Grand gestures
John Cusack in Say Anything
What if a woman had put up that billboard to proposition a man he had just met? Would she have been greeted with such disdain, such vitriol?
Initially, when the public first heard of this billboard guy (let’s omit the names, Google if interested), there was this wave of what could only be described as gushing from some fans. The man looks innocent enough. He’s not built like an Adonis, no impressive jawline, no Cole Sprouse hair. He packaged himself as an underdog wooing an otherwise unattainable princess — whom he’d just met, but claims is his everything. Then we find out he’s a CEO of something, and it got creepy from there.
Supposedly, he likes to market himself as a Christian Grey type, focusing on the “filthy rich” aspect of things. He wields and banners his power through grand gestures, like putting up a billboard along Morayta, or offering to buy her tons of Bobbi Brown. In one of his social media posts, which is supposedly a message to said princess, he managed to mention in passing how, since the time they met, he has had 29 flights to numerous locations. Real smooth, buddy. Eventually, we would find out that he is a scammer with numerous — more than 29, no doubt — receipts from different victims to prove it. But let’s stop right here.
Obviously, scamming people is wrong. The minute the public figured this fact out, all the supposed adorable-ness of the billboard gesture flew out the window. So let’s forget for a minute that he’s a scammer and just look at him like the rich CEO that he presents himself as. His faulty moral compass and shady dealings aside, if he weren’t a fraud in his real life as well as his delusional life, perhaps some would still have found it cute, even endearing. But putting up a billboard to ask someone out, aside from being unoriginal and cheesy, is not just creepy; it’s an unnecessary display of power, a persuasive show of force turned national spectacle that coerces a woman, by way of large-scale peer pressure, to agree to something because everybody is watching; to be nice; to not be a bitch.
If it were the other way around, if it were a (sane, non-scammer) woman who asked a man out via billboard, she would be applauded by both women and men, regardless of what she looked like or how much money she made. It would be seen as a bold, empowered gesture — because women have less power by default. For a woman to be able to do that sort of thing would take guts, breaking every damn stereotype, going against what her mother and grandmother and PerDev teacher taught her, having the money and connections to get that billboard, and risking being called a desperate, thirsty hoe.
In all fairness, if some other more-upstanding dude made the same grand gesture, he still risks being called a creeper, a perv, a stalker. Courtship in this day and age is a tricky thing. We don’t know how it works anymore. We don’t know how to deal with it when it actually happens. We live in a time when someone sending you flowers and chocolate will first be creepy before it is flattering or sweet. Call it evolution or learning from experience, that’s just how our minds work now. It’s not a good time to be making grand gestures, when we are wary that every little thing is a stunt, a cheap stab at viral fame, or an attack on a broader, socio-political scale.
If anything, this generation, which lives by the faux intimacy and shallow connections manufactured by the internet, jaded and woke to the point of obsession, is in dire need of sincerity. And a billboard proposal? That’s glaringly insincere, no matter the intention. Ask us out for coffee but make it about yourself, why don’t you. Seems like a sure way to find oneself, suddenly, cancelled.
