The Post (it’s gotta be true!) to have gotten into a screaming match at a dinner party with a playwright whose show had been savaged by The Times. "The Times is the arbiter of good taste in New York," she screamed hysterically, which must have done wonders for the digestion of the other diners.

Not long after, this arbiter of good taste was standing in the gutter on West 46th Street, waiting for the light to change and yakking on her cell phone, when she got her foot run over and broken by that ultimate New York status symbol of good taste, a garbage truck! Good taste, give me a break!

Historically, the American female has seen herself as the civilizing influence needed to smooth out the rough edges of American manhood. Where this comes from, I don’t know. It seems to me to be just another puritan punishment exacted to wreck people’s enjoyment of life. Frankly, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. No female qualities visible to me would seem to suggest such an exalted social status. One time, I inadvertently brushed a bleached-blonde suburban Republican woman in a crowded store with a gym bag I was lugging around. She suggested that I apologize to her, but this being New York and sometimes crowded, I ignored her, at which point she started screaming "You motherfucking faggot!" That type of etiquette lesson I can do without.

Now, with the absolute and utter collapse of the triumphalist Anglo-Saxon business model and concomitant social breakdown, our whole concept of social interaction may be due for a reassessment, purely in terms of effectiveness, if not quality of life.

© Dean Borok May 2009
deanyorkave@yahoo.com

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