Dirty Old Men or Enlightened Romantics?
From where I was sitting, there was nothing girlish about what I was oogling on my television screen. For a solid hour every week, I wallowed in my own self-loathing. Hayden Panettiere from Heroes. A helpless cheerleader with superpowers and a fabulous habit of getting photographed licking things. In this modern age of ours, a simple Google search is all one needs to discover that Hayden Panettiere has a serious oral fixation. Oral fixation. Hangs out with the sluttiest of Hollywood sluts. Dresses like a cheerleader. And underage.
And I didn't give a fuck.
With my girlfriend by my side (and giving me very dirty- not the good dirty- looks), I felt that I had crossed some sort of line in the sands of manhood: When did I suddenly become a dirty old man? Do you suddenly wake up one morning after a night of drinking and lying about your age to co-eds and go from the cool older guy who can pull college girls to the creepy lecherous man who sits by himself at Tuesday noon showings of New York Minute? Or is the very idea of the “dirty old man” just a product of a bygone era when 17 year old girls dressed like 8 year old girls do now? And, most importantly, am I going to hell if I think that some teenage ingénue prancing onscreen in ass-hugging shorts and a belly shirt is hot enough to risk jail time over?
At some moment, and the exact moment is one of the world’s great unknowns, a guy becomes too old to pull girls under 21 (and I use girls rather ubiquitously not as some sort of Freudian slip about my deep-seeded underlying psychosis). My friends and I went to Spring Break in South Padre when the youngest among us was 24. We had our cover stories firmly established. I was Jamie McCarthy from South Boston and a senior at BC, double major in English and architecture. It was shortly after the whole Good Will Hunting thing and I figured that my horrific Boston accent coupled with a sad-sack story of my childhood in Hollywood’s idealized Southie would be gold. My friends followed suit with similar aliases.
It was Texas Week which meant that not only were the bars teeming with gorgeous college girls but high school hotties as well, an absolute recipe for a felony arrest. My friends were lounging outside of our hotel room when a bikini-clad girl performed a series of cartwheels on the lawn in front of them. For my friends it was a moment of supreme glory, proof that there is a higher power somewhere and he was on their side. Finally one of them pulled his jaw from the floor and this being Spring Break asked the girl if she would like a beer. The ensuing conversation changed them all in a deep and profound way and haunts them still to this day.
Drunk Guy Pretending to Be College Student: “Hey, that was awesome, you want a beer?”
Cartwheeling Girl: “No, I don’t think that I should.”
Drunk Guy Pretending to Be College Student: “Why what’s the matter are your parents gonna get mad at you?”
Cartwheeling Girl: “My mom may.”
Drunk Guy Pretending to Be College Student: “Who cares, this is Spring Break!!”
Cartwheeling Girl: “Yeah, but my mom’s next door.”
Drunk Guy Pretending to Be College Student: “How old are you?”
Cartwheeling Girl: “14”
My friends didn’t even wait for the –en in fourteen. They were back in the room, sliding door locked, blinds drawn before the syllable was out of her mouth. Forget for a second that a parent would bring their fourteen old daughter to Spring Break, were my friends really in the wrong for their assumption? Spring Break is not someplace one would expect to run into a lot of 8th graders but it was my friends who suffered, convinced for the remainder of the trip that every girl they talked to at a bar could potentially be some backwoods Lolita.
But rarely is one’s shaming that tangible. Usually it happens that you are on the train and catch yourself mentally undressing some lovely lady and just as you are working on getting off that pesky jacket you notice that she’s wearing her high school lacrosse jacket, her high school junior varsity lacrosse jacket. Or you are at the mall and you eye an attractive girl from afar only to shudder when you get closer and realize that you’ve just been fine-tuning pick-up lines for a teenager on a date with some pimply dork. Worse still, you start to rationalize that your car, apartment and ability to buy beer legally would be all the ammunition you would need to seal the deal with Ms. Teen USA before your inside voice suddenly chirps up “Hey, asshole, did you like watching all those male rapes on Oz? Feel like being Adebeze’s bitch?”
I’m 28 and don’t consider myself old. But am I already a dirty old man? And if that is the case shouldn’t you get a notice in the mail from the government like they do for Selective Service informing you that you are officially banned from the active pursuit of girls under 21? And is it my fault that the standard of beauty in America has changed from mature, full grown women to immature, prematurely grown teenagers?
I don’t want to get off on a Bob Ryan-esque rant about how things were in the old days but didn’t it seem that when we were growing up that there were a much higher proportion of sex symbols spread throughout the age brackets? Sure there are beautiful women in their late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and up, if that is your thing. But you rarely see them. In films and television every female character seems to be either Kelly Kapowski or Deb Barrone. How many major female celebrities are there between 25 and 35? A staggeringly small number. Where does that leave me? Either I’m trolling junior high schools or I’m volunteering at a senior center.
So if the whole world is shoving images of vivacious teenagers in front of us at every turn is it any surprise that our ideas about what is sexy have changed? Our wives, girlfriends and the other women in our lives may view us as vile and disturbed if we admit that Hayden Panettiere is hot but the fact of the matter is that she is. She simply is. Dirty old men, hardly. We’re just working with what we’ve been given. And we have nothing to be ashamed of. Now if you excuse me I have to go back to watching some Saved By The Bell reruns.
Mike Lindall