dirty birds
Originally written 12.01.2002
Ok, so British and Scottish drinking culture seems really, really pervasive. Some of these kids can really take in the alcohol as well. Take for instance my flatmate Iain. He is quite a big fellow, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised last night when he managed to drink more than 3 liters of some inexpensive cider alcoholic beverage. Well, by the time he was past his first liter, he was properly pissed. Not only that, but he was talking incessantly about doing his hair so he could “pull a dirty bird” at some club in Edinburgh called Opium which sort of caters to the alternative, nu-metal crowd. Apparently, the dirty birds really go for a unique haircut. Another flatmate, Marco, and I first gave Iain an astro-boy type doo, but that wouldn’t do it. Neither would the Sum-41-lead-singer-esque style that we tried next. Only liberty spikes would do. This seemed to be a point of particular anxiety, and after a bout of uncharacteristic whining, we helped him put his hair into liberty spikes. He did the front, and did a pretty good job (evidently, he’s spent hours on this in the past), while Marco and I did a slightly less than stellar job on the back. Even still, it was good enough to pull a dirty bird. Okay, so to clarify (because initially, I was probably about as confused as anyone reading this is now), a dirty bird is sort of a dirty girl. Yeah, and I thought the whole “bird” thing was just a stereotype. Apparently it’s a full fledged member of the lexicon. So, I asked, how do you identify a dirty bird? Apparently, said Iain, a dirty bird is a girl who’s ready for anything, anywhere. And how do you tell that? How to avoid mistaking a non-dirty bird for her fouler sister? Well, I guess the strategic placement of hands during the club experience serves as a means for dirty birds to make themselves known to potential mates. As for the term “pull”, I thought it better not to ask for the details. I assume it has the ambiguous connotation somewhere between the phrases “hook up” and “score” in the American vernacular. Iain insisted that with his well coiffed appearance he would easily pull a dirty bird (which is a fairly easy task to begin with) and that he would be sure to make her scream “Geoff!” in a coital exclamation. Gladly, an altercation at the club and subsequent ejection from said club foiled any passionate midnight utterances of my forname. All of this spectacle was pretty amusing, but I also found it a bit unnerving. Sure, it’s all between consenting adults, and, as I was told, it’s not like it’s unprotected. Still, such a primal, frivolous exchange of human sexuality seems a bit cheap and seems like it perpetuates the objectification of women. People can argue that the objectification is mutual, and therefore, no harm, and no foul. Perhaps things are different in the UK. It has been my observation, however, that the pressure to gain acknowledgement and validation through sexuality, is far greater for young women for young men. For young men, it’s recreation, an extracurricular collegiate activity that doesn’t go on the resume. But for young women, it seems like society has placed some artificial, added, significance to the acceptance of one as a sexual partner. Exploiting that inequality, even ignorantly, seems somehow wrong. So, at least for me, I’ll leave the dirty birds for someone else.
A bit of an update, it seems that I got the totally wrong impression from Iain’s drunken rantings. I don’t think he was really intent on scoring a bird, he was just talking shit, which, except for maybe Pete, is the official pasttime of 29/5 Sciennes