Men who date, marry and love women sometimes have a funny way of showing it. This week gave evidence to some strangely misguided approaches for how men coexist with the other half the population, even when they ostensibly love and care about them.
Your Stalker Is Calling
Men in India, Morocco and other places where gender segregation still reigns supreme have found an ingenious yet deeply alarming way to try to meet women: Calling random numbers until someone answers, hoping to strike up a conversation, The New York Times reported. They are called “Phone Romeos,” and it’s literally what it sounds like. They call up random women and attempt to woo them with the kind of lines that only the most hard-up would swoon for.
“Among them are overeager suitors (‘Can I recharge your mobile?’), tremulous supplicants (‘I am talking to you, madam, but my body is shaking’) and the occasional heavy breather (‘I want to do the illegal things with you’),” the Times wrote.
The men are extremely persistent, buying rosters of numbers in bulk, using multiple SIM cards and false names to avoid being identified, or keep pestering women who aren’t interested (which would be most of them). One police call center in India said they get some 700 calls a day from women complaining about these total weirdos. “Sometimes they call and say, ‘I love you,’” a woman told the Times. “Sometimes they call and say, ‘I want to talk to Sonia,’ and I would say, ‘I am not Sonia,’ and they would say, ‘Okay, can I talk to you?’”
Weirder still is that sometimes the scam actually works — one woman in the story has been talking with her gentleman caller for 11 months, though they still haven’t met in person. Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, no matter how much it wants to do the illegal things with you.
Dick Moves
When Talking Points Memo reporter Alice Ollstein asked Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) if he was in favor of the Republican healthcare plan meant to replace Obamacare cutting essential health benefits like breast cancer screenings, he was a big old dick to her:
I asked Sen. Roberts if he supports scrapping Essential Health Benefits. "I wouldn't want to lose my mammograms," he snarked. #AHCA
— Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) March 23, 2017
He later apologized, CNN reported, saying he knew mammograms were essential to women’s health, but they noted he’d also previously said to CNN he wouldn’t need mammograms personally since he’s a dude anyway — a funny comment from a man with a wife and two daughters. Two shitty comments and one dick apology make a visual dick and pair of balls of dickness.
52 Percent Stupid
A nonpartisan poll found that while the majority of Americans are cool with reproductive rights, 52 percent of men don’t think they personally have benefited from women in their lives having easy or affordable access to birth control, ThinkProgress reported. That is weird because unplanned pregnancy is very expensive. Perhaps these men inadvertently revealed they are, in fact, the precise percentage of the population that never gets laid.
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
