I've been sick, pretty much on an off for the past couple weeks. The last few days have been particularly bad, with some fever, slight congestion and sore throat, although I did not experience any fully-blown flu symptoms. In other words, I've just been feeling like crap.
On Saturday, while Adam was losing money at a friendly poker game, my friend Noelle and I watched "Kissing Jessica Stein", which she had seen and loved many times before. I met Noelle on Nerve a couple months ago. She is incredibly bright and has a pleasant, sexy way of carrying herself. She is fairly Sex and the City-ish, actually: accomplished, successful, independent, believing that most men are obnoxious and interchangeable and that women are much better -- without being a lesbian. The movie was cutesy and fun (and the Salon review I linked to does a pretty good job of pointing out pluses and minuses). I appreciated the message: go out there and explore your sexuality; even if you find that you really are as straight-laced as you think, the exploration itself will do you good. But I didn't appreciate the implicit commentary on men, seen as freaks or assholes that you end up having to love anyway because they're there and they're kinda cute and you're straight.
Women have to get over feeling superior to men just because they cannot understand them. I think that, because men don't have periods and are, historically speaking, the "intellectual sex", women expect them to behave rationally at all times. When they fail to do so (which they inevitably do, because they are human beings endowed with penises), they are bumped down to the status of animals in the eyes of women. Unfair? Certainly, especially since men don't seem to expect women to act rationally at all times, and tend not to think lowly of them when they throw menstrual hissy fits. Let's face it. Objectively speaking, there is not much of a difference between a man neglecting to shop for groceries because he has lost track of time in a strip club (for when the penis stands, the head gets buried in the ground) and a woman neglecting to shop for groceries because she is feeling moody because of her period (for when the uterus bleeds, the head gets buried in the ground).