Is this your husband?

I think I used to be funnier than I am now. I’m not sure if that’s true but it feels true. And I am not exactly sure what happened or when, but it might have something to do with the fact that it’s scarier now to be decidedly anything…out loud. Including satirical blogger, politician or…someone’s husband!

 That’s right, recently someone’s wife made a very public declaration about a certain someone (her husband) doing whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted that she apparently didn’t like…at all! We know this because she lopped off his junk (slang for penis) then ground it into a pulp. Yeeewouch.

 For sure there are more immediate consequences we all face for saying (or doing ) whatever we want, wherever and whenever we want, particularly because more people are watching and listening than ever before. But not since Lorena Bobbitt have we seen so publically such a cruel and heinous act performed by a woman scorned. Typically we witness women one after another “standing by their man”; examples are Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Edwards, and most recently Weiner’s wife (no pun intended). Yet it looks like the tides are turning.  Some women are respecting themselves in a way that makes them simply no longer willing to endorse this bad behavior. Like Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger, and Tiger Woods’ (again no pun intended) now ex-wife. While these reformists have more in common than their husbands’ prophetic surnames, we can only hope this pendulum finds a happy medium to “bone collecting,” and sooner rather than later! Anyway, I don’t want to have to start coming up with nicknames for the results of lopping guys’ Johnsons off, like “He got a Willy Wonka” or “He’s dead meat,” etc. Because, well, it’s just really not funny.

 Still there are some people who seem less concerned about showing lust or desire (or haven’t watched the news lately). Like last week when my husband and I were seated at the bar in a local French bistro.
Keep in mind that the bar is teeny and the restaurant is smack in the middle of a bedroom community. My point is, this is no city bar or local watering hole. So you’re more likely to see a young kid at the bar having a French hamburger than the 3 men behaving badly I am about to describe.

 My husband was still parking the car when the man exactly next to me exclaimed “You’ve got to check this out!” Of course I looked; his not-so-subtle tenor demanded it like a bull horn. I sat there, curious to see what the heck all the hoopla was about, and watched mesmerized while he took his first two fingers and spread the image on his iPhone, exposing (to my horror) some woman’s vaj to his friends. Of course my jaw dropped open and I looked away; Did I really just see what I think I saw? I looked back in disbelief. There it was, now even closer. The guy was waving it around like a first-place ribbon. His two friends seemed stoked with this display of raunch, lust, and desire, and reached for their phones to rustle up their own pics. I think part of me was shocked because these guys looked like men, grown men over 45, well dressed and, I would have imagined, well educated. If I had only heard them I would have guessed they were 12 years old.

  OMG, I say to myself…what the? That’s when my husband walked in. He sat down and we started to talk, but honestly I couldn’t stop listening to this crap on the other side of me. I filled him in about what I just observed and he didn’t believe me, Okay, he thought at minimum I was exaggerating…which, okay, sometimes I do, but in this case I didn’t need to. And I saw his point. Who would believe it if someone told you that three grown, married men were passing pictures of women they have humped or wanted to hump back and forth like pubescent twelve-year-olds who just got a hold of their first Playboy magazine?

 I tried to drop it but it just kept getting worse, and louder! (No, they were not drunk. They were casually drinking…good wine, I might mention.) I was starting to get physically uncomfortable and disgusted. One of the married guys (two were married, one was divorced) was gloating about how this babe he f’ed in high school was trying to connect with him on Facebook, and while he was showing his friends some half-naked pic he asked them if, by the way, they would want to fher too. The other guy started whizzing through his FB account to find a pic of the gal he had just f-ed the night before, and then after he showed her off he fingered through his other “friends” on FB to find the pic of the one he claimed he was about to f tonight. This, my husband heard.

 When I got up to use the ladies room (in which I wanted to vomit), my husband overheard them discussing the affectionate names they have come up with for all this f-ing: He reported when I returned: Two women in one night, a double. Two women on a Friday, then two women on a Saturday night a double-double, and so on. Apparently a double triple was the crowning achievement; something none of them could admit to but all three pathetically aspired to.
 Look, it’s one thing to kiss and tell another to hump and advertise. It’s just bad form, really. And a while most of us have done some crazy/foolish stuff, publicly disrespecting women at any age is unacceptable and is personally where I draw the line. Partially because I have not yet met a married woman—never mind a married person—that I believe would ever want to know that their partner held them in such low regard.

 So naturally I did what anyone would in my position would: I stood up, gallantly took three steps towards my evening bag, plunged my hand in and grabbed my phone. Then I gracefully yet deliberately turned around, leaned into them all and…took their picture. Seeing as they were such big fans of voyeurism I thought they might appreciate that. Now they know in the back of their minds that there are people like me lurking about, hoping to as lovingly but fiercely as possible take a stand for RESPECT and announce with equal candor where and when it needs to be displayed.
 
 No one would dare kid themselves that lust and desire does not visit us all from time to time, yet we do have a choice as adults (one definition in the U.S. of the end of puberty, sadly, is “Persons over forty”) of how we control such impulses. It’s time to put a stop to this vulgar energetic malevolence towards our women, the feminine in us all, and I say now is the time for some respect.

 So instead of haphazardly hanging our dirty laundry in public, choose public places that are more conducive like…say the gutter or a strip club. Or at least try to be mindful that you are indeed in a public place and not everyone might share your taste for the maligned.

 So there you have it; an absolute rant, albeit from my heart. Would love to hear your thoughts and, as I mentioned, especially what you would do if one of these men were your husband?