A Meathead Watches Gilmore Girls (“Sadie, Sadie”)

Sam Wilkinson

According to a faithful reader, I'm Ordinary Times's "least thoughtful writer." So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Related Post Roulette

22 Responses

  1. Michael Drew says:

    You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.Report

  2. Glyph says:

    Kudos on writing a post long enough that I had long forgotten that there was an asterisk, and was thus surprised and amused to encounter a M.E. underneath it all.Report

    • Chris in reply to Glyph says:

      I had the exact same experience, and giggled like a junior high kid.Report

    • zic in reply to Glyph says:

      It’s kind-of interesting to see romantic fiction (stereotypically consumed by women) analyzed through the ME lens. I read (I think on Sully’s Dish) about the new version of Pride and Prejudice, and the ME moment was Elizabeth walking up, windblown and with muddy skirts and face aglow from the exercise, as the ME moment for Darcy.

      For women, and I think this has much to do with cultural conditioning, ME is more a glow in the belly, and attributed to the possibility of Romantic Love™; we’re not supposed to feel/recognize overt sexual attraction. I hope this is changing in both directions; hope of romantic love as more a recognized response for the boys, and overt sexual attraction more recognized for the girls.

      I do know this will alter my future viewing/reading habits to better recognize men’s ME moments, and those times when women’s romantic-longings are actually the female variation of ME.Report

      • Sam Wilkinson in reply to zic says:

        I spent this entire post putting serious thought into the meaning of ME. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I finally did.

        Two masters degrees everybody! TWO OF THEM!Report

      • Glyph in reply to zic says:

        Well, at least you finally rose to the occasion. Sometimes when we get older it takes a little prick to spur our memory. If you’d never gotten it, that would have been pulling a real boner.Report

      • Chris in reply to zic says:

        I hear women talking about M.E. moments all the time. Hell, my girlfriend cannot see Nick Newman on a television screen without having one, and talking about it. Twitter is full of women talking about their M.E. moments. And there’s no confusing them with romantic longings. These are definitely straight up M.E. moments. (A common Twitter thing is for women to post pictures of men and then drool over them collectively. Very much like men have been doing since the dawn of time.)

        Thinking about it, I’ve heard women talking about this sort of thing since I was old enough for the girls/women I was around to be talking about it. Now, it may be the case that often in fiction, women’s M.E. moments are represented as romantic longings, but in real life, at least in my experience, women are really up front about it, especially with each other.Report

      • zic in reply to zic says:

        @chris this is why I said ‘stereotypical,’ it’s also something that has changed greatly during my life time. It’s much easier to say ‘he’s hot,’ without having to go to needing romantic love to feel that then it was (at least in TV and fiction) just a few decades ago. To put it another way, conditioning sort of had girls (at least this girl) thinking that hotness = romance, and there are all sorts of stereotypes and plot ploys not only showing that, but portraying women who responded to ‘hot’ instead of ‘romance’ as fallen and damaged.

        But I really don’t want to entangle in the how-women-are here; we do that too often; I was intrigued by the how-men-are.Report

      • Chris in reply to zic says:

        Ah, I got ya.Report

      • zic in reply to zic says:

        @chris and just to point out the obvious, but that equating romantic love to ME moments was, pre-contraception, probably rooted in the the somewhat twisted wisdom that if you got preggers, you wanted it to be with someone you actually did love and could spend your life with who would be a responsible father. That’s the weight of biology absent modern contraception, in a world focused on male inheritance. That’s not to say there couldn’t have (and weren’t) other models, but our notions of lineage and male heirs and all that resulted in this particular model for most people.Report

      • Glyph in reply to zic says:

        RE: the How-Men-Are – I’m not sure that ME and romantic love are all that easily disentangled for (at least a lot of) men either, despite the usual stereotypes.

        I clearly remember many, many days (less frequent now, as I am exhausted most of the time, and older all of the time) when I felt ‘lovesickness’ in the pit of my stomach for every reasonably-attractive female that I passed on the street between the ages of say sixteen and sixty – each one had at least one feature that I found attractive, and I felt a palpable *loss* and deep sadness (like, seriously, almost tears, and despondence) as each receded into the distance and I knew I’d never see them again, never speak to them, never touch them, never fall head-over-heels into a torrid affair with them. Gone forever, and we never even knew each other…

        Realistically? That mess is M.E. all the way; a biological imperative to spread my seed far and wide with abandon.

        But that’s not how it *felt*, in the moment (not saying there were no sexual fantasies or feelings; but those were liberally admixed with less overtly-sexual ones and more thoughts like “I wonder what *she* likes? I wonder how *she* talks? What does it sound like when *she* laughs? Maybe she would love me and I would love her and we’d be happy always.”)

        The thing is: saying THIS stuff out loud *almost* sounds more insane/dangerous than the standard “He’s horny and just wants to eff anything that moves” cliches. THAT’S normal, right?

        This is actually a topic I’d love to hear Veronica talk about, because she’s had a view from both sides of the fence. I don’t subscribe to this old idea that these things are somehow simpler or easier for men. I may not always understand what women are going through, but man, lemme tell you, they sometimes have no idea what goes on in these heads (heh) of ours either.Report

      • Kimmi in reply to zic says:

        Glyph,
        Actually, you’re either getting a nice fun patina of “I am a Nice and Good Person” over the instincts… or you’ve got more girl in your head than you think (Not At All Uncommon for Smart Kids to be “in the middle” on brain chemistry).

        The instincts, as I’ve had them described to me, tend to key in on scent, and be more focused on “sex NOW, figure out how!” Of course, there are tons of ways to tweak/suppress/modify instincts… (not to be completely crass about it, but… %fullness has a lot to do with guys getting horny — if we can talk about women making different choices at different times of their fertility cycles).Report

      • zic in reply to zic says:

        @glyph as a teenager, I spent time at both my parents homes, different towns, and so had friends in both places; separated by time while at the other parents home; this is common now, but was still relatively uncommon in the ’70’s.

        One night, at my Dad’s for the weekend, I went out on a blind date. Had an awesome time, smoked a little, drank a little, made out a little. Didn’t think much of it one way or the other; nice guy, but nothing that spoke of deep interest to pursue. I go home to Mom’s, don’t get back to Dad’s for a month (forever in teenage time.) Only to discover that this boy I’d dated once had built up this incredible myth about me; the things I liked and didn’t like, the things I’d do and my morals and . . . it was horribly shocking, but that zic had almost nothing in common with this zic. That zic was in a deeply committed relationship with said boy, something this zic knew absolutely nothing about. He was the only time I remember being overtly cruel to someone; partly self defense to reclaim my own identity, partly to shock him into seeing that his fantasies of another person really shouldn’t be imposed on that person.

        At the time, I also recognized that what he did to me, in his own head, was no different then the tween fixations I’d had on certain TV/music/movie stars; hours fantasizing about love with them, totally inventing a person on a few crumbs of knowledge and experience. So yeah, I don’t think there’s much difference between men’s responses (interpretations of romantic love) and women’s either. It sort of amuses me that the weirdness of going to the binaries — men this, women that, in our cultural stereotypes. Diss the good, loyal, loving men as boring, diss the wild girls as damaged goods. ‘Cause boys get lucky, girls get shamed.

        it’s just preggers.Report

  3. zic says:

    Going on memory, but: I do recall that Lorelai doesn’t know Luke’s lady split, and Luke does not bother to mention it until after the proposal has been accepted. So in Lorelai’s world, Luke is unavailable.

    I go back to the parallel constructions here, as well; Luke and Dean are cut from the same cloth, at least in Richard and Emily’s eyes, and the welcome Dean receives is deeply embedded in ‘potential mate’ filters Lorelai has; and even though she rebels against her parents and their lifestyle, rebelling doesn’t wipe out all that conditioning. That’s a very big part of how and why she doesn’t recognize Luke and her ME responses, both male and female, to him.Report

    • Sam Wilkinson in reply to zic says:

      Zic,

      I am very interested in the concept here of unavailability which at least accounts for the possibility that Lorelai really does know the score between the two of them, but ignores it because of Rachel. I find that possibility quite interesting.Report

      • zic in reply to Sam Wilkinson says:

        There are two things — first, Luke’s unavailable, and his unavailability is reinforced by the Emily/Richard conditioning of the type of man that’s acceptable. Both sort of act in concert, was my take; it’s pretty obvious that on subconscious level, there’s some attraction; these are Lorelai’s constraints on not to going there.

        I don’t remember if it’s already happened, but the first time Emily sees Lorelai and Luke together, she actually comments on it, but of course, nobody pays attention to Emily.Report

  4. kaitcat says:

    Welcome back! Good to hear from you again. Don’t make us wait so long next time, okay? I re-watched Seasons 5, 6, and 7 while you were gone. 😉Report

  5. Mike Schilling says:

    I didn’t interpret Lorelai’s silence as not thinking about telling Emily, but rather not wanting to deal with her disapproval. (“Really, Lorelai? A high-school teacher?”) Putting it off is a fairly dumb strategy, since when she does tell, she’ll get that plus “Why did you keep this from me?” and possibly “Were you ashamed to tell me about this man? I don’t blame you.”, but having to face Emily always turns Lorelai into an emotional teen-ager.Report

  6. Mike Schilling says:

    Also, if you could make the next review either one or three shows, it would keep you in sync with the AV Club reviews (which are always two shows), which I find handy.Report