Sameness, Difference, & Whatever

Last week, while at work, I encountered a delightful woman who spoke in a thick Irish brogue. Funny enough, she was, in fact, Irish. It’s not something one hears every day around here and it was refreshing to hear a little more than then bland Michigan English being spoken. I thought to myself “Hey! Here is someone else who probably also is mimicked for how she pronounces the word coffee.” In any case, work is work and work takes priority so I avoid getting into any dialogue with clients that might be considered controversial. These days, that could be just about any subject imaginable.

The woman, a manager in an established legal office, gave me some instructions as to how, where, and when to move certain items, signed a release form for said items, and went on about her business, indifferent to me, my crew, and the task at hand. For me, that was the end of my thoughts of her as well. My crew, on the other hand, could not stop themselves from fawning over her accent and how ‘hot’ it made her sound. Needless to say, many men get turned on by anything in skirts, so for them to become instantly enamored with this particular female was no real shock. One would think these guys just got out of prison. Crass pronouncements of “I’d sure like to bang a bitch who talks like that!” belie the Neanderthal’s ignorance to the harsh reality that a woman’s peculiar manner of speech does not in any way alter her anatomy, does not ensure that she isn’t a complete psychotic, nor increases his chances of bagging the heavily accented prize.

As much as men are intrigued by foreign women and their accents, I think women are even more so caught up in an attraction or even fixation with accents, dialects, culture, and skin tone. Men are always horny no matter what the woman sounds like, but women tend to have fixated tastes and a powerful curiosity for the ‘different’. My own love life is an example of that. After moving to the Midwest and still having a vigorous Brooklyn accent, I became an instant novelty among Michigan women who had never dated a man from New York. When coupled with the ‘mystery’ of my Orthodox Jewish background and recent apostasy, garnering female attentions became quite easy. Having an accent and a parochial upbringing may have made me different enough to be an interesting topic of opening conversation in some circles, but it never made me a better man or lover.

If you ever wondered why so many American daytime soap operas have English or Australian characters, there is your answer. Foreign characters with ‘sexy’ accents make the story more exotic and therefore more romantic and attractive to the mid-western ladies sitting at home watching that nonsense. Similarly, if you own a sales company in the north that markets products to male clientele, make sure to hire a female sales representative from the south or other regions of the Earth nowhere near your own. It’s a no-brainer. Her drawl will do the selling for her. The foreigner, through no conscious effort of his or her own and by virtue simply by being born and raised in another geographical locale becomes transformed into a romantic, lustful ‘love-god’, better than anything the current crop of locals can offer and vastly more interesting.

Now, even though I admit to using this to my own advantage, I still dislike when it is being used on me or when others fall prey to it so easily. It is likely that wherever these sexy foreigners come from, over there they aren’t considered ‘all that’, accent or not, and there exists no appreciable novelty except to anyone who hasn’t been exposed to that sort of voice for the last ten years. I dated a German woman for a year or so, and though she was smart and quite beautiful, after a while questions like “Why are you so stupid sometimes?” or “Why do you talk so much?” became really irritating even when uttered in that same luscious accent that first captured my cynical heart. That experience taught me that familiarity might not always the breeder of contempt; it was probably my asking stupid questions and talking too much that caused the enmity.

It’s not as if I am above such curiosity or that I have become completely immune to its effect through my travels and experience. I still enjoy something different once in while, but I don’t find myself falling madly in love with a thing or person just because it smells, sounds, or behaves in a manner that bears a stark contrast to my normal surroundings. I have also noticed that the longer I spend in one place the more I lose that foreign ‘edge’ that made me stand out just a little bit not too long ago. Far be it from me to claim an intellectual or moral superiority that enable me to pass judgments from some high-placed sanctimonious perch. The revelation that I am so perfectly human in my shortcomings and prejudices is really starting to hurt.

Maybe I’m envious of the Englishman’s linguistic ‘mojo’ or the Latino man’s skin tone that all the ladies, young and old, seem to rave about. Perhaps the ‘New Yorker’ in me, both in terms of speech and attitude has become dulled by living in the Midwest. Maybe I’ve become ‘same old same old’ to the world around me and need to finally accept it and stop complaining. Part of me obviously resents the natural processes that lead a man into becoming part of his own surroundings and blending in so well that his existence is casually ignored by those living around him in that same monotonous venue, where he now fears we will catch himself overlooking them in the same manner for possessing the very same situational defect.

Once we realize that people are just being people, this whole issue would vanish, providing it’s really an issue in the first place anywhere other than inside my overactive imagination, which I’m not sure of at all anymore.

Maybe this rant was for nothing. Ach!

“No matter what you choose to keep, please keep it in perspective.”