Some Girl

Guess what girrls, it's right under your noses. And you haven't even seen it, most of you.

I find it amusing and a reflection of the heavy female slant of popular cultural ideology at the moment, that the commentators here focus on Claire's heartache in discovering her "boyfriend" graphically "cheating" on her -- while completely ignoring April's relationship with her boyfriend Neal. Claire and Chad had spent all of two evenings together and had sex once before that happened. OK, so it was meaningful sex. Chad had made no promises and done nothing to pledge monogamy. They were beginning to explore each other. They had connected. His statement "Claire, I love you", as she walked away from his house the morning after was clearly an expression of feeling and connection, rather than a commitment -- if she was able to understand him at all. As well we know, although Clare doesn't, that he was set up and probably didn't go out looking for it. Clare's hot hurt that Chad's having sex with someone else was "cheating' at that infant stage was about as unjustified as it's possible to be in the modern urban context -- and entirely a product of Claire's projections ahead of reality. In contrast, April privately and publicly humiliates her long term boyfriend just about maximally by spending more nights a week than not sleeping in some new pickup's home, only to extricate herself the next morning without waking up Mr. Strange, by calling any one of their mutual friends to come pick her up -- or for that matter her boyfriend himself. Meanwhile, Neal is reduced to supplicating her to stay with him "tonight, at least". When Neal succeeds for a while in extricating himself from this utter self-denigration by finding someone new -- she lures him back to her, by convincing him she sees and needs and truly appreciates (no kidding!) the real Neal, as no one else can.

This scene is even described by one girrrl reviewer thus: "Theres this scene with juliette and Micheal Rapaport(april and neil) sitting in his car. She finallyl explains to him how she really feels and what she sees in him, and that she's sorry for being so "slutty." Juliette delivers this scene with such raw emotion that every time I watch it I tear up myself." Yeah, well anyone who believed she was going to change much of anything because of that bit of emotional manipulation doesn't know much about people. She wasn't remotely close to changing -- which in any fundamental way is always dicey and at best a long road anyway. Try reversing the genders girrrls.

Finally, any guy who would marry an April is freaking totally out of his self-deluded mind, unless he gets off on thoroughly masochistic self-destruction, and wants that as the predominant and public theme of his personal life. She is a good definition by example of a total slut. And no, that judgment doesn't reflect a general prejudice against girrrls who like me have been with a whole lot and even scores of the opposite sex. I often prefer women with considerable experience of different men. Instead that judgment reflects the way that April habitually does her maximally casual sex, long after she's proven she can (to the limited extent that's ever much of an issue for girrrls), how little she really looks for anything else, and how she likes instead to relate to her steady "relationship interest" while she's doing her all consuming thing. Well, conceivably if she had followed her genuine total slut period by an extended period of abstinence, or a previous year or longer of monogamy with someone else -- to show me that what she was looking for really had changed. After all, cheating is as easy, and habitual, for a total slut like April as the nearest bar and an evening supposedly spent with her girlfriends -- any evening randomly chosen without effort or pre-planning. Although actually, her history of total slutting while simultaneously manipulating a man who was emotionally committed to her, would permanently disqualify her so far as I'm concerned.

As well, now that I'm on the subject, it's hardly an accomplishment for any reasonably attractive mid-thirties or younger woman to casually bed scores or hundreds of men -- even if she limits herself to attractive men. Most young women above dog status (bad fat) can if they want to, if they dispense with any sort of commitment or even a strong (if sometimes fast) emotional connection as pre-qualifiers. There's a vast sea of men out there, including attractive ones, who are interested in casual sex but can't get it at will just because they want it -- or can only get it by working really, really hard at it. It's only an accomplishment of sorts when men rather than women do something like that -- for the simple reason that only a small minority of men CAN, although the great majority of young men would love to be able to (sometimes desperately so). That in a nutshell is why women can be sluts and men really can't. (Although many men use the word unfairly, and with more than a little jealousy.) A slut is someone who habitually has careless, easy sex. It's not simply blind social prejudice, as the current feminist line would have it. It's the nature of the different "market conditions" for casual sex between the two sexes. For women, screwing lots of men very quickly and easily merely involves relaxing or abandoning requirements which most women enforce (most of the time) before sex. For men it requires being very unusually attractive, in one way or another.

As for my downward mobility premise -- consider who appears as the possible happy ending guy, who picks up our West LA (parents') upper class mansion dwelling late 20 something Some Girl, as the movie is ending. A nondescript in looks and personality, but moderately forceful, young member of the LAPD.