What Boys Like
“Yo deseo un café.”
I use this sentence to try to explain to D, my coworker, the subtle difference between wishing for myself (“I would like a coffee”) and wishing for another (as in, “I wish you a good weekend”). She’s taking Spanish at school, so Spanish, the language, comes up a lot in our conversation. She’s trying to wish me a good weekend. En Español:
“Ahh.” And then, “Tu deseo… tienes… este… wait, don’t tell me… un fin de semana. Is that right?”
Uhhm…
I write down one of the many possible ways of wishing someone a good weekend in Spanish:
“(Yo) (te) deseo que pases un buen fin de semana. The words in parentheses are implied in the rest of the sentence so you don’t have to say them, but you can.”
“Ahh.” As if to say, “I never would’ve guessed that.”
They probably haven’t taught you that yet, I thought.
“They haven’t taught us that yet,” she added.
Nice to know when someone is on the same page with you, even if it is just about hoping for a good weekend. En Español.
So after this, I decide to stop by the local Barnes + Noble—there are at least three mondo bookstores (two B+Ns, one Borders) along my route—on my way back home from the Globe. (I use almost any excuse to make this stop, whenever my car happens to be in their vicinity. It’s like a sickness with me.) I think to skim through the Languages section for something like a Descriptionary, but in Spanish, on D’s behalf. At first nothing but, true to form, off near the “Gulf Arabic” language aids, I find what I seek. It turns out there are dozens of these books, not only for Spanish but many other languages. (“Che cosa è una mucca?”) What I couldn’t find were any language tools to help you learn Russian without using the Russian/Cyrillic alphabet, say: like, how am I supposed to learn it if I can’t read the letters? Then it hit me. Duh. Learning to read in your target language is probably a good way of picking it up. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been watching too much late-night TV (“Lose weight without exercise!” “Get rich without working!” “Girls jumping on trampolines!”… errr, wait…).
Altruistic rationalization for stopping at the bookstore: check. Now, on to my fun.
It turns out that, actually, I’m here sort-of on business. You see, earlier in the evening, MM had dropped by the Globe and we had got to talking. She, being a Mac user like me, had hit the same wall that pretty much all Mac users face at one time or another: Software X runs only on Windows PCs and no, the powers-that-be are not about to chip a nail to accommodate a few Mac-using crybabies, so sorry. So I suggested a couple of possible solutions, among them quasi-magical VirtualPC emulator software to cure what ailed her. And there was much rejoicing. Well, in the course of that conversation my alternate life as a web and print graphic designer was revealed to her (I didn’t realize I hid it so well), so… maybe I would like to bid on her company’s website makeover and printed guide? Would I ever! So, in the interest of making an informed bid, I thought I would research my customer and their target audience. So off to B + N I go.
Did I mention MM’s company is the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But until today the bulk of my impression of how gays are portrayed in media came from the NBC shitcom, Will and Grace. Oh, and that Cartman line in South Park about “gay cowboys eatin’ puddin’,” but that was more a comment about independent film. I haven’t even watched Queer As Folk. And I’m too young to remember Billy Crystal in Soap. So I started with the magazines… not enough time to really go into the books tonight but it was a start.
And?
I was dismayed (relieved?) to observe that gay advertising is just about as subtle as hetero advertising. That is to say, subtle as a brick. Pandering to the lowest-common-denominator consumer impulses in their target audience. Personally I try to create advertising that addresses and answers my audience’s need without resorting to lowball manipulation (which is probably why I’m not employed by an ad agency at the moment), so this sort of thing bothers me professionally. So, uhmmm, there I was, holding some magazine practically falling over itself trying to cram as many perfectly ripped hunks in underwear as each page could sustain (to be fair, this mag was the male gay equivalent of Maxim, so it was just being true to its mission statement. I think), all the while contemplating ways in which I might portray the gay angle in such a cool and explosively creative thing as a film festival… when from somewhere at the periphery of my attention bubble I hear:
“Which of these magazines do you think teen girls read?”
I blinked. Did I just hear that? I looked up from my fest-o-flesh. A woman. Medium height, medium build, medium brown short hair, medium age. Faint red streaks on her forehead created by continuous flipping back of her medium-length bangs in the course of punctuating every sentence.
“I want to show my students (‘Ahh, a teacher! Okay, you won me over. Go on.’) where many of our gender stereotypes originate. Which of these do you think are typical?” She gestured at a huge assortment of magazines, each of whose covers featured one perfectly flawless (courtesy of Photoshop: trust me) young woman sporting a witheringly radiant smile (ditto), decked in the latest oh-my-gawd threads and nearly buried in story titles, pull-quotes, teasers, all in color schemes so bright they hurt the eye. For a while there I literally stared at the array dumbfounded, honestly not being able to distinguish one mag from another. Then, an epiphany.
“Where’s Tiger Beat?” The really trashy, quasi-tabloid magazines I’d grown to associate with the age group in question were missing from this cornucopia of fluorescent (p)ink. If anything epitomized the “cult” in culture for this set, it had to be something like Tiger Beat. Or was I just so out of touch that I’d missed that whole segment being superseded by the arguably more sophisticated fare that now assaulted my eyes? (Well, to their credit, production values on these new teen magazines are obscenely high. We’re talking almost artwork-quality here. They make the DuPont Registry look homely.) I concluded that B+N catered their magazine rack to the people likely to darken the doors of a bookstore, ie, the less illiterate among us, so in order to find the lowest-of-the-lowbrow in teen culture it occurred to me that a supermarket—where those other champions of American literature, the supermarket tabloids, may be found—would probably be a better place to look. I cheerfully informed her of my observation.
She would have none of it. Apparently, ten minutes to eleven pm, she had decided to make one last stand at the Clearasil Corral and she was not about to leave without her perfect three (out of about 30) teen girl magazines, and neither was I. So she began making helpful suggestions:
“Do you think this one is good?” A blur of intense blue, green, pink, orange…
I recognized this tone. It’s the tone of a client who made up her mind hours ago and was just calling to hear you agree with her. I agreed with her. She smiled a medium smile. Progress!
I put down my gay mag and resigned myself to the process.
“How about this one?” I nodded again. Providentially, a bona-fide teen girl materialized at the scene, one would think, hoping we’d move over a bit so she could browse through “her” section. I sort-of-led my teacher-friend’s eye in the teen’s direction, as if to say, “hey, there’s a teen: ask her.” She followed my lead like a ballroom dancer and, with the help of her newfound inside source’s wisdom, quickly found the perfect three magazines (no Tiger Beat, alas) for her class tomorrow. God help them.
This would have been my moment to make a quick and graceful exit, had I taken it. I didn’t. Perhaps stunned into inaction by the recent bludgeoning my eyes had endured, I tarried one breath too long, and was caught back in my teacher-friend’s orbit. It was time for the moral of the story:
“It doesn’t matter how you feel, you know.”
No points for eloquence there, teech.
But what she had to say was good. It was solid. It doesn’t matter how you feel. Emphasis on feel. Our petty moods shouldn’t rule our lives because, after only a short while, the moods will have passed and nothing of substance will have come of them.
You’re preaching to the choir, teech. Like I can stop you. You’re on a roll, so what you must do, do quickly. I nodded and smiled as I listened.
Life is not about accommodating our every little discomfort, it’s not about taking an anti-depressant to “fix” a bad mood, or getting a boob job. And it’s certainly not about being led by the nose, like most of us are. Not only is it not about making real discomforts go away, it’s also not about fulfilling ad-created needs by buying, or about worrying whether your lipstick matches your purse.
Because every serious conversation these days seems to be required by law to mention September 11, she stated that how each of us “feels” about the tragedy also doesn’t matter. In my mind, I continued the thought: true, because if all we do about it is “feel”—and let’s face it, that’s what most of us will ever do about it—then our “feeling” is pointless. It’s a vain and self-serving pat on our collective backs. It’s us saying, “There, there, you’ve suffered soooo much from the trauma of watching those ugly things on TV. You deserve some comforting. Why don’t you put a flag sticker on your car and go about your daily life?”
But if we disavow this notion, if we acknowledge that the universe doesn’t revolve around us and our little moods, then we are truly free to go make a real impact upon the world. Because that’s what life is about: impacting the world positively, in real, palpable ways, whether great or small. Right on, sister.
I hope that my teacher-friend’s three perfect teen girl magazines have the desired effect. I think she’s onto something and her heart is in the right place. I hope she manages to open some eyes among her students. It can only do them good.
And this is why I like to frequent the bookstores. Creepy, greasy little old man stalker notwithstanding. (No, I am not making it up.)
(Oh, hey, feel free to disagree with me on all this. I’m not preaching. I’m just saying…)
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