9. So we would sneak out to a bar and chat up men. And we found it irresistible to tell them what we did for a living. This always played out in the same way. And by "always" I mean ALWAYS.
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10. First, the men would be incapable of understanding what we'd said, and would think we'd said we were croupiers who worked for a casino dealing cards. Sometimes we had to set them straight three times before they could hear what "gambler" meant when applied to a girl.
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11. Once they understood, they would try to explain to us how to win at cards. ALWAYS. They knew nothing, and they were preposterously wrong. It was like a four-year-old explaining to a pilot how an airplane works. It was also, after the first time, intensely boring.
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12. It was impossible to stop them doing this. If we interrupted to explain how they were mistaken, it only made them pause with a pitying expression on their faces. If we got frustrated, they acted as if we were hysterical women who couldn't admit we were wrong.
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13. But on some level they knew this had failed, because they then moved on to gambit #3—warning us that what we were doing was dangerous, and we were going to get hurt. This was delivered with a worldly-wise, "Let me tell you how the real world works, little lady" air.
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14. As a result, none of us got laid the entire time we worked at this professional gambling job. All our interactions with men were fucked-up and acrimonious. Let me repeat: WE COULD NOT GET LAID BECAUSE WE WERE PROFESSIONAL GAMBLERS.
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15. Any of these men could have slept with us, enticed us away from the boss, been taught how to be professional gamblers. Maybe we even would have been willing to steal our boss's $30,000 in cash. None of them saw this temptation. Not that they resisted it: THEY DID NOT SEE IT.
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16. Anyway, in my opinion, this kind of bullshit is a major reason girls, especially straight girls, give up doing cool things. Instead of getting glory, you get relentlessly patronized & insulted by the very people who are supposed to find you sexy BECAUSE you do cool things.
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17. And I know—maybe better than most people—how spurious the glory of most cool things is. In particular I know being a professional gambler is bullshit. But I worked for my spurious glory and I wanted it. I WANTED TO GET LAID FOR BEING COOL.
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18. In my later life as a writer, I've often been treated as cool for the gambling, including by men. Maybe I meet a better class of men, or maybe it's easier for men to accept in the past tense. Anyway, when it happened—nothing but bullshit. I'm still amazed by this fact.
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Was it dependent on the age of the men? I might be trying to deceive myself, but when I see similar behaviour around men in computer science and bouldering, it seems somewhat more prevalent in the early twenties. Not that that's an excuse, mind you.
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Replying to @AndresFreundPol
I don't know for sure because we were always talking to young men. The only middle-aged dude I remember was a weird dude who tried to hit on one of us, and commented (about our boss) "I know that man owns you…" And we were all like, "Kill me now."
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