From Merriam-Webster: of a man: to have casual or illicit sex with a woman or with many women; especially : to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife

From Dictionary.com: (of a man) to make love with a woman one cannot or will not marry; carry on flirtations.

I guess I didn’t have any notion that the term was so gender-specific. Though if I guess using these definitions you could extrapolate that anyone who has illicit sex with a woman or a woman one cannot marry it coud apply to lesbians. But if you look at the word’s origins, it’s pretty clear they meant men:

1737, from Philander, popular name for a lover in stories, drama, and poetry, from Gk. adj. philandros “with love for people,” perhaps mistaken as meaning “a loving man,” from phil- “loving” + andr-, stem of aner “man.” Philanderer “male flirt” is from 1841.

Anyway, it seemed weird after learning all this to call the woman in The Ask a philanderer. So I did what every lazy writer does, I turned to Twitter for the answer.

I got: Slutty, slut, whore, one vote for using the word to describe a woman anyway, and cuckoldy (my favorite). And the comedians on Facebook came up with: Slutting around, Ho’in it up, and Ridiculous. Women are just as likely to collect stamps as men are (which made me laugh, thanks Barrett).

Interesting aside, the origins of cuckold:

Word History: The allusion to the cuckoo on which the word cuckold is based may not be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the nesting habits of certain varieties of this bird. The female of some Old World cuckoos lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving them to be cared for by the resident nesters. This parasitic tendency has given the female bird a figurative reputation for unfaithfulness as well.

Really, I supposed she would be a cuckolding (making her husband a cuckold) but it doesn’t sound as elegant as philandering. Why I was going for elegant, I don’t know. But it is weird that a man gets to be something elegant sounding while a woman ends up being a whore/slut (and I can’t even talk about the bullshit phrase man-whore without my head exploding).

All this is to say that I have decided we need to bring back strumpet. It’s a good, solid word that is ready for a comeback.

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Okay, I will admit upfront that I haven’t put this Crackpot Theory through the rigorous paces most of my Crackpot Theories are subjected to before the great reveal. But, well, I tempted fate by whining about being boring and unbusy which made me incredibly busy with no time for boredom.

This theory of mine has been bubbling in my chest for awhile, taking seed from my weekly Sunday podcast with the OxBoys. The OxBoys love “Star Wars” and most everything to do with it. They also love to tease me mercilessly about my Star-Warsless life. We discuss my apathy towards the movie at least once a month. I tease them about the thousands and thousands of dollars they waste (still) on the movie franchise.

I mean, really. Last week they were mooning over the Tauntaun sleeping bag and how they wished it was real (which apparently ThinkGeek is trying to make happen) so they could buy it. I asked them at what age they would stop buying Star Wars crap, and the claimed never while trying to convince me if there were some “girl” crap from my childhood that were as a awesome, I’d buy it too. Like a real-life, life-size My Little Pony.

Uh, no.

This all got me thinking about Star Wars and Watchmen and guitar solos and men.

I am convinced that men are incapable of realizing some of the stuff they loved so much in their formative years is crap. Not that it’s bad to love crap, but that doesn’t make it any less crap. It’s as though they are incapable of leaving behind those things, outgrowing them. It is their unrelenting fanboy allegiance to this crap that makes it so hard to trust their judgment when they talk about those things that I seemed to have missed out on 20 years ago when I was busy loving Glass Tiger and reading Sweet Valley High books.

Because men dominate the media, run Hollywood studios, and publishing houses we are continuously inundated with this crap repackaged, remade, or reissued.

And yet they are always, always, always disappointed when that which they loved when they were 12 turns out to be crap when they view it through their adult eyes (see: Indiana Jones movie, the last Star Wars trilogy, the Watchmen movie). Of course they blame it on writers or directors or what have you for not staying true to the story or staying too true to the story or some other thing that has nothing to do with maybe what they loved when they were a kid wasn’t so great to begin with. Maybe, just maybe, it is the source material.

Really, since when are teenagers renowned for their great taste in anything? I paid money to see “Howard the Duck” in the theater. I listened to the 45 of Jack Wagner’s “Weatherman Says” (intermittently cleansing my palette with a 45 of “Who’s Johnny”) until it wore out. And I can say without hesitation that I would not encourage anyone to seek these out because they are awesome.

Men can’t seem to filter their childhood loves through adult eyes. It seems as though they are afraid that by admitting that what they loved was crap means they can no longer love it. Which is total bullshit, because I just listened to “Who’s Johnny” four times in a row because I love that crap.

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i am so bad at being a girl. i can’t even moisturize properly. . . can you see me trying to apply eye shadow? fuck. how do most women do this? i can’t imagine intergrating some sort of make-up applying regime to my already frentic mornings (mornings that on a good day involved hair brushing, but that’s no guarantee).

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you can also wear the comfortable panty hose, the bra, the thong and you can apply weird chemicals to your face in hopes that you look like a pretty colorful bird.

also, you have to spend a majority of your life worrying about how you look and what men think about how you look and whether your boobs and/or ass are big and/or small enough for most everyone. you have to worry about how you don’t look like the girls in the movies and the magazines and how that makes you feel bad about yourself.

oh and another thing, you have to deal with people who talk to your boobs and not to your face.

you also have to worry about a biological clock that keeps ticking away and wonder if you’ll ever find a man who will put up with your too small/big boobs/ass.

and if you do happen to find someone who doesn’t care about the boob/ass thing and you are young enough that the biological clock hasn’t started ticking then you cna worry about how you are going to raise a family and work and still be fulfilled while doing dishes.

and if you don’t give a rats ass about the biological clock or the manfinding, then well you can just deal with the societal pressure to marry and the intrusive questions about why you aren’t married and let everyone think you are a lesbian.

ok?

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Instead, I went into a room with Sonja the Wondergeek and had lunch. I told her about the techwriter’s screaming fit and how goddamn angry it made me.

“Do you think Virginia will ever come back,” she asked, referring to a techwriter who had left softwareland about a year ago, a techwriter who was my friend and whom I adored.
“No way,” I said, “Why would she? She’s got the baby and a hubby who makes gobs of money and enough interests to keep her busy.”
“Yeah,” she agreed as we went back to eating our sammiches.

After a few mouthfuls she turned to me.

“Do you have a rescue fantasy?”
“Huh?”
“You know, have a fantasy that some man will come along and rescue you from this working life. A fantasy that this is just what you’ll do until you get married.”
“Oh god no,” I said. “I have rescuer fantasies.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I have a thing for those damaged artist types.”
“I never pictured you as being so controlling.”
“It’s not about control,” I said. “It’s about being with someone who has more to do than work as a corporate drone. I figure I’ve got it good, and I’m pretty good at this. In a few years I’ll make more than enough for two. So, whomever I end up with can do something more. Whether it’s painting or singing or counting ducks in a marsh or something. You know? Maybe he’ll just want to stay home and raise babies and do dishes. I always wanted a house husband.”
“I can see that.”
“I figure he can do his thing and not get paid very much and I can make enough for us.”
“Good,” she said. “I just hate that women have that fall back. You know, so many of them think that if this career thing doesn’t work out they’ll just get married and that will be that they’ll just go be a mom and a wife and this was all just something to do to bide their time until they found a husband.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m a little beyond that point.”
“Maybe women are different now,” she said. “But when I went to college there were a lot of girls there who were just looking for a husband.”
“Oh, that hadn’t changed by the time I went to college. There were plenty of girls who were just looking for the MRS degree. It drove me nuts. I wrote a column about it in the paper, I was really quite unpopular with a majority of women on campus for a long, long time. Railing against marriage and the need to get married so young wasn’t a popular viewpoint and that was in like 1994!”
“It really surprises me,” she said. “I just figured that you have a thing for older men and you want to be a writer that you’d find someone to marry you and then go write books and have babies.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to have babies and write books,” I said.

The conversation was great and it made me think about how far I’ve come. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time cultivating that self-destructive, need someone to rescue me from myself facade. Somehow I had decided that’s what men wanted, someone to rescue. I had also decided that if they rescued me from me, they’d love me. I learned the hard way, that’s not so true.

Around 28, I got sick of waiting for the white knight. I realized the only person who could rescue me, was me. So that’s what I did. I rescued myself. And now, I guess, I’m just looking for someone who wants to make me laugh. . . and do the dishes.

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