How I Met Your Mother: The X Rated Version

You’re a 22 year old girl who’s been saving herself for that special guy. You’ve managed to get through college ‘intact’, most of your friends having had their flower picked by various frat boys while wasted on appletinis and one by the entire football team on a sports trip to Wisconsin. You now feel ready to take that final step to womanhood and you’ve thought of a way it can pay for Grad school too!

What does everyone else do when they have something they don’t want anymore, the third toaster you got for your wedding, that Ricki Martin CD you never listen to, a gubernatorial jet? They EBay it. So, why not your virginity?

This is precisely what ‘Natalie Dylan’ (She’s not using her real name for some inexplicable reason) is doing. A Woman’s Studies graduate from Sacramento State, she is hoping to become a marriage councillor once she’s auctioned off her hymen to pay for school. The media circus now surrounding her extends from CNN to Howard Stern, who has gallantly offered to promote the auction on his radio show. She is being wrangled by Dennis Hof, infamous owner of the Bunny Ranch where the auction and the deflowering itself will take place and her sister is already gainfully employed paying off her student debt.

Despite this oh so obvious male control, ‘Dylan’ sees putting her bride’s pride under the hammer as some sort of post feminism act of empowerment. Burning your bra is so 20th century. What we should all be doing is selling ourselves to the highest bidder so he can be internationally known as a cherry popper. If that isn’t going to close the wage gap, I don’t know what is.

Take note Palin, this girl’s a true women’s rights icon.

She even has a better grasp of the American economy: “We live in a capitalist society. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?” If only Lehman Brothers had thought of that! Hell, if the winner’s from overseas, surely that will count as foreign policy experience. ‘Dylan’ in ’12!! ‘Dylan’ in ’12!!! She’ll break through your glass ceiling, after someone’s broken through hers!

But ‘Dylan’ is not only a woman’s rights activist and potential world leader, she’s also a romantic: “Through this process I’m not just looking for the highest bidder. I’m looking for someone who is a genuine, overall nice person.” Aww, she’s just a single girl looking for love. Nobody thought it would work but when her eyes met his wallet it was...magic. They’re optioning the movie rights to Miramax, Jason Biggs and Katie Holmes are going to star.

What’s really going on here? Once you get through the jokes, the media and the questionable viability of a girl actually finishing college with her virginity, what does all this really mean? Is this the culmination of 60’s free love attitudes fused with the ultimate capitalist ethic? Is it the last bastion of sexual morality slipping away? Is it proof that sexual impropriety now rules and we are truly an anything goes, anything is up for grabs society? Are we all damned? Or is it all about one girl who is so desperate for her fifteen minutes of fame she is willing to shock the world the only way she feels she can? Andy Wahol would be proud.

The problem is nobody really cares. Whether she goes through with it or not, whether she ends up with Colin Farrell or Ron Jeremy, whether it’s a hoax, whether she makes a million or whether she makes a hundred, within a matter of months she will just be a name and if she’s lucky everyone will soon forget that too.

Going once...going twice... sold.

You know you’re on a Foreign Exchange to America When... You’ve Always Wanted to Be Here but Now You’re Not Sure Why

When I first told my best friend’s 6 year old daughter that I was coming to America for a whole year this time instead of the usual weekend or 3 months, she looked up at me with those big green eyes, wrinkled her button nose and said “Why do yur want ta go there? You always go there.”
It got me thinking. Why do I always go there?
I blame ‘On the Town’. All that singing and dancing around New York in vibrant Technicolor while I sat in rain saturated middle England scoffing Heinz tinned ravioli and dreaming that one day I would be on the top of the Empire State Building with a sailor of my very own.
This was obviously before I knew any sailors.
What is our fascination with you guys? Is it simply that your representatives are everywhere? Hollywood, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson and Mickey Mouse add up to a ‘brand’ that for better or worse has spread throughout the world, a brand that inspires love and hate even if you never make it through homeland security. The very fact that this ‘brand’ is so omnipresent cultures resentment. Countries feel they have to battle against it in order to keep their own identity. Whether it is France taking a percentage of American film revenues to pump into their own industry or the movement against globalisation (read Americanisation), anti American feeling is not confined to extremists even within your closest ally.
Britain’s ‘special relationship’, with the other side of the pond, as with any relationship, has had its ups and downs and is not quite as equal as the partners like to think it is. At first we had to get over the shock that this new country didn’t want to be part of our glorious empire. As time has gone by our relationship with the land of the free seems to have turned from that of proud parent to a slightly disgruntled second cousin who tried to carry on the family business only to be shown up by a flashier relative who got their success independently and now shows off at every family reunion. It’s not that you don’t like the guy, how could you not. He’s charming, funny, smart. It’s just that he makes you wish you had bigger balls.
Except when his prowess gets him (and you) into trouble. That’s when things get nasty.
Maybe the problem is your envoys. As my cousin’s partner who put it so succinctly. “Every American I’ve ever met has been an arrogant arsehole!” I’m not sure how many Americans he has actually met but it’s an opinion a lot of people share. Most Brits encounters with Americans have been at our tourist spots where we trail around silently basking in our nation’s history only to have our reverence interrupted by a loud cry of “Oh my God! Look at that cute castle! Chad, get the camera! It’s all so quaint!!” This may be slightly stereotyped but whether it’s though less p.c. media or our own experience this is the impression an awful lot of us are left with.
And when faced with these stereotypes or your exulted Commander in Chief aging our sovereign by 200 years or a small town that has no other eatery bar McDonalds, it is understandably easy to forget that Arthur Miller was spawned from the same country as The Pussy Cat Dolls. Even someone like me, who loves this country and has defended it on numerous occasions, finds it hard sometimes, especially over the past eight years.
Then I remember my first trip to New York, racing towards Manhattan in a Yellow Cab, my first glimpse of the Empire State Building across the river and I grin. It is the very duality that I find so frustrating that fascinates me so much. Like family, it is despite or maybe even because of the flaws that I brave Homeland Security once more and plunge head first into America, again.

Not As Stupid As They Look

This summer the California Senate sent a bill to the Governator’s desk making texting while driving illegal. That’s right folks, no longer can you hit reply when your vibrating, laughing baby goes off as you steam down the 101. If you really have to tell Stacey that she just made you LOL it may cost you all of fifty dollars should a member of California's finest spot you. How will drivers survive? How did they survive before?!

Senate Bill 28 appears to be one of those completely superfluous laws, laws that invoke the accusation of ‘nanny state’. ‘Why do we need that?’ we ask. Surely, the dangers of taking your eyes off the road in order to comment on last night’s pool party using a complex code of semi-colons and closing brackets seem so obvious that rational, commonsensical grown-ups wonder what the law is coming to. Well, the fact is we aren’t all rational commonsensical grown-ups. At some stage we were all teenagers.

In July 2007, an AAA study revealed that 46% of teenagers’ text while driving. The Albuquerque Tribune spoke to a couple of happy teen texters. Jesse Gallagher, 18, who apparently receives or sends a message every 45 seconds, told the reporter “You learn to text without looking. Then it gets easier” No kidding!! Deseray Gonzalez, 17, says she has memorised the letters so she can watch the road at the same time, “pretty much”. She receives around 500 texts a day. Two questions come to mind: a) how can anyone receive 500 texts a day?! Let alone some kid in Albuquerque! I’m lucky if I get 2!! And b) is a fifty dollar fine enough? Shouldn’t they be off the road? Or jailed? Or worse have their precious party lifeline confiscated? Don’t we need a law to stop this kind of irresponsible behavior?

How many more of these ‘stupid’ or unnecessary laws and rules sent around the planet in chain emails are actually needed, even sensible?

For instance, in Florida, all the doors on public buildings must open outwards. Apart from eliminating that awkward push or pull moment, it seems a completely inessential measure. However, in emergencies it allows for quicker evacuation of buildings as you don’t get the usual bottle necking of crowds at exists.

Some of these seemingly laughable rules have perfectly reasonable and sometimes serious explanations. A city in Kansas has been forced to include a statute against picketing funerals. It’s not a measure against disgruntled family members left out of the will but a special law brought in due to Overland Park’s proximity to the Westboro Baptist Church whose members are notorious for demonstrating at the funerals of homosexuals and more recently those of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, security guards at the Joe Louis Arena have the right to confiscate anything they deem may be thrown on to the ice during the Red Wings match, particularly seafood. Ever since two fishmonger brothers threw an octopus on to the ice in 1952, there has been a danger of octopi getting caught up in Chris Chelois’ skates.

So the next time you’re frustrated at the apparently superfluous bill that your Governor just signed into law or snigger at the fact that bathhouses are banned in San Francisco (first brought in during the height of the AIDS epidemic; they are now allowed under license), remember there may well be a perfectly legitimate reason the rule exists. We should also remember that many are brought in for a much simpler reason; to protect the rest of us from the really stupid people!

Still not sure why I can’t get a fish drunk in Ohio though!!