You may have noticed that I rarely link to the Washington Post, and that most of my newspaper-reading centers around the New York Times and the LA Times. Why? Because of articles like this. I’m vomiting in my mouth a little bit, and I feel dumber just from having read it.
The topic? The Wingman. The IQ level? Approximately 10.
You know the wingman. He’s the guy who accompanies his buddy to a bar to help him pick up babes. He does whatever it takes to give his friend some time alone with the girl of choice: telling flattering lies about him, enticing away the sidekick girlfriend, running interference at the approach of a rival male.
Yes, this is from an article in the paper that once broke the Watergate scandal. Talk about going downhill.
And the tactic of these wingmen? Lie. Because apparently your friend has no real qualities that make him work speaking to.
Jentz points to Moniello. “He’s been an author.”
Moniello grins. “I’ve written a few books.”
Books, plural? At age 22?
“Hey, you only have a couple of minutes to make an impression,” Moniello continues. “So if you have to save a baby seal from an oil spill in Alaska, you have to save a baby seal.”
Jentz picks up: “Sometimes you’re a lawyer. You may only have taken one law class, but what the heck? It adds flavor, gets people excited.”
Riiight… The funny thing is, I’ve met guys like this. They’re morons, and they insult you by thinking that you’re a moron too.
Moniello says his hometown wingman — good wingman relationships never die — is as adept as they come. “If I go to the bathroom, he’ll make me look like Jesus. . . . The girl I’m after will say something like ‘I hear he’s a player’ and he’ll convince her I’m really in love with her.”
Well if she’s actually convinced, then you’re both idiots and I’d say you’re made for each other.
It doesn’t take four years in college to learn the wingman trade. Jason Linden has been at GW only two years and defends the practice as necessary — particularly when a pretty girl is accompanied by a gaggle of other girls.
“It’s very hard to spit game to a girl if she’s with a group of her friends,” he says. “They’ll catch on, and you could look like a loser in front of them in addition to the girl who rejected you.”
It’s also hard to spit game when you use phrases like “spit game.”
He knows. One night freshman year, he approached a young woman in a club whom he had seen around campus. She was yakking with a group of girlfriends. He didn’t realize he needed to win over the group first. “I tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Come get a drink with me.’ ” he recalled. “She looked at her friends, asked them quite loudly, ‘Who is this guy?’ and continued talking.”
That’s usually the result of acting like a jerk — instead of saying hello, or asking if you can get a drink for her, marching up and telling her to join you for a drink is easily-identifiable asshole behavior. It’s not the group, babe — it’s you.
And a quibble with the writer’s language. Who “yak”s? Would a group of guys be described as “yakking”? Probably not, since “yakking” infers trivial conversation, and as we have learned from this article, young men are Very Serious and Very Intelligent indeed. Further, the women in this piece are perpetually called “girls,” despite the fact that they’re in their 20s.
Wonkette, as quoted in Broadsheet, pretty much sums up my reaction to this piece:
We started the Post piece on ‘wingmen’ just as fratty, pointless, and 20 years out-of-date as its subject about three times. We kept stopping about 6 or 7 grafs in, usually to retch or look for a less disgusting article — like one about, say, Klan-sponsored anti-immigration rallies.