why can't life be like the movies?

A guy I went to college with tells me a few weeks ago that he always had wanted to kiss me. He never tried, he tells me, because he felt he was “too simple,” he imagined I’d prefer a more “complicated dude.” I was surprised by how astute this was.

The thing is, he’s confessing all of this over IM. I’m flattered, kinda, but it feels cheap. He asks me if I ever thought about it, and I tell him I think I considered it once, but I liked much better how we would just sit on my bed not talking, wasting the late afternoons drinking 40’s of Golden Anniversary and mooning over Morrissey. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I explain that I was pretty bonkers back then, and only liked dudes that made a living out of hurting my feelings. This isn’t a lie, but I don’t tell him the part about how I didn’t consider him a prospect because he was just too dumb for me. That’s the mean part.

I think about how this would have gone down if he had told me over the phone, rather than IM. He gets bold and says he’ll be in town next week, and that I “owe him a kiss.” I read the text over a few times and imagine some grizzly Sam Spade-looking bastard pushing me up against a wall and telling me that. I get turned on. Then I deflate again looking at the screen. I start to feel hot and angry. Am I supposed to be charmed by a dude who tells me he wants to kiss me over the internet? Am I supposed to be charmed by a dude telling me he want to kiss me at all? Why doesn’t he shut up and kiss me? I’m totally bored by his cowardice all of a sudden. “I don’t owe you anything,” I type. I close the window.

Most of my girl friends are hard bummed by how wimpy our dating pool is. My sometimes-lover B. says it is the result of a “feminized” society, that masculinity is denigrated in mainstream culture, and you only have to look to the catalog of limp-dicked fathers from any American sitcom for proof. Masculinity is increasingly recognized as something to be feared, and thus mocked, he says. I think.

Even though it gets my feminist hairs all in a bristle, I think there’s something to his theory. How much, I’m not sure, but sometimes it starts to look like all of what we ascribed to traditional masculinity, the yang, is more applicable to the "empowered female" than any 20-something dude. That can make for some messy identity politics. But no matter how much of a "man's man" the ghost of your lusty dreams is, it's never a good sign when they ask you out (whatever that means) via text message, e-mail, or IM. If you've ever enjoyed the unparalleled crazy to come out over these mediums, you can't help but consider the separate psychic space communication without physical presence takes us to, a realm that's patently PoMoRo--meaning unstable.

All this hyper-connectivity of the modern age seems to be ushering in a pretty brutal death for the art of seduction. Am I a bad girl for wanting to play that game? Can I be a feminist and still want to be ravished? Was Robert Evans really such a bad guy? And should I feel guilty for being such a jerk to wimps? All I know is, there ain’t no steamy film noir starring the internet. It's all about being there.