Fuck you, Dan.

I love you.

Winking Redux

In a post I made a few weeks ago, I discussed a conversation I had with my family about men winking at women in public and the ways that sort of behavior bolsters the harmful and toxic environment the patriarchy creates for both men and women. My intent in discussing winking was to open up a broader conversation about the nature of personal space in public and what I've perceived as many men's feeling of entitlement to infringe on the personal space of women. My thinking was that this conversation might lead to another conversation about how these small, seemingly insignificant breaches of personal space are part and parcel of a cultural atmosphere that is generally hostile to women. I didn't expect my anecdote would lead to much more than some civil discourse, but I didn't think a small discussion was an unreasonable expectation.

However, what I ended up doing was opening up a conversation with a bunch of crybabies about whether or not it is okay to wink at people. Let me come clean: I winked at someone like two weeks ago, while I was waiting tables at the diner. I was bringing a couple of regulars their check when one of them said to me, "can you actually add two small coffees to go?" I said, "how about instead I just bring you some to go cups for the refills I was about to pour you?" Then I winked, and dropped the check on the table. Someone let Andrea Dworkin know that my feminist ally badge needs to be revoked.

(Trigger warning for discussion of rape below the break.)

I can't figure out how to black out my website because I am bad at the Internet.

But pretend I did, okay?

BREAKING NEWS: Mediocre Pizza Parlor ROCKY'S II Is Still Mediocre.

 

I just want to remind everyone that Rocky's II, a pizza shop I reviewed in September of 2010, is probably still exactly the same as I said it was then. I wouldn't know because I haven't been back there because why would I go back to a place I didn't totally love? But the real question is this: why am I bothering to mention this right now? There are hundreds of mediocre pizzerias that are probably still mediocre, so why am I singling out Rocky's II?

It's because this weird thing happened the other day. I loaded up my email and it was mostly a handful of Slice Harvester comments. This is something I'm slowly growing accustomed to, but not that strange these days. This stack of comments were all Anonymous and were all for Rocky's II. The first one came in at 5:23 am and simply said "LOVE ROCKY'S PIZZA." That is innocuous enough, I guess. Some drunk dude got on the website and looked up his favorite place and felt compelled to let me know how he felt about it.

My mother is very proud right now.

Slice Harvester: MyFoxNY.com

Pizza talk from my kid sister.

I am in Miami partying with my awesome girlfriend's awesome family and didn't have anything prepared to post today, but then my sister sent me this email, so she'll be the guest contributor this week and then next week it'll be back to me, in New York, maybe talking about pizza but likely just complaining about something I saw on cable that made me hate men. Anyway, here is my sister:

So I was starving when I got off work today, really in the mood for pizza, and you have to remember that I work at the end of the world all the way in West Chelsea and there is literally nothing to eat near me. In fact I eat the same disappointing salad for lunch EVERY DAY.

Still not talking about pizza!

Who cares? I was never really talking about pizza in the first place, that was just how I tricked all of you into caring what I had to say about other stuff, like Wyclef and making music. Today I want to address all the straight men in the audience. To my other readers, read this over and see if it's worth passing on to a straight man in your life. I am not trying to exclude any of you, but I think we need to have a collective "Dude, seriously."

Recently my father and I went to go see his father and take him to a doctor's appointment, take him out out to lunch, get him some groceries, etc. (Status report: the old man is doing just fine.) We went to Whole Foods to buy him some cheese blintzes and ruggelah, and in the car driving over to his house, my dad said, "if I was a single guy I would go to Whole Foods to meet women."
"And why is that?"
"Didn't you notice," he said, "the place was full of single women. Well, maybe not single women, but it was full of women. Some of them had to be single." I hadn't noticed.
"Okay, so, how would you go about meeting these single women, or determining if they're single?" I was only half involved in the conversation because I was reading a NY Times article on my phone.
He shrugged. "I dunno... I would bump carts by accidentally or something." As you can tell, it's been a long time since my dad's been single.
"Don't you think they'd see right through that?" I asked.
"Sure, but if they were interested they'd see through it and know that I was interested and if not they would go about their day and I would go about mine and nothing would really be that different."
 "You don't think or care that they might be annoyed by the intrusion?"
"What are you supposed to do, never talk to a stranger because they might be annoyed by the intrusion? I am intruded upon 500 times a day, it happens. We live in a world with other people. Sometimes we have to interact with them."
And so on.