I don’t know how we got onto Elon Musk.
It was just the second date.
To be honest, I had probably brought it up. An off-the-cuff disparaging comment.
In my defense, this was the week when Elon Musk lost his goddamn mind on Twitter. First, he’d attacked journalists and “the media.” Then he went on to rant that he wanted to create a website where the public could judge journalists — a Yelp for journalism, if you will. He wanted to name it after a Russian propaganda paper — Pravda. A fucking Russian propaganda paper! Musk was outraged when folks dared to compare him to Trump. This is how Trump got elected — he tweeted.
It didn’t really matter how we got here, though. Replace Musk with Kavanaugh, Louis C.K., Junot Díaz or Kevin Hart. It was happening again in a different bar, with a different drink, in the same situation: a seemingly fine man with seemingly liberal politics — so close yet so far.
“In five minutes you’re going to owe me a nickel,” my date said.
“What?”
“In five minutes, you’re going to owe me a nickel,” he repeated.
“Um, I don’t remember making a deal?”
“Just wait.”
Apparently, I was being entered into a contract with a man without my consent. The only way this nickel could have been more shocking and demeaning is if he’d tried to pull it out from behind my ear. And even then…
I took a sip of my drink and wished it would either magically double in volume or disappear so I could get the check.
As I listened to this man discuss Elon Musk and what prompted Musk’s idea to build tubes that would shoot people under LA, there was no magic and definitely no spark.
Nearly a week earlier, I’d thought this man had been a reasonably safe bet, a bet I was completely aware of taking nonetheless. This guy lived in Oakland, not San Francisco. He was less likely to have an Apple Watch and Uber stock and more likely to go to house-music shows and make art. He liked to read — he’d even read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels! He was cute, if less than stylish. He was interesting and interested in me, and he even asked me questions about myself — which is not close to a given on a date, not even half-close. He’d been married before, which, at some point in aging, becomes a form of vetting by a woman you’ve never met and proves that a man isn’t afraid of commitment. Best of all, he didn’t seem to be afraid of my well-informed opinions and wanted a girl who was age appropriate — in your 30s, this is a miracle unto itself.
This man worked as an editor for a PR company or something of that sort, not as a coder — or worse, an entrepreneur. There’s nothing inherently wrong with San Francisco or tech. It’s just a probability game. Even some seemingly “wonderful” men in SF have sympathies for James Damore and the faux-academic, anti-women manifesto he sent to his Google colleagues.
Uh-huh, I thought. Just like the gaming community and the comics community…ultimately, it meant to be male, white and well-off.
On the first date there was a flag, but it was yellow, not red.
We were talking baseball, which I love. He was a Red Sox fan — uh-oh — but also an A’s fan since he had moved to Oakland a decade ago — OK, OK. I told him I’m a huge baseball fan. I go to at least a dozen A’s games a year, watch two dozen more on TV and listen to even more on the radio, sometimes even while I’m at the game.
He was into it. He told me he was on this old baseball forum where people talk stats and games and things.
“Like Moneyball,” I said, “and Bill James.”
He smiled.
“Is it like SB Nation?” I asked. “I used to be on SB Nation when it was just Athletics Nation, but then it got so big, and people started to be so intense, so I stopped.”
“No. This forum is old-school. We haven’t updated the website in forever. Honestly, I like it that way. Keeps a lot of new people off the site.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“What?”
“Honestly, that bums me out.”
He looked perplexed.
“Is your site full of a lot of white dudes? I feel like a lot of websites don’t like new people because ‘new’ is often women and people of color.”
“I mean, I think our site is mostly white men, but we are very open as a community.”
In between date 1 and date 2, though, Musk was back in the news. He was selling flamethrowers to deranged members of the American population.
Uh-huh, I thought, just like the gaming community and the comics community, where the true fans had been there before, but to be there “before” meant being the ones who felt welcome before, the ones who could afford computers before. Ultimately, it meant being male, white and well-off.
I started to mumble something about Gamergate and reddit and 4chan, but I changed my mind and asked him about growing up in Boston instead.
We ended that first date talking about the local election for the Alameda County district attorney. He was voting far left for a woman of color, for the woman who was against putting children who had committed petty crimes into the prison industrial complex until they were 18. I was put at ease once more.
I chose to ignore his terrible taste in footwear — New Balance but not normcore — and we made plans for a second date.
In between date 1 and date 2, though, Musk was back in the news. He was selling flamethrowers to deranged members of the American population. I say “deranged” because unless you are Ripley in Aliens or a firefighter creating a firebreak, who needs a motherfucking flamethrower?
But all this is to pay for tubes! Under LA! For the commuter!
And maybe after that, just maybe, some water for Flint.
I’d gone on this second date to decide if I felt like making out with this guy, maybe going back to his place. I didn’t need this relative stranger knowing where I live — I’ve made that mistake before.
We’d met through Tinder, because it’s present day, and who meets in a bar anymore? In fact, according to another man who’d messaged me around the same time, “IRL is next to impossible these days unless someone fixes you up with someone they know. Anything else can be misconstrued as harassment, and for good reason. Women don’t go about their daily lives just so random men can hit on them. I get it. Whenever I think about how I used to meet women at shows or bars, those days are over.”
After reading that message, I took a screenshot, added “FML” and sent it to my sister and gym wife. I contemplated asking him why 1) he thinks women can’t distinguish between flirting and harassment; and 2) whether he, in fact, knows the difference. Instead, I put down my phone.
“So there he was, just stuck in traffic,” my date continued, “and he thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Why can’t we bypass this traffic?’ And that’s what gave him the idea to disrupt — fuck! I almost did it.”
“Disrupt” was the secret word. No nickel owed. I was expecting sirens and screaming and Pee-wee Herman to appear any second. For him, trying to avoid the word “disrupt” was like trying not to think about an elephant after someone tells you not to think about an elephant. He lasted for barely two minutes. Typical.
“Who is going to be able to afford these tubes?” I asked. How many stops would there be? Could there be stops? Would it just to transport rich people to rich-people spots? Also, how fucked up was it that people who researched transportation in Los Angeles for decades would never be able to “disrupt” transit — even though they had spent their lives researching potential solutions — just because they weren’t billionaires?
“He’s not technically a billionaire. His money is tied up in Tesla stock,” he interjected. I took another sip of whisky and readied myself.
I used Kim Kardashian as an example. She’d just gone to the White House to get a woman pardoned. I’d skimmed the case. It seemed completely reasonable to pardon Alice Marie Johnson, a woman stuck in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. Based on Kim’s visit, Trump pardoned Johnson. But, I said, how angry would I be if I were someone who has been trying to get people pardoned forever, and in walks a pretty, rich celebrity with connections, and boom — pardon?
Now what I didn’t say was that Elon Musk is seen as a genius businessman because of SpaceX and Tesla, but Kim also seems to have some savvy business sense. I remember a week with chocolate boxes and little hammers filling my Instagram feed. A perfume bottle in the shape of her ass did the same a few weeks before. Say what you will about Kim using her sex appeal to sell products, about the resulting detriment to women on account of her continually pushing a hyper-idealized version of womanhood, but Kim Kardashian is successfully monetizing society’s endless desire to objectify women. She’s banking on the understanding that even with three waves of feminism, the world hasn’t changed much. She’s ruthless in business. Just like a man.
Yet we disparage Kim Kardashian’s business sense but elevate Musk’s, in part because…sexism. Because to be a reality TV star as a woman doesn’t get you a presidency. It does, however, get you seen as less capable than a man who built a useless “kid-size submarine” to save 12 teenage boys and their football coach in Thailand, who called the man who actually saved the team a pedophile, who threatened the media after they reported his company’s poor safety record for employees, whose company continues to remain in debt and is possibly on the verge of bankruptcy, who shot a car into space. He shot…a car…into space!
Dating has always been a mess and a crapshoot. But dating men in 2019, post-#MeToo, now includes the faux feminist. They think they’re “woke” because they realize they’ve got some luck, and they acknowledge some privilege. They might even seem sensitive, inquisitive, driven and smart. Yet they still tell you what to do, tell you why you’re wrong.
But y’know, men get to lose some to win some. They get to be bold and brash, and still get put on a pedestal. Women get to be whores and sluts and “low IQ.” Women get to owe a nickel even when we didn’t agree to play the game.
