Reasons Not to Kill Yourself Today, No. 14: Hugh Hefner is Single!!
Want to know something my mom said to me at Christmas? I’ll tell you anyway. First, cause my first cousin’s getting married, we were talking about weddings and I said I don’t love – okay, haaate – the part when a father “gives away” the bride like she’s so much chattel. I said, you know, it’s quite patriarchal. She opened her eyes a little bit and said what’s wrong with patriarchy?
And while my jaw just laid there on the floor like it was dying, Mama kept on. She said honestly now, if you could, wouldn’t you rather not work? She meant like if I had the choice wouldn’t I rather just stay at home and do whatever I wanted and just like be provided for? Doesn’t every woman, secretly? She looked at me and waited. That’s a true story.
Here’s another one. Hugh Hefner, the mainstream Dov Charney, was supposedly s’posed to get married to someone my age (meanwhile, his age is the same as his bank balance) this weekend. Her name was Crystal. Of course it was. So but “Crystal” had a “change of heart,” he tweeted (gross) and instead of starting the rest of her life she went to like a pool party in Las Vegas. Close enough, no? Guys, I am not getting paid enough to make this up.
What happened is Crystal, who gave an “emotional” interview to Entertainment Tonight, had woken up one day to the world-breaking realization that she was not the only woman in Hef’s life. Un. Be. Lievable. And yet. Said she, through tears of gold, “I didn’t feel comfortable in my heart knowing that and being able to get married to him.” True minds, meet your impediment. “Marriage,” she said, too, “is between two people and that’s not what our relationship was.”
And here you’d forgotten. Here you thought romance was cold.
How many happy endings lie there in one failed union? So many. Crystal, suddenly finding herself an inspiration to Miss America contestants who secretly want to know what “feminist” means, will be strong, surviving on the profits of her ineluctable reality show. Hugh will remain single and enthronged with silicone until he chokes on an anal bead, but not before finding God in the form of Mormonism. I’ll get to see the look on my mother’s face next Christmas when I tell her she is basically Hugh in this argument and even Hugh can’t win. Marriage, pulled from this Platinum Triangle wreckage, will quiver momentarily in the Jaws of Life before being revived as a viable option for young people not on TV. Maybe said marriage will even be cool again, in like a pre-prenup way. There’s a lot of things I hate about forever, but I’m not unhopeful, Mom.