Intuition in Susan Jacoby's Unfair Game

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"Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious."-George Bernard Shaw. I believe Shaw was correct in saying you have to make an effort to listen to your intuitions. These days, it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to guarding your life, but people can take this a little too far by letting their own naïve, discriminating, and generalized ideas develop negatively in their heads. Race and gender are the singled out subjects that we let influence our culture's freedoms because of media, family and friend's twisted views, or a bad experience.

In Susan Jacoby's story Unfair Game, she encounters a man at a bar and a man with a wife on a flight to San Antonio. After describing each meeting, she ends up complaining about her disgust for men. Obviously, it's not right how some of the men treat her, but her generalizations about men are soon disproved. When the last man in her story asks her to join him for a drink, she denies him; he takes it very graciously and leaves.

This woman allows her own ego and insecurities cloud her judgement. She says no to every man she meets and doesn't seem the least bit flattered that the men notice her. She doesn't even have the slightest clue how hard it is for a person to ask another person out. She fails to distinguish between the slime balls she meets and the genuine guys.

Jacoby's reactions lean toward the extreme of women that have valid reasons to keep mace in their purses. Jacoby got hit on by men, but there are men in the world who assault, abuse, or rape women. Jacoby seems to be overreacting to her mild experiences with men. She closes herself off to any type of advancement though all the experiences she described made the men seem pretty harmless in comparison to what was possible.

At the start of the story, her friend as well shrugs off the same man at the bar as Jacoby. An educated guess would be that the two friends probably discuss their distaste for men in depth, only encouraging their skewed views on all men. Women with Jacoby's perspective seem very narcissistic and apprehensive.

You'd think the most receptive audience of this piece would be female, but if a woman took some of my points into consideration suggesting that most men do not deserve Jacoby's style of treatment or rejection, they would find that generalizing the idea that all men are pigs is sexist.

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