Tuesday, February 05, 2008
This is why I almost never watch television
Natalee Halloway is back in the news, as the American media, and its public, can't seem to get enough of her story. It would appear that America's heart bleeds for blond-haired, blue-eyed, white girls, from upper middle class society, but when was the last time you saw a multi-national police and military effort assembled to find a missing girl from South Central Los Angeles or any other of America's other poor, urban communities? I would venture to bet that in the two years since Natalee Halloway disappeared, at least one 18-year old black/hispanic/asian/etc girl with a promising future and loving parents disappeared somewhere in America. I wouldn't know for sure, because I didn't hear about it, and there was no miliary effort to find said girl. Those girls are lucky to become faces on milk cartons and mailbox fliers.
In Halloway's case, it is as easy to imagine that she got drunk(van der Sloot suggests that she and her friends were dabbling in cocaine as well), hooked up with this slob, and had some sort of seizure, as it is to think he was making a move, something went wrong, and he ended up killing her. Either way, the moral of the story should be clear to any girl with any common sense and a shred of self-respect: don't trust strangers. Don’t' trust f#*king strangers! It's the oldest lesson our parents teach us and most learned it shortly after they were taught to sit on the toilet when they had to "make poopies", because it is as simple and as obvious as not shitting your pants.
I don't get the one-night stand, particularly from a girl's perspective. You literally put your life and your health in the hands, or the pants, of someone you hardly know in order to experiece a few minutes of cheap, animalistic pleasure. This person could be carrying a multitude of STDs, or a rapist, or a murderer, or more likely, someone out cheating on their wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend. A girl I know once told me about a friend of hers who hooked up in a bar bathroom with a guy she had known for less than an hour. Ten minutes after their romantic tryst in a public bathroom stall, he disappeared into the night…now that has to make one feel classy. Apparently, the girl spent the next three years getting HIV tests every six months, "just to be sure". Sounds like a great time and well worth the risk, as I'm sure the sex moved mountains and opened up a whole new realm of understanding for her.
One night stands are always a bad idea, but hooking up with a stranger strikes me as unimaginable. Ted Bundy wasn't enough to scare people out of this ancient behavior pattern and Natalee Halloway won't be, either. I'm sure that all across the globe last night, tonight, tomorrow night, and beyond, there will be people penetrating, and being penetrated by, strangers. People will be people, after all, and it would be ridiculous to expect anything more from Earth's "most intelligent" species. Hopefully, Natalee Halloway died defending herself and her dignity, rather than in some post-coital embrace. How would you like the last act you do on this Earth to be a random hook-up with some pudgy scumbag on a beach somewhere? That sort of talk is disrespectful, no doubt, but the reality is that such a scenario is a possibility.
The funny thing is, most of the people I have known who participate in the one-night stand lifestyle(male or female) wouldn't get into a car with a stranger for fear of ending up a corpse rotting in a shallow grave somewhere. But a few minutes/hours of conversation and a few drinks change everything. Alcohol and drugs serve as keys to the one-night stand door, and an excuse for opening it after the fact, but that does nothing to make sense of sleeping with someone that was a complete and total stanger minutes, hours, or even days before. When we cheapen or devalue the things we do, we cheapen and devalue who we are. In the process, that cheapening puts peoples' health and even their lives at risk, but the beat goes on and on.
For the sake of her family and friends, I hope this Natalee Halloway thing is wrapped up and closed soon. It seems more and more obvious that van der Sloot disposed of her body, but questions will probably always surround the circumstances of exactly what led to this young girl becoming a body in the first place. Either way, even such a widely covered example of bad things happening as the result of, or at least during, a one-night hookup will make no difference whatsoever in the continuance of this most ancient ritual. For "normal" or "average" folks, getting drunk and sleeping with strangers is a rite of passage, so we can expect more stories like this one for years to come. Of course, you won't hear about it happening in South St. Pete or College Hill, but then, there is only so much time in the nightly news and so much web space on CNN.com.
Labels: rant
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