The instinct of imitation and the absence of courage governs the social societies of Oxford. Take your pick from a wide array of approaches to attaining self-esteem and attention/acceptance — fuck a bottle blonde, wear a fishnet dress, join a fraternity/sorority, learn to play a Deep Blue Something cover, buy a trendy windbreaker, give some head, play along, date someone, break up with someone, fuck that bitch, screw him, do another shot. And in six years there, I’ve come to believe that almost every single one of those angles all funnel into the clearest objective — validation through having the opposite sex want to fuck you and your tribe being jealous of it.
We aim low, without the slightest hint of subtlety. The same gender that sees the word ‘whore’ as the ultimate insult parades around in practical nudity, selling their bodies as the pay-off aspect to a crowd of suitors. The gender that claims simplicity and views it’s counterpart with the most severe distrust shoves alcohol down their throats and pitches their A-List material in order to con them back to their apartment. And they both do it to impress their own gender. To fuck is to triumph.
And further mucking up this already unhealthy scheme is the aspect of Love. We want to disperse our romantic notions onto those who we show skin or exhibit casual indifference to as a lure. As a result the simplest things become the stickiest of situations; phone calls not recieved or conversations with a member of your gender incite panic, all because in our deepest of thoughts we know that it is all a sham. She’s aware that the lack of clothes and suggestions of playful but calculated promiscuity is what brought him in, and this makes her begin to wonder if the same could pull them away. He’s aware that his carefully chosen words and gestures he used that first night were a pitch she bit on, and he knows ten friends with better approaches. We all eventually question how we got there in the first place, which is a death sentence.
The magic powder on this bubbling cauldron is the mass consumption of alcohol and drugs. When this game began, most of the boys were intimidated by beautiful and seemingly confident girls. Most of the girls had yet to reconcile sex with the ingrained moral and spiritual preconceptions. Rather than address any of this, we all decided to throw back an excessive amount of liquor to qwell the fears that occur in the dark when we take off our clothes.
We wonder if they would want to be with us if we were physically unattractive or wealthy, and we do it because our initial connection and the jungle we’ve had to chop through before it indicates that we might not. There’s something at the core of us that transcends that, but we must face the reality before us. The bright things she says or the caring gestures he makes would have never come to fruition if it weren’t for our ability to attract through cheap pretenses in the first place.
One begins to wonder how love and honest affection can exist anywhere in this Mexican stand-off, and the result is that no one lowers their aimed guns. We use each other as pawns, seeking out a dispersion for affection, a sense of self-esteem, a distraction from another, acceptance from peers. Sooner or later the line between our roles and the real life actors who play them begin to blur. A paranoia sets in that causes us to question the object of our affection as well as our reasons behind it, and at the same time somehow causes us to retreat into the very same behaviors that led to the doubt in the first place.
In order to get closer to anyone else we must run from ourselves. It would be so simple if the heart weren’t attached.
