Hi faithful reader!
Thank you for coming back to my lowly blog after my chronic case of 3-hours-of-what-I-might-consider-a-migraine and my temporary blip of never-ending laziness. I've missed you.
So a lot of unfunny things have happened to me (or at me, since I'm often an innocent bystander or unwilling participant), but I'll cover those in subsequent blogs. Today I'd like to talk about the one time I ventured into in the realm of toilet humor - not even - tampon humor.
One night not too long ago, I was out drinking with a couple of bro-dude friends. Now alone, they are respectful and kind, but together mixed with alcohol, they are different animals altogether. Their deeply, profound bromance is difficult to penetrate and I sometimes feel like they're speaking some special language I don't understand. Let me preface that throughout the night they remained ever gentlemanly by New York standards and I still hold them in high regard, however, at some point during our happy hour night drinking one ventured into my purse looking for dirt. The dirtiest thing he'd find was probably my week's worth of fast food receipts crumbled at the bottom of my bag, but I insisted he go for the mother load - the lady's secret pocket. You know... The pocket with the zipper that's difficult to open in the back of a woman's purse. The place where a woman stores her "unmentionables." If I remember correctly, what I had stored that night were the following:
Hermetically-sealed, applicator-free tampons
A pantyliner
A pillbox full of Target store-brand Advil
Eye drops - synthetic, gel tears to be precise
A purse hanger
and one or two close-to-expiration-date condoms (I must have forgotten I put them in there *wink, wink* two years ago)
So one bro-dude pulls out one of the tampons asking not-so-innocently, "What's this?" Well, if he expected me to be embarrassed, to shrink or to - worse - set him up for a joke, he's friends with the wrong girl! It might have been the three Manhattan cocktails egging me on, but I quickly took that applicator-free tampon and shoved it up my nose. Just as quickly the other bro-dude shrank and looked away in disgust. He kept saying to take it out, to stop being gross. Frankly, what I had up there was the equivalent to a tightly-packed cotton ball. A ball still wrapped in plastic! I even tried reasoning with him that in sports medicine, when a player suffers a bloody nose, the sports doc is quick to use tampons to plug up the bleeding, or at least that's what I saw in that one "Sex and the City" episode where Miranda dates Blair Underwood. However, it was all too much for other bro-dude. He even swatted at me. At my face. Now, I don't think his intention was to inflicted bodily harm, of which he didn't, but that was enough to kill the joke. (Maybe the joke was already dead?) So I took out the tampon and put it back in the lady's secret pocket for later use.
But that encounter left me with a lot of questions. If a guy, like original bro-dude who lacked boundaries when he rifled through my purse, had done the exact same thing would the other bro-dude have found it funny? Undoubtedly, yes. Would I? Maybe. Most likely, I would have been annoyed that he was "soiling" one of my tampons, but would I have laughed? No. If he was shoving that tampon up his nose in a flirtatious manner? There would have been a strong possibility for flirtatious punching (and body contact) on my part, for sure! Outright squeals of laughter? Still no. Is this kind of "Jackass" humor strictly for men, or more specifically, bro-dudes? If so, why? Why can't I shove a clean tampon up my nose and not elicit the same kind of squeals and high-fives from friends and perfect strangers? Women can do gross out humor, too! It's not exclusively male-dominated. My disdain for stereotyping, and for making blanket statements, keeps me from venturing a hypothesis here. However, next time I find myself in the same scenario, you know what I'm going to do?
The same. Damn. Thing.
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