i've long said the female mind, especially the young female mind, let's say younger than twenty-five or thirty (and much longer for sheltered souls), cannot conceive the depravity of the male mind. there have been times where i've said this to girls in the past and they turn to me curious and ask me to enlighten them, or to try to at least. always with a chuckle, i explain i lack both the skills and the confidence to bring them into the know. but here, in tommy wolfe, we've tapped the most capable or appropriate member of the tribe to throw the barn doors open.
wolfe's journalistic style makes him the perfect american male to vivisect our college-age youth. or you could say, he picks up where the most-effective movie Kids left off. i'm glad that wolfe exposes what sorts of nonsense is happening on the other side of the tracks from where Kids drama unfolded because i think many left the theatre with an inflated sense of the them-not-us mindset, and charlotte simmons makes the strong point that that notion is simply not true. in evidence, here's one of wolfe's more succinct bits of work:
By the time they reached the bed, she had somehow managed to unbuckle his belt and undo the top button of his khakis. Like many a man before him, his brain had dropped like a stone into his groin.
socio-economic standing doesn't have a lick to do with that small but absolute male truth.
and i can't tell you how many times i repeated the mandate in my head that i'm going to make bella read this in the months before she leaves for college. there were a few points were i dismissed the notion saying that by then it will be too dated for her. then i re-did the math and realized i'm looking at eight short years and know, sadly, the book will still be perfectly relevant and accessible in that desperately brief span.
