By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
At lunch Sunday with a friend from college who is in town working on the Paramount+ TV show Landman (starring Billie Bob Thornton, about the oil business in Texas) my friend said she said would be shooting this week at a restaurant called “Mr. Charles” on Knox Street, in Dallas. She didn’t know what kind of place “Mr. Charles” might be.
I replied, “yeah, that’s one of those way over the top, fancy restaurants women go in groups with each other.” It’s much like the one described in a New York Times article I had read July 15, entitled “Where Have All the Men Gone? We Miss You. Please Come Back.’”
This New York Times article really piqued my friend’s interest. So I told her the gist of it, which is that that the author of the article had noticed that at fancy restaurants, there are only groups of very nice-looking women and no men.
My friend wanted to know what a man’s take might be on this week’s version of societal collapse. And I am just stupid enough to wade right into this. (I am also actively trying to write my blogs in such a way as to make sure that I remain a solo practitioner, because no major law firm with an HR department, would ever be able to hire me after reading these things.)
This isn’t Schopenhauer. “If you want deep philosophical thoughts on the differences between the sexes, go read Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born in 1788” I told her. If you want my take, which is to say, if you want a side dish of “funny,” along with your stories of societal collapse, “I’m your guy.”
“First,” I told her, “asking either sex why the other is avoiding them, is a little like asking a school of undersized fish (who have no ability to conceptualize the meaning of words) why the fishermen keep throwing them back.” (Even if you told them, it is unlikely that they would have the ability do anything differently to change the outcome.)
But my best guess to the question, “why aren’t men at fancy restaurants anymore?” seems fairly obvious. “Men do not give a crap about fancy restaurants” I said. “The only reason we were ever there in the first place, is because women wanted us to take them there. If you remove that reason, most of us are going to be at home, or at sports bar.”
But my friend pointed out, “that doesn’t explain what happened to men going with women.” “Okay”, I explained, “I thought that was obvious. It started fifteen years ago with a phone that had a camera pointed at the user.” More particularly, the camera pointed at both the man and the woman forming the couple in the snapshot. “As the years progressed, you can’t help but notice,” I said, “that one of the two in the shot kept getting much more ‘photogenic’ than the other one.”
Coincidentally, just about this time, things like MedSpas, Botox and Lip-Filler centers started popping up. (Which forms a good chunk of my law practice) “Heck they even have places in Dallas,” I told her, “that only blow dry women’s hair. You don’t even get a haircut for your money.”
“Men can’t get all fancied up at a MedSpa like that, so we are kinda stuck the way we looked in 1990.” Which is a good thing, I continued. “If we bought a set of those fingernails, we would lose a pint of blood just trying to eat a sandwich.” (She thought that was funny, your mileage may vary.)
“Then, the final nail in the coffin of our being invited with you,” I concluded, ” came with this thing on your phone, out of the devil’s workshop, that that filters the images of groups of women.” (You really can’t do that with a guy in the picture.) So, women started shoving us out of the frame. “And we went home.”
This suddenly made perfect sense to a friend who earns her living in television. Oh yeah,” she said, “you men really do ruin our shots.”