My enduring pursuit of the opiates provided only from male attention, glorious male attention, has destined me to a lifetime of displays of unseemly and comically humiliating behaviour.
Comedy writer Julie Klausner says she spent most of her 20s taking dating cues from Miss Piggy, “chasing every would-be Kermit in my vicinity with porcine voracity.”
There was Colin, the vegan lead singer of a noise band who lectured her on new media; Alex, an asexual freelance music reviewer; Rob, an actor who barred her from poking around the mammoth Star Wars collection he kept in his tiny apartment; and Ben, a slob who microwaved old tea and kept Penthouse magazines stacked around his bed.
The escapades are catalogued in Ms. Klausner’s new memoir, I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated.
The author, who used to pen jokes for Saturday Night Live, sees a Kermit in all of the men, who gave in to her pushy advances but ultimately preferred hanging out with friends and pursuing their own projects, just like Kermit did on The Muppet Show. The fuzzy green frog, she writes, could just be the “model of modern masculinity.”
Ms. Klausner, now 31 and living in New York, spoke with The Globe and Mail about why young women are having trouble quitting the Kermits.
You write that after you watched The Muppet Movie as an adult, Kermit reminded you of the ‘vintage-eyeglass-frame-wearing guys … who pedal along avenues in between band practice and drinks with friends, sans attachment, oblivious to the impending hazards of reality and adulthood.’ Do you think more men are enjoying a protracted state of adolescence because they don’t have to support women?
It depends on what growing up means, because sometimes that just means being able to support yourself. I do think that the bubble has burst, and people do need to get with the program if only because the economy necessitates it, but at the same time we’re idolizing younger and younger pop culture icons and it’s definitely taken its toll.
You write about this generation of men who would rather watch YouTube videos with their buddies all day than pursue women. When did these guys start popping up?
There’s a really interesting book called American Nerd by Ben Nugent. He traces the cultural history of the nerd and goes back to the fifties and sixties but mostly the seventies where you had Woody Allen doing standup. From the late eighties into the nineties, alternative music went mainstream and you had grunge drag where you saw Kurt Cobain wearing lipstick and a dress. Then it switched in the mid-nineties to indie rock and all of a sudden you had these grown men dressing like kids and hemming and hawing. At the same time you had these shuffling emo adults.
Has the Kermit/Michael Cera-type replaced the bad boy for women?
There have always been bad guys and nerds. It’s just more acceptable now, in a mainstream way, to be sheepish about pursuing romantic intentions with women.
Is the Kermit man an urban condition? Do Kermits exist on the farm?
I’ve never been to a farm – I’ve bought fruits and vegetables at a stand in the Catskills on a weekend. I imagine it is [an urban condition], but at the risk of sounding like a blue stater dripping with contempt, isn’t that where culture is created, in urban environments?
Your argument is that women reared on feminism now find themselves ‘at the mercy’ of men who don’t know what’s expected of them. Why is it feminism’s fault?
