October 1, 2020:
Queen Bee on the dormroom floor, hive of drones attending.
"I don’t read that," she says, with a Queen Bee snort.
"I’m sure you don’t," replies the King Bee, making clear by tone his contempt for her reading abilities generally. As her admittedly lovely jaw drops in disbelief, he continues his rounds, chuckling.
This memory encapsulates more than merely our elitist contempt for the University writ large and the University students specifically. It was simultaneously a time of my life when I felt The Truth was a necessary corrective. Where the world could be changed for the better through bluntness, and the duty of those militant was to confront the bullshit. I wore my anger and also my confusion over growing up lied to so close to the surface that it frequently erupted into incidents like this, justified and rationalized by the theory of say-it-out-loud. All of which is to say, I was frequently not very nice.
I doubt I would respond to this woman in the same way today. She's habituated by beauty to the sycophancy of others. I would certainly still find that emetic. Calling her stupid though seems both pointless and sexist. She isn't stupid, she's vain. Where insulting her changes nothing.