In Defense of A$$holery

To paraphrase Henry Girard: I am not, by nature, interpersonally an asshole. But sometimes it is socially expedient for me to ask myself: what would an asshole do in this situation? Because whatever else you might say about it, assholery is almost never second-guessed. "You asshole!" Well, no, but I don't mind you thinking that if it beats the alternative.

Peachy Keenan writes of Colgan Air flight #3407 that crashed in 2009:

If you read the cockpit transcript, you will be shocked at how unsterile it is. Normally no non-essential conversation is allowed in the cockpit during takeoffs and landings. But this captain chatted the entire flight to Rebecca, regaling her with old flying stories, giving her pilot career advice, advising her on lifestyle choices, complaining about his own career decisions. To me, it’s obvious that the older man-younger woman dynamic was at play as he talked her ear off, perhaps in an effort to simply make conversation in an awkward, unnatural pairing, or perhaps to impress her, or perhaps because he just felt awkward around a cute young blonde."

Keenan writes this in the context of pointing out that this and the two recent commercial aircraft accidents all involved under-qualified female aircrew. But reading her account made me grateful that my job doesn't require me to interact with females. Who needs that sh!t.

The sad fact of the matter is that it is trivially easy for us men to be maneuvered into a headspace where we start trying to "impress" a woman. I recalled this scene from the 1996 movie "Beautiful Girls":

I hate this. I hate this enough that this is the point where I stopped watching the movie, and couldn't even get through this clip for the purpose of this post.

I must have trauma.

And lest this seem an exercise in hatin' de wimminz, let me clarify that I hate the degree to which I myself am susceptible, except by vigilant assholery, to the maneuvering.

I hate it for two reasons. I hate it because it's sterile. As a married man, I would not (I avow) be trying to cash this out, and in any case am fully aware how futile that would be anyway. That's probably true in general: like I said, I haven't seen the rest of this movie, but I predict that none of these poor guys has any interaction with Uma Thurman beyond the level we are seeing in this scene. We all of us know this. But here we are, tap dancing for loose change anyway.

The second reason I hate it is that however difficult it is to escape the "older man-younger woman dynamic" mentally, it is impossible to escape it socially. Let's take the Congan Air example. It is possible that Capt. Renslow is chatty by nature, and I'm not even judging. There is a reason that There-I-Was is a pilot cliche; we ALL do it to anyone who sits still for it, especially other pilots. But throw in a cute blond girl, and now the cliche gets mapped onto a template where That Creepy Guy Is Hitting On Me. It doesn't matter what Renslow's intentions actually were. You know that Rebecca spent the last hour of her young life thinking this; you know that the NTSB investigators listened to this tape, looked at each other, and rolled their eyes; and you know that it really sucks that Renslow's family had to mourn with this as their last memory of him. I cringe in embarrassment for all of them.