I asked Google Gemini to create a picture of a young man eating a salad in a park. The angry business squirrel with the hamburger and the top hat sporting pigeons were Gemini’s ideas. Make of that what you will. Also, hat tip to the mighty Dave Barry, whose column about this subject is far funnier than anything I could ever come up with.
Our latest dispatch from the world of modern culture comes courtesy of the New York Post, which recently ran a story entitled, “Single women resort to stealing men’s lunches to get their attention.”
OK, Post, you have my attention.
The story’s primary source is TikTokker Nicole Or, aka @nicoleee461, who reports that she’s heard of single women “popping into a Midtown Manhattan lunch spot during the work week to steal finance bros’ salads and then use the name on the order to look them up on LinkedIn to message them.” As an aside, that one sentence explains a great deal about everything that’s wrong with modern urban life.
Ladies — and as usual, I say this with nothing but love and respect — there’s a more concise way to describe this approach. In fact, it’s a single word. That word is stalking.
Somehow, it gets worse. According to @nicoleee461, assuming the guy meets the stalker’s standards, she will message him with something like, “Hey, oh my God. So sorry. I grabbed your salad. Let me just make it up to you and buy you a new one.” In other words, the very first message these women convey to the men with whom they presumably hope to potentially share the most intimate moments and most brutally honest conversations of their lives amounts to a bald-faced lie and a fake apology.
If you watch @nicoleee461’s video, you’ll quickly find additional answers to the question, “Why aren’t more men approaching women these days?” In addition to salad stealing based stalking, women are making bracelets with their phone numbers and giving them to men. They’re surreptitiously taking pictures of guys, making the picture their phone’s home screen, then asking the guy to take a picture of them and their friends so he sees that his picture is on said home screen. Suffice it to say, these tactics don’t exactly suggest you’re a viable candidate for companionship and potential life partnership. They are, however, excellent ways to cause a man to calmly back away at approximately 75 miles an hour.
Here is also where we see another example of how, despite the ululations from certain parts of the political spectrum, men and women are not completely equal. Imagine if a man stole a woman’s lunch, stalked her on the internet, and contacted her directly via her personal social media, phone, or email. Imagine if he took a nonconsensual picture of her, made it his home screen, then showed it to her. These aren’t meet cutes, they’re grounds for restraining orders.
In another post, @nicolee461 is wearing a t-shirt that says “Men made me what i am today … a b***h.” So there’s that. Is it possible, ladies, that maybe, just maybe, part of the reason men are less likely to approach you these days is that you’re acting like absolute lunatics?
There’s another problem: You’re targeting guys who voluntarily eat salad as a primary meal. Because nothing exudes virility like Swiss chard. Some of you may protest that it actually takes an extra degree of masculine confidence to be seen in public, in broad daylight, eating a salad. The same way that it takes some extra manly manliness to wear a bright pink shirt.
To which I say, hogwash. A man eating a salad in public without shame or an accompanying hangar steak is conveying one of three possible messages: 1) I’ve recently had a heart attack; 2) I’m married and my wife makes me eat this gerbil fodder; or 3) I’m super duper conscious of my figure. Suffice it to say, none of these men are likely to be prime dating material.
Also, you’re in New York City, for crying out loud! If you insist on trying to meet a man via lunch larceny, head to the deli across the street from a local construction site and steal a worker’s meatball sub. Settle on a bench and watch as one by one he accuses his coworkers of being the thief, using increasingly inspired language, until the inevitable moment when they all come to blows. Meatball sub or not, the last man standing is your guy.
There’s a bonus: Given modern union rules and construction contracts, there’s a good chance he makes an excellent living. Maybe not as much as the associate at the big law firm or the finance bro at the investment bank, but then again he’s not wasting his metaphorical cabbage on extra slim Italian suits, exotic narcotics, and $30 salads.
Another problem, as with the last subject I had to explain to you women with nothing but love and respect, is the featured picture. It’s a twenty-something couple sitting in a park eating, of course, salads. If you look closely, you see that his salad is considerably smaller than hers. Equally troubling is the fact that his trousers are more neatly pressed than hers. He’s gazing at her with an expression that clearly conveys either, “I’m crazy about you” or “I’m crazy.” If this is an accurate portrayal of the modern, salad eating urban professional young man, ladies, you are well and truly screwed (actually, not, but I digress).
Just another perfectly normal salad eating guy. Photo courtesy the New York Post.
To the Post writer’s credit, she acknowledges the creepiness of the stolen salad approach to dating, and suggests that modern men do indeed need to step up their game, follow in their forefathers’ footsteps, and just talk to some damn women. “Honestly, it feels pretty good to the ego,” said 28-year-old Jhonatan Mendoza, whose primary dating handicap is that his name is Jhonatan.
We next learn that, “The majority of single people complain that the dating scene is the toughest it’s ever been, especially in New York City.” Which is hilarious, because it suggests that these young urban single people have experience dating in other eras. Which, of course, they don’t. I urge them to seek a little perspective, and ask their elders what it was like to date, say, in the 1990s.
From the straight male perspective, a typical 90s weekend night went like this: Between two and five guys, or “wingmen,” would enter a bar and survey the scene the way World War II fighter pilots entered the battle space and evaluated squadrons of enemy bombers (not that I’m comparing you beautiful, svelte, luminous ladies to Luftwaffe Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors, far from it!) The dark air would be thick with an obscuring screen of cigarette smoke, often peppered with strobe lights, that made positive identification difficult if not impossible. As a result, it was not unusual for men to inadvertently proposition the jukebox (not that I’m comparing you beautiful, svelte, luminous ladies to a Crosley CR1210A-OA Rocket 45, no sir!)
Meanwhile, like World War II bomber pilots, the women would circulate the room in tight, mutually protective box formations. In place of .50 caliber machine guns, their primary defensive weapon was The Look. Every man since time immemorial knows the devastating firepower of The Look, particularly when deployed in overlapping waves by multiple German heavy bombers women. It’s the same look with which a woman regards an overflowing toilet.
A mere two second burst of The Look could reduce the most confident, macho, masculine man to a simpering puddle. A steelworker who spent his evenings at the local boxing gym and benched 250 would be overwhelmed by a sudden, inexplicable need to call his mother. Upon receiving direct hits of The Look, the average man would resort to the only defensive weapon in his arsenal: Multiple shots of Goldschlӓger.
The men threaded their way through the defensive fire and attempted to pick off individual stragglers who through inexperience, inattention, or multiple shots of Goldschlӓger had temporarily fallen out of formation. This, of course, is also the answer to the age-old question of why women go to the bathroom in groups.
This was the point at which the 90s dating scene was equally perilous for women. If they failed to take out an approaching guy with The Look, they would confront the imminent threat of multiple direct hits from The Line. The Line was the 90s man’s primary offensive weapon in the dating battle. If he was lucky he’d get one or two passes before the woman rejoined her formation and, along with as many as half a dozen others, directed The Look at him in a devastating, often fatal fusillade.
A typical Line consisted of a rudimentary didactic, the second part of which could be so brazenly sexually charged that in the modern era it would qualify for felony counts. “That dress looks really good on you. It would look even better on my floor,” was a typical Line. “Are you an astronaut? Because your [female body parts] are out of this world!” And so forth. There were entire books dedicated to teaching men Lines. All were terrible, and more than a few were overtly menacing. This was what women had to contend with.
In contrast, the Post reports that in the modern era women are taking initiative. And while much of that initiative appears to be of the unsettling salad stealing sort, every single single guy nevertheless should thank his lucky stars and shut up forever. Or, you know, man up, order a roast beef sandwich, and start talking to women again.
Why are modern single young men so reticent? “Dating coach Blaine Anderson found that 53% of men say the fear of being perceived as creepy ‘reduces their likelihood of interacting with women.’” Right, guys, right. Because nothing says “normal guy” than hovering around a bar for hours staring at women from across the room without ever approaching them. Good call.
Then again, for the vast majority of human history, indeed up until just the last few years, most human societies expected men to initiate. We can’t really expect women to get it right the first time. For that matter, men have had around 300,000 years and we still mostly cock it up. With the possible exception of Frank Sinatra, every man remembers moments when he made an absolute clown of himself in front of the entire room while trying to engage a woman in conversation. Everyone assumes that when an otherwise healthy, well-adjusted man falls into the throes of depression or addiction he must be battling with monstrous demons. In fact, he finally snapped when his brain dredged up, for the 87,000th time, that time 35 years ago in eighth grade when he tried to talk to a girl with a giant booger plainly visible on his upper lip (again, h/t Dave Barry).
The story concludes with a quote from a Gen X woman who, as usual, offers the only sane comment. Laura Beasley, 54, advises young men to “just be straightforward. There are a lot of stupid lines out there.”
Also, a lot of terrifying Looks.
the all aspect report 