Balls

If I were a young, single guy living in New York, flailing around in a dating pool of women who'd chow down on cock in exchange for a night out at the Beatrice Inn and perhaps an introduction to Leo, I think I'd be the biggest fucking misogynistic prick in the world.

As it is, surrounded by those kinds of women myself, sometimes I suspect that I'm rapidly becoming a female misogynist.

Let me qualify that, though.

I have plenty of chick friends and I love them. They're super fucking smart. They're funny and raunchy. Beneath all that, they have good hearts and are great, loyal friends.

We don't compete with each other about our "careers," or the way we look. And we don't compete for guys. Period. If one of us likes a guy and calls it first, the other just steps off. And that's it.

No cliched, catfight bullshit.

Our philosophy is, I guess, that there's plenty of dick to go around. At least, enough so that we don't have to destroy a friendship over some guy who will be a minor footnote in our lives a few years from now. My chick friends and I, though, we're in it for the long haul.

My best friend Karen, for example.

If that crazy-ass bitch needed a kidney, I'd give her one of mine. Even though I am a hypochondriac and a germ phobe and there's a very good possibility that I'd get septic shock, or some shit, from the surgery.

If she needed my kidney, I'd still give that shit to her.

And fuck, I'd give her my last bit of Laura Mercier tinted moisturizer, if she wanted it. Even though her skin tone doesn't really match mine.

It's not that I can't jaw on about the merits of Nars eye shadow verses Lorac with the girliest of them. I can. It's just, that's not all I like to talk about.

And it's not that I'm intimidated by other women's beauty.

One of my closest friends could model if she wanted to.

I’m not unattractive, but standing next to Hannah at a party makes me feel like Weiner Dog from Welcome to the Dollhouse.

There’s pretty and there's beautiful and then there's un-fucking-believably beautiful.

Hannah is un-fucking-believably beautiful. Genetic Freak beautiful.

Her beauty is made even more excruciating due to the fact that she has very little idea just how beautiful she is. This makes her even more beautiful, at least to me.

While annoying, it's also why she's my friend. She's more than just a killer face.

She's really bright. She's got a filthy mouth on her that rivals mine. She's also super bitter.

Sure, she's beautiful, but her father's enthusiasm for unbelievably sloppy embezzlement tactics landed him in jail when she was sixteen. Her family's humiliation was splashed all over the papers for more than a year. Right around that time, she filled the Missing Daddy gap with crystal meth and ended up in rehab by her seventeenth birthday.

This, her mother celebrated by committing suicide not three weeks later.

These days, Hannah's just a stoner, albeit an inveterate one, and has so many unresolved, um, "issues," even the perfect mug staring back at her from the mirror in the morning isn’t enough to assuage the urge to smash her face into the glass. (She doesn't do this anymore, though, although she did back in her crystal meth days.)

She's in the My Family Was Beyond Fucked Up Too Club so I tolerate her staggering beauty. Members of this club are granted unending reserves of empathy by other members. It's the unwritten rule.

Even if their bone structure and naturally cut abs make you want to fucking puke.

Even though I have a lot of male friends, I don't trust women who say they, "You know, get along better with guys." This usually means they enjoy the perverse pleasure of giving their male friends BBD (Blue Balls Deluxe).

A hot chick with only male friends spells, "You'll never hit this; but I enjoy your adoration anyway." Additionally, if you try to penetrate the all-guys-and-one-chick circle of friends, you'll be greeted with horny appreciation by the peen in the group and outright hostility by the queen bee.

That shit's a little too Wild Kingdom for my taste. It's weird.

Me, I do get along better with guys than girls, for the most part. I had two older brothers growing up. I live for crap and fart jokes. So, based on that, I guess you could say my chick friends are like guys. When people meet my female friends, in fact, they'll invariably say that we're like guys; you know, how we talk about dick like it's pussy and how, when a hot guy walks by, one of us will mutter, 'Damn, I'd like to hit that' and shit like that.

I don't think we're like guys, though.

Objectifying men as brutally as men objectify women and having a healthy sex drive doesn't make you a man.

It doesn't make you an asshole, which is what men who objectify women and have healthy sex drives, are labeled.

It doesn't make you a slut, either, which is the female label. It just makes you a girl who appreciates balls once in a while.

Your own balls, while still being a girl and owning it.

I wish that chicks writing about their shocking, scintillating, excruciatingly graphic sex-ploits weren’t so encouraged to do so by the publishing world. As if the only thing a chick writer has to offer is why, after her fortieth degrading blowjob in the bathroom at CBGB, she had, “like, a revelation.”

It’s fucking insulting.

It’s tired. It’s boring.

There are so many other things to write about. You know. Things that guys are encouraged to write about. Just fucking find them. Get your mouth off the cock and fucking find them. Jesus Christ.

And I wish there were another word besides "balls" to convey "cool" and "punk rock" for chicks. I wish girls didn't have to repudiate the female in them and have to convey their righteousness by saying that they're "just one of the guys."

Because sometimes, just sometimes, men don’t have balls. At all. For example, Christopher Hitchens, who just wrote a thoughtful treatise/publicity stunt for Vanity Fair about why, exactly, women aren't funny. There's empirical evidence, yo!

Read it. He still uses the word “squeeze” as a noun. You know, as in “boyfriend.” This dude’s clearly only ever fucked in the missionary position and thinks that when confronted with a Manolo Blahnik blow-out sale, all women, everywhere, no matter who they are, shit their pants in ecstasy while simultaneously cumming and wondering which stilettos to wear while planning their baby showers.

But wait!

Cultural icons like Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz are backing (backstabbing women everywhere) his fat old ass up! He must be right.

Are Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz still even alive?

Ladies, please. If your feminist convictions have waned that much or if you need a jolt of publicity that badly, there’s a pole at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club on 51st and 12th just waiting for you. It’s not as upscale as Flashdancers, but your tits are kind of shriveled now and you have, after all, agreed to enter Male La La Land. It’s a bitch, ladies, but that’s what happens when your money and past glories insulate you from the real fucking world, where young women struggle against Lipitor-addled decrees like the one your pal Christopher just issued in a magazine with a circulation of millions.

I have to say, despite the monthly cramps and the decision to have my pubes voluntarily ripped out by hot wax once every few weeks, I don't hate being a girl.

I don't apologize for it and I don't try to "rise above it" by being "just one of the guys" so men will take me or my humor more seriously.

I love being a girl. I really do. And fuck anyone, male or female, who has a problem with that.

And I don’t think that having a physiological ball sack makes someone's writing any more or less funny.

So, Christopher Hitchens, you bitter, old fuckbag, suck my left one. Or else, go muff diving at a Lilith Fair Festival. No bikini waxing there. Just big, ol', need-a-bush-whacker and-some-scuba goggles to navigate underbrush.

And that shit ain't funny at all.