"Eat My Dick"

Admittedly, airline food tastes a lot like dick anyway.

Over Thanksgiving our hearts were warmed by the touching story of Elan Gale, a reality TV producer who live-tweeted his attempts to mollify “Diane,” an unruly passenger on his flight to LA. First he sent her wine and condescending notes, but when she failed to heed his advice and sent him a snarky note in return, he had no choice but to tell her to eat his dick. Somehow, this didn’t improve her mood, and Gale reported that she slapped him after getting off the plane.

Well, okay, that last part actually didn’t happen. Or the first part, either. Or anything in the middle. After Gale’s livetweeting went viral, a number of commentators began to question the wisdom of spending several hours harassing an obviously upset woman by telling her to eat your dick. On Monday, in the face of mounting controversy, Gale admitted that the whole affair had been a hoax – Diane was not a real person, and telling an imaginary woman to eat your dick is apparently less of a faux pas than telling a real woman to do it.

Now, I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even though Elan Gale didn’t actually tell a complete stranger to eat his dick on Thanksgiving Day, he’s still a complete fucking asshole regardless.     

I’d love to tell you that I’ve never fantasized about telling a woman to eat my dick purely to upset her, but that’s just not true. I actually spend a fair amount of my day fantasizing about telling people to eat my dick, and while the vast majority of them are men, a number of women also make the cut. Here’s just a partial list of women who I have pictured standing in my room so I can verbally abuse them and tell them to eat my dick:

1)   Senator Dianne Feinstein

2)   Jenny McCarthy

3)   Candy Crowley

4)   Sarah Palin

5)   Nancy Pelosi

6)   Michele Bachmann

7)   Every single anti-vaccine mommy blogger

8)   Betty Draper (seasons 3 through 5 only)

I wouldn’t say that I’m proud of this. In my defense, though, I’ve never even come close to actually telling a woman to eat my dick.* For one thing, I really don’t want anybody eating my dick – it sounds extremely unpleasant – and also that’s just a really nasty thing to say to a woman. Or any person, for that matter.  

*While drunk, or while playing Mario Kart, or while drunk and playing Mario Kart I may have in the past said, “Eat a dick,” but it was always in good fun, and I think the indefinite article takes some of the edge off of it.

Of course, Elan Gale didn’t actually tell a woman to eat his dick, but he really, really wanted the whole Internet to think that he did – so much so that he spent a six hour flight scribbling notes in different handwriting, snapping pictures of them, and making up an entire physical altercation between himself, Diane, and a gate agent in which he got to have the last laugh.

There was kind of a halfassed moral to the whole event – his livetweeting of the thing that he made up ends with the text of his final note to the woman who doesn’t exist:

“If you want to stop being a nasty person, just follow me on Twitter and read all of the nasty things me and my legions of Internet friends wrote about you! Like Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye works perfectly, every single time.’”

Gale invested considerable time and energy creating an imaginary situation in which he was the hero for shutting down a stranger’s immature behavior with even more immature behavior of his own. This is the sort of scenario that could only take place in a person’s imagination, because in my experience, if somebody is being rude and disrespectful to people who are politely trying to help her, being rude and disrespectful back to that person is unlikely to make things better for anybody involved.

Honestly, I’m glad for the sake of the flight crew and other passengers that this whole thing was a hoax – it would be bad enough to be trapped on a six hour plane ride with a loud, angry, spiteful woman; the last thing anybody on that flight would want is a narcissistic LA scumbag provoking her the whole time for Internet fame.

I feel like there’s enough real, tangible bad behavior going on in the world that we don’t need attention-seekers inventing more for their own benefit – and especially not on Thanksgiving Day.

C’mon, Elan Gale. That’s pretty trashy, even for someone who is responsible for the continued existence of The Bachelor. Thanksgiving is supposed to be about goodwill and giving people the benefit of the doubt, not encouraging people to tell everybody who gets on their nerves to eat dicks – have you never seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles!?

People eat a lot of things on Thanksgiving. But dicks should not be one of them.

Truman Capps wants that quote carved on his headstone.