Big Dion

To this day I’ve never seen “Sleepless in Seattle” or “When Harry Met Sally” or any of Nora Ephron’s other films, save for “You’ve Got Mail,” which was unforgivably terrible and made me want to spew green bile everywhere. But I will always love Nora Ephron for an essay I read my senior year of college. The essay was “A Few Words About Breasts.”

I loved it and after I found out she died last night, I read it again and I loved it even more. I loved it for the same reason that readers of “Esquire,” an unrepentant MEN’s magazine, loved it. It was so completely honest and vulnerable and (without being sexist, patriarchal or patronizing) adorable.

I fell in love with Nora. I fell in love with her insecurity, her brazeness (which isn’t a word, but should be), her wit and her intelligence. There’s something special about writing that allows you to see into someone’s soul and into their head that no other art form has and Nora was a master of it. I’ve been a fan since the moment I finished reading the essay for the second time and my heart sort of sank last night hearing that she died.

Of all the women I’ve loved and never met (Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem, Nina Persson, Nora Ephron, that’s it) I may have loved Nora best.

If you haven’t ever read it, take a moment to read “A Few Words About Breasts.” It will be, without question, the best thing you do today. After I read the piece, in college, I wrote my own response for my Personal Essay course. It got an ‘A’. It’s not nearly as good as hers and it’s actually kind of dumb, but it’s all I have to offer in the way of an elegy.

“With Apologies to Nora Ephron”

I truly detest the word boobs. It’s probably one of – if not my least – favorite words. I can’t stand it. It’s just such an ugly word.

I mean if you can think of an uglier word then by all means tell me, but I certainly can’t. The word repugnant is probably uglier than boobs, but repugnant is a spectacular word because it means repugnant. There is probably not a more prima fascia repugnant word in the universe than repugnant, which is exactly what makes it so extraordinary.

But the word boobs is an extraordinarily ugly word for a beautiful thing. I love breasts. The word breasts is kind of a funny word when said aloud (honestly, say it out loud, breasts) but that’s just because of the location of the esses, and any word with esses separated by a single consonant sounds strange (chests, vests, crests..etc. ad nauseam). The word boobs, however, is just ugly.

It’s ugly no matter how you look it at. On its face: boobs. Anyone that can honestly look at that word for its calligraphy value and not say it’s horrendously ugly should have their head examined. It’s ugly to say and it’s ugly to hear. Anytime I hear some girl talk about boobs, or even more disturbingly her singular boob, it’s like someone hit me in the genitals with a baseball bat. Even the word genitals is more appealing than boobs.

I’ve hated the word for a long time. I think it was truly ruined for me when a friend of my tenth grade girlfriend repeated it over and over again until I really got to thinking about it. Boobs. It’s just so very unattractive. It’s unattractive to hear, unattractive to say, unattractive to write and unattractive to read. Boobs.

I love women’s breasts. I’ve been an aficionado since I was 12 and my friend Michael scored us a copy of Juggs magazine, but I’ve always hated hearing people call them boobs. Tits, knockers, fun bags, melons, honkers, hooters, bazongas, chi chis, anything is better than saying boobs. You can’t truly appreciate a nice set of boobs. Boobs sounds like something you wipe off your shoe when you’ve been out in the rain too long, or something gunky you find underneath your bed when you haven’t cleaned you room in a long time.

Boobs don’t sound like the beautiful things that they are. Boobs don’t sound like the parts of the body that give sustenance to a newborn infant or the best accessories to that new dress you just bought. Boobs? Boobs can’t make a woman or change a man’s heart. Boobs?

Where did this word come from? I’ve been hoping and praying in vain for ages that someday people will realize how absolutely profane the word is, but so far to no avail. I mean, really, boobs? Have you ever heard anything quite so stupid?

(photo above is Minka Kelly, Leighton Meester and someone named Jessica Szohr. Courtesy of fuckyeahhotactress.tumblr.com)

I went out last night and got back into my old (bad) habit of making out with girls in public. It’s something I try not to do anymore because it’s so very freshman year of college, but I suppose we all have our vices. Some people smoke, some people eat a tub of ice cream, some people bite their nails, I make out with slutty girls in clubs. It could be worse.

This all happened at a club called MJQ. It’s a really cool place that sometimes sucks, but the concept is quite novel. You’d probably miss the place if you drove by it because the club is literally underground. The actual structure is just this shack-looking edifice and it’s only real purpose, I guess, is so that people who have never been there know where to go inside. So you pay your $5 to the guy sitting outside and walk down a hallway corridor that leads you to the actual club part.

SIDE NOTE: Normally I am unequivocally opposed to paying cover, but it’s the only way I’ve found to party with black people in Atlanta. I still haven’t been able to find a bar or otherwise free establishment that’s frequented by black folks where I can feel confident about not getting shot. Plus my tour guide for this place is of similar mindset and I live around white people and I work from home and I’m still not quite comfortable with putting up a Craigslist ad looking for black friends. So here we are paying cover.

I digress. The club itself is almost like a really decked-out basement with a bar in the middle and a tiny dance floor and an even smaller stage adjacent to it. Around 1 a.m. it gets packed. If you go on Wednesdays they play this crazy, unpredictably outré mix of music that can only be described as whatever the fuck the DJ feels like playing that night. Last night I swear I heard Slick Rick, the Cranberries, Wu-Tang, whoever sings 99 Luftballoons, The Go-Gos, I think there was even a Cardigans hearing (like a sighting…I don’t know if this works, but I’m gonna stick with it).

So I’m inside and I’m dancing with girls and I meet this one kind of cute, nerdy-looking girl who says her name is Katie. Katie was super excited to dance with me, like really, super fucking excited. Like I said, she was nerdy, but she wasn’t ugly. She kept telling me how good looking I was and how lucky she was to be dancing with me. Apparently she’s from Colorado, but she’s one of the Hill people that’s from the mountains and has no real social skills. She was in town visiting a friend or something like that. I asked her to be my date for a wedding I’m going to in August. She melted. We made out a little bit. She left.

Katie’s actual kissing technique wasn’t particularly objectionable, but her lips were. Her bottom lip was cracked and chapped to the point that I was seriously taken aback. First of all, you shouldn’t leave the house with chapped-up lips and even if you do, have the common courtesy to lick them before you kiss someone. Does she not realize her lips are chapped? I mean, I know she’s a Hill person, but they’re your lips, how do you not feel them being cracked? I could feel the dead skin, and it was just weird and nasty. Needless to say, I will not be bringing Katie the Hill person to the wedding.

This happened once before with a French girl I met in LA who didn’t speak English. I made out with her at this bar on karaoke night and her lips were so dry that I actually had to tell her to lick them. That’s when I realized she didn’t speak English. So I mimed it for her, she licked her lips, we went back to kissing, they got dry again, we stopped kissing, I mimed again, we went back to kissing, something happened, we stopped kissing, her friends took her away, I never saw her again. It’s always been a goal of mine to take home a girl who spoke no English, and this was the closest I’ve ever come.

Back to last night, though. After I left Katie, I went back to talking to these 21-year-old girls at the bar. Eventually one of them ended up giving me a faux lap dance and we started making out. Her problem was too much tongue. A note to women everywhere: kissing is not a tongue contest. You don’t win anything for sticking as much of your tongue in my mouth as possible. In fact, you lose.

I’ve had a pretty good run of kissers in the last 5-10 years. In fact, since I’ve been 21 there haven’t been too many terrible experiences, so last night was extra unpleasant. But I’m not even done yet.

Then there was some girl named Jackie who did the fish-out-of-water thing to me. I haven’t experienced this in years and its return was anything but welcome. The fish-out-of-water technique is when a girl opens and closes her mouth as many times as she possibly can while kissing you, like a fish when you pull it out of the water and it’s struggling for air. I will never understand why girls think this is cute or sexy or enjoyable. It’s not.

I think the problem is that no one has been able to sit these girls down – for a number of reasons – and explain to them what they’re doing wrong. (These girls also may have just been really inebriated. I’ve kissed some girls drunk and then kissed them sober and noticed a world of difference. That said, I get really inebriated and I still don’t kiss like a fish, so I’m going to err on the side of this being an overall, not just a drunken, problem.) So I would like to take a moment to tell all the women out there a few things about kissing. I’ve kissed a lot of women in my time – young and old, black and white, foreign and domestic – so you can trust that I know a thing or two about this.

1.       Kissing is like dancing and like with dancing someone has to lead. That someone is the man. The man leads. Don’t try to lead. Like with dancing, if you try to lead shit gets fucked up and nobody wins. I don’t know about other dudes, but I’m not following, so we just end up in a situation where two people are trying to lead and then people’s feet get stepped on and heads get bumped and everybody’s a loser.

2.       Following the same line of thought, you need to follow. You can’t just do your own thing. Again, kissing is like dancing. If I’m doing the waltz you need to be doing the waltz. You can’t do the mambo. I don’t care how much you like doing the mambo, we’re waltzing now. Get with the program.

3.       Most people would rather have too little tongue than too much. I personally am a fan of French kissing, but I would rather have a completely tongue-less kiss than tongue everywhere. That’s just unpleasant. If you suspect, even a little bit, that you may use too much tongue, tone it down.

4.       Eyes closed. The whole time.

5.       Sometimes biting is sexy, but don’t overdo it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bitten by a girl in a way that was not pleasant. A note to biters (and this is coming from a guy who likes biting): you can’t just bite, there has to be some kissing in there too. Once I literally took a girl aside and had to explain this to her. I coached her step-by-step until she finally got it. Biting is not kissing. It can be a part of kissing, but not the only part. That’s just biting. I don’t want to just be bitten by you; I don’t care how hot you are. Also, try to keep the biting light. I want to feel it, but it shouldn’t hurt in the morning.

I love Chris Brown’s new video. Breezy’s verse was cool, I loved the cameos from Snoop, Red and Meth, I love the way it was shot, I love the shout out to ‘90s fashion (whether it was ironic or not I’m not sure because everyone’s dressing like the ‘90s these days) and most of all I love seeing my girlfriend, the city of Los Angeles, in the background. I love this video.

Fortunately or unfortunately any positive mention of Chris Brown these days seems to necessitate a defense for supporting him despite his well-documented forays into domestic abuse. It’s always interesting how someone becomes the face of something. Like how Diddy’s son became a poster boy for privileged kids being given full scholarships to college yesterday, despite the fact that thousands of other rich, famous people’s kids have been given full scholarships to college for various reasons through the years.

Chris Brown’s poster boy status makes more sense. We all saw what he did to Rihanna, thanks to TMZ, and it was shocking. Then we saw his behavior afterward and then there was this and this. But it seems like in our culture it’s not the crime that counts, but how you react afterward. Note Casey Anthony and Dharun Ravi for great examples of people who were vilified more for their post-crime behavior than for what actually happened.

People like to pretend that they hate Anthony because she killed her daughter, but the real reason they hate her is because she was in a wet t-shirt contest days after Caylee died. People don’t hate Ravi because he shamed his roommate into killing himself, they hate him because he didn’t look sad enough in the court room after it happened.

(SIDE NOTE: $500,000 has been donated for George Zimmerman’s defense. That’s not directly related to any of this, but I felt like it was worth mentioning.)

The same is true for Brown. It wasn’t that he beat Rihanna up or that we saw how bad he’d beaten her, it’s that he wasn’t contrite and forlorn enough for all of us after it happened.

But more to the point, the whole Chris Brown-Rihanna incident could have led to a really adult and mature conversation about domestic abuse and why it happens, how it affects people and what factors cause men to be abusive and women to stay in abusive relationships. Instead there was some stupid war between #TeamBreezy and #TeamChrisBrownisaTerribleHumanBeingandShouldNotBeAllowedToLive (the second one is not an actual hastag). It’s all fine and good to support Chris Brown without defending what he did to Rihanna, although a lot of people seem to feel the need to do that (“she deserved it,” “she was attacking him,” “he was defending himself,” “that crazy bitch had it coming”), but I think it’s more important to look at his behavior and what it says about him and American culture at large.

Here’s the thing about men who abuse women: they aren’t normal people. Most men who abuse women are actually unstable and/or psychopathic. To wit, research suggests that about 80 percent of “both court-referred and self-referred men in domestic violence studies exhibited diagnosable psychopathology, typically personality disorders.

“The estimate of personality disorders in the general population would be more in the 15–20 percent range…As violence becomes more severe and chronic in the relationship, the likelihood of psychopathology in these men approaches 100 percent,” according to a report by Donald Dutton titled, “Patriachcy and Wife Assault: The Ecological Fallacy” (that I admittedly found on Wikipedia).

To put it simply, Chris Brown is crazy. I think his behavior following the incident and everything he’s done since then sort of corroborates that idea. It was particularly visible in his violent outburst at “Good Morning America” after Robin Roberts had the temerity (the TEMERITY) to even broach the subject.

There’s also a school of thought that suggests stress is what causes men to lash out violently at their domestic partner. More than the stress, though, it’s the fact that men who abuse women don’t know how to deal with the stress. They simply inculcate the stress and unleash it unexpectedly on an innocent victim.

“Our study suggests that violent behavior is a likely response among people with particular methods of evaluating and coping with stress,” said Kristi Williams, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. Her study found that abusive men were likely to view stressful circumstances as personally threatening, while trying to avoid the situation or repress emotional responses.

Domestic abuse is also a learned behavior. Studies have found that nearly one half of abusive men grew up in homes where their father or step father was an abuser. The real problem is that no one knows what to do about it. There are programs for men who have been abusive, but what about programs for men before they become abusive?

This comes back to our societal ideal of what makes a man a “real man.” There’s this idea that a real man is stoic and that anger rather than sadness is the appropriate reaction to trying times and situations. There’s an entire school of thought and research devoted to how men respond to sadness with anger while women respond to anger with sadness. If (as a man) you’ve ever been so sad you punched a wall or broke something or (as a woman) have been so angry you started crying, you’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand.

So it’s society’s fault? Not exactly. To bring it back to Young Mr. Breezy, like most great artists he seems to be navigating a delicate balance of brilliance and insanity. A lot of that has led to the rapping and the tattoos and the increasingly erratic behavior. The disparity between the blind adoration and blind enmity that seems to be directed toward Brown seems to come from those who realize that he’s not of sound mind and those who don’t. I think that’s why so many people (and a particularly high number of women) are so passionately supportive of Chris Brown no matter what he does. People who are abnormal and outré and different see bits of themselves in him.

It’s easy to dismiss what he did as, “the kid made a mistake” and just as easy to vilify him for life as, “a monster.” But really, like all of us, he’s a complicated individual who has issues. We won’t ever understand his issues because we don’t know him.

But I suppose I’m talking to myself, because no one really wants to talk about domestic abuse unless we’re all agreeing that it’s bad. So let’s just listen to Chris Brown’s music. Cuz I can’t lie, Breezy’s got that hotness.

If you are actually interested, check out http://www.emergedv.com/

and http://www.mchenrycountyturningpoint.org/causes.html