This week in delusional men: a Salon essayist is accusing his poor, innocent bunny rabbit of ruining his sex life.
The saga began when San Diego writer Dave Good found a "naive"-looking bunny on his running trail. Apparently, this was not one of the many "wise" bunnies that populate the nation's forests, nor was it a particularly "threatening" bunny. No, the bunny Good found was the helplessly innocent kind of bunny, one in desperate need of saving. Turned down by the humane society and with no hope of finding an alternative owner, Good heroically elected himself as the bunny's savior.
With this newfound dependent, Good began to systematically use the "naive" little rabbit to procure local attention via an alt weekly and an ancillary Youtube video.
"Women across the country commented. It turned them on, they wrote, to see a (single) man with a bunny," he recounts, before divulging the sad reality. "Really? The bunny as a chick magnet? No. In fact, my dating life went down a rabbit hole soon after the bunny moved in. The bunny was a game changer, and it took me the rest of a year loaded with hard rejection to figure out why."
Good soon "figures out" that he spent the subsequent year getting turned down and dumped, because "men can't like rabbits" -- a conclusion he arrives at based on the fact that rabbits "can't [play] fetch," and are a "[cultural] joke to baby boomers."
So, just to recap: This man plucked a bunny from the woods, took it on a small publicity tour and then blamed it for his lack of a sex life. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one furry fallacy.
Good's essay includes an account of all the women who "had something to say about the rabbit roommate" but failed to return for a date or even phone call after coming over. But somehow we're skeptical that the bunny was the only reason these ladies weren't trying to slip with its owner. Purely judging from his piece, we came up with a list of other reasons women might not be interested in Dave. Here are a few:
1. Dave's bunny was pooping everywhere.
Bunnies poop a lot and it doesn't sound like Dave was doing a very good job cleaning up.
“Is there anything left of your house?” Dave's mother asks "with grief in her eyes" [italics mine, drama Dave's]. Clearly this rabbit was too "naive" to use it's litter box.
2. Dave is a depressing person.
Let's just go back to the grief. She had GRIEF in her eyes? Really, Dave?
3. Dave is annoyingly paranoid.
"Last week," he writes in one of the many examples of relationships gone wrong, "A blind date I’d never even met canceled a barbecue get-together. Had she seen the bunny video on YouTube?"
Um, your Youtube video only has, like, 600 views, Dave. Your date probably did not bother to Google your not-at-all viral clips. She probably just decided that she didn't feel like going on a blind date that night.
4. Dave invents entire conversations in his mind.
He writes, "Another woman messaged me that, while we could be great friends, it would never work out if I had something else in mind. Of course I had something else in mind. Shit. Had I told her about the rabbit over dinner?"
What? That woman literally said nothing about the rabbit. See: Paranoia.
5. Dave thinks dog parks are "the best pick-up spot ever invented."
"There are no bunny park equivalents of the dog park (the best pick-up spot ever invented)," Good writes, "because bunnies don’t actually like each other." The fact that he didn't find a dog in the woods is truly the biggest tragedy of all.
6. Dave thinks you can invent pick-up spots.
See above.
7. Dave is an entitled creep.
"Even Sam finally had enough [of the bunny]," Dave says of his a woman who he calls "perpetually single and every man’s back-up plan: You can ring her out of the blue after months of no contact whatsoever, and still get action."
Hmm ... She either got sick of the bunny or the fact that you thought of her as a "back-up plan." Tough call.
8. Dave is insultingly picky.
Describing his latest attempt at romance, Dave says, "She’s in the correct age group, intelligence quotient, energy levels and so on down the line." We seriously wonder what other requirements exist on that "line."
So, what can we learn from Dave?
Get a bunny and avoid the pain of true rejection forever! There are times in everyone's life when he or she is eschewed by potential love interests for one reason or another. Perhaps you snort when you laugh or have otherwise grating idiosyncrasies. Or maybe you are a paranoid jerk with little respect for women -- who knows? But as long as you have a white, spotted rabbit by your side, there is only one source of blame.