Birds of a Feather

I was watching TV the other day, and I saw a commercial for Six Flags amusement park, and something really bothered me. You know how they have the Looney Tunes characters there, greeting the guests, taking pictures with the kids? Well, in this commercial, they had Sylvester the Cat dancing right next to Tweety Bird... and they were the EXACT SAME HEIGHT!!!

It freaked me out.

I'm beginning to think those are impostors.

I told this theory to a friend of mine, and he had an alternate (and probably more sensible) theory: those are, in fact, the actual characters there at the park, but when they shoot the cartoons, they use all kinds of trick photography and forced perspectives (like in those Lord of the Rings movies) to make them appear different sizes.

So if you were shooting a scene, say, Sylvester would be closer to the camera, and Tweety, well you'd place him...

Wait, is Tweety a him or a her? Is there any kind of consensus on this?

I had always assumed that Tweety was a dude, but a few years ago I started noticing Tweety all the time on little girls' pajamas.

...on hangers at Target! Jeez! You people should be ashamed of yourselves. That's how rumors get started!

Anyway, it struck me as me weird. Why would they put a guy character on girls' pajamas?

But the more I pondered it, the sad reality started to dawn on me: Who are they going to put on girls' pajamas? There isn't exactly an overabundance of good female role models in the Looney Tunes canon. Really, what are the choices?

The old Granny who owns Sylvester and Tweety? Who is, at best, a neglectful pet owner, leaving her poor defenseless bird alone with a blood-thirsty predator -- a pet himself who's clearly malnourished, as evidenced by his willingness to commit an act of violence just to get a bite to eat? This woman should not be enshrined on pajamas! She should be sharing a cell with Michael Vick!

Or what about the haggard old hen, a desperate single parent who's willing to use her only child as a pawn in her pitiful attempts to ensnare the dubiously oriented Southern bachelor Foghorn Leghorn? What kind of message would that send to little girls?

Or how about the poor unwitting cat who, after an unfortunate run-in with the machine that paints the lines down the center of the highway, becomes the unwilling recipient of Pepé Le Pew's lecherous overtures?? Actually, now that I think about it, that may not be such a bad choice. At least that character communicates something useful to girls about what the world will be like for them when they grow up.

I heard a staggering statistic recently: by the time she's 23 years old, the average American woman has been hit on 7,000 times.

Seven Thousand! And that's just the average ones. Imagine how many times the hot ones are getting hit on!

Believe me, I, personally, am not doing anything to drive those numbers down.

I remember reading this book called The Gift of Fear, and in this book I encountered a nugget that was probably the most profound insight into the difference between men and women I've ever heard. Forget all that shit about "Women want to talk about their feelings and Men just want to be left alone," or "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." That's all a bunch of white noise.

Open up your mindhole, folks, because I'm about to drop some knowledge into it.

The real difference between men and women, according to this author, is that, at their core, the thing that men fear most is that women will laugh at them. And, at their core, the thing that women fear most is that men will kill them.

Yikes, right?

In the face of this discrepancy, the fact that any two people of opposite genders have ever managed to get together is nothing short of a miracle.

Don't misunderstand me, ladies. I'm not saying all men are likely to kill you. A good 50% would never try and kill you at all. But how are you supposed to know which 50% those are? It's tricky.

And so you put up these walls, and I completely understand. You have my sympathy. But you have to feel for us, too, because we're expected to scale those walls. We have to circumnavigate the defense shields that have been built in response to the 7,000 other idiots who came before us, and that's a lot to contend with.

How does a guy communicate to a woman that, "Hey, I'm one of the good ones. I just wanna talk to you, get to know you, maybe buy you a drink. Or, God forbid, yes, I'd like to have some kind of sex with you. But murder does not make an appearance anywhere on my to-do list."

It's tough. The other night I was at this fancy restaurant, and there was a table of attractive ladies. As I made my way over to them, before I could even open my mouth, the leader of the... uh, oh damn... shit.

Quick, what's the collective noun for a group of women?

Oh, that's right: Coven.

(I'm just joking, people! Come on!)

So the leader, the alpha, she starts in with me right away, before I can even say hi:

"Look, Jessica just broke up with her boyfriend, and we don't want to look at men tonight, we don't want to talk to men, we don't want to be around men, nobody's interested in you, nobody's going to give you their phone number, nobody's going to have sex with you, so just go away and leave us alone!"

I was totally taken aback. It was quite a greeting, and I'm not sure she even took a breath. I hadn't anticipated that level of ferocity, and as I tried to recover my composure, the only thing I could think of to say in response was:

"So, should I come back later to take your order, or...?"