From Bugatti to Honda

This can also be found in the JUNE 2013 issue of Cognition Magazine at www.cognitionmagazine.com.

So… two months ago I came across this YouTube video and as with just about everything from YouTube brought to my attention by way of Twitter, I was chagrinned to find that human beings are still rather under evolved.  I didn’t write about it then because I was so disgusted by what I saw that I could scarcely gather my thoughts well enough to speak with any eloquence on the matter. Fortunately for you, I do believe I am able to do so now. (I will do my best to refrain from any This-Dumb-Bi*@es and Look-Here-H@es.) I won’t mention the name of the video blogger in question but I’ll say that her name is also synonymous with the infamous “struggle plate” as she believes she is a master chef in addition to an Internet life coach. (In my opinion she holds neither claim.) Quite frankly I’m not here for the further advertisement of such nonsense, so this time around kids, you will just have to take me at my word if you haven’t seen it yourself. She began the video with the obviously metaphoric tale of her downgrade from Bugatti to Honda at the tender age of 14 and how she instantaneously became every bit as expendable and common as every other Honda or “box Chevy” on the block. At first I thought the bitch was trying to make a point about the futility of materialism but she soon made me aware that I had given her WAY too much credit. This ill-formed allegory actually made reference to the loss of her virginity. She proceeded to postulate inarticulately and ad nauseum about how she finds that being a virgin is special and this “nuance” makes a girl socially superior and higher in demand than her non-virgin peers. In short she believes that when a girl/woman who loses her virginity she loses value and her feminine singularity in the process.

Now if you’ll entertain the exercise, allow me to break down for you ALL the ways that this little allegory is so f@!#ed up. There is possibly no object of our time more symbolic of the male ego than the automobile—none. A man will hang damn near all his masculinity on the type of car he drives and congruently on the kind of women he can get to ride in it with him. This woman has not only allowed her vagina to be reduced to that of a material object whose value is in part based on its mileage but she has directly identified her  female sexuality as an extension of that male ego. She has totally bought into the ideal that the only woman truly worth having is one that no other man has had. And if it weren’t sad enough that she has molded her own psychosexual identity in the image of a man’s prized possession, she’s passing the dysfunction down to her daughter and other girls under the guise of motherly advice.

Ladies, are we still teaching our girls this ass-backwards, patriarchal ideal that a woman should base her value on how many men she has or hasn’t slept with? Seriously? In 2013 we’re still doing this? The optimistic side of me would like to believe that this dumb b—this woman is the last of her kind, but alas, I know this cannot be so. There are plenty of you out there who still equate your worth with your “number” and our society’s inability to come to terms with the many degrees of female sexuality speaks quite loudly to that belief. Now I can’t tell any one of you how to think but be for real—sexual attraction, desire and activity are some of our strongest, most basic human instincts. If we weren’t all (women and men alike) supposed to bone we wouldn’t be so driven by that need, and this chick who got up on this ridiculous soap box knows it. She has HUGE jugs that she is not at all shy about flaunting. She is hardly above bending over in front of a camera with her ass out, but by all means, Madame let your daughter believe that she is less of a woman for behaving like a sexual being. Maybe the problem is that YOU, Miss Self-Proclaimed YouTube Sage, feel like a Honda and YOU have commoditized your own body in the process. Look here h—woman: if you feel devalued for losing your virginity at a young age then that is YOUR hang-up and yours ALONE so don't project your self-subscribed notions of depreciation onto every last woman in the world. That isn't a burden for all of us to carry alongside ya.

Yes, we should teach our kids to make good decisions in all aspects of life including sex but we are not in a position to cast down judgments of shame on them for simply being human. If we adults could pass on to younger generations that we are sexual beings and stop belittling them for acting on these urges, then just maybe we’d have much less sexual dysfunction within our society. Maybe if we would stop treating homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, etc. like deformities of our purported “heterosexual nature”, people would feel less psychological pressure to conform to a lifestyle that goes against their true individual nature and in turn be less prone to self-destructive and abusive behaviors. Or maybe we all should just be for real about what we want on an individual level society as a whole would reflect that same self-assurance… I’m just saying.

Is it my opinion that 14 is too young to start having sex? Hell yeah it is. A 14 year-old can’t get a damn job to support a kid. A 14 year-old can barely rationalize the changes he/she is going through in his/her own body and mind and much less understand the many responsibilities inherent of being sexually active. Hell some grown folks can barely reconcile that shit. But even though I think 14 is too young to lose one’s virginity (for strikingly different reasons than Madame Box Chevy), I would NEVER suggest that a person has undermined his worth by doing something that comes all too naturally. And, hey, if any of you reading this happen to be virgins, I am in no way suggesting that you have made an “unnatural” decision to wait. The point is we all have to make our own choices when it comes to sex. We all have our own way of figuring out what lifestyle works best for us and if your lifestyle doesn’t hurt or violate you or anyone else then I say, “Baby go ‘head on”.