BDE

This week I have stumbled across the news, well I say news, more gossip, that Ariana Grande is engaged. Now I have two Childerbeasts who love Ariana. If you don’t know her, she’s an extremely petite woman, very pretty, perfectly coiffeured, and I believe she has an exceptional vocal range which she has worked exceedingly hard to achieve. By all accounts she is a very talented and hard working young woman. Congratulations Ariana, I hope you are very happy together.

In a gender role reversal, her fiance appears to have been subjected to the same scrutiny that women often are when showbiz couples are revealed. From what little I have seen Mr Grande-to-Be is quite tall and I am given to understand, a confident person. That is about all I can tell you apart from that he is a person of the male gender. Comments have been made that he does not possess a chiseled jaw, or a row of perfect white teeth, with the implication of “what is she doing with him?” and “how dare he be so confident when he doesn’t look like a film star.” He is not what we would think of as Showbiz good-looking whereas Ariana most definitely is. And then Ariana tweeted suggesting that her fiance’s….ahem….. feet are so large that the wedding shoes will have to be bought before the rest of his outfit. There seems to have been some collective relief expressed on Ariana’s behalf that the mystery of their relationship and his confidence has been revealed in one tweet, because presumably, why else would she look twice at him? And why would anyone who is not textbook perfect have the audacity to be confident otherwise?

This confidence has been referred to as BDE: Big Dick Energy. A confidence that men who are not jaw-droppingly handsome possess because, presumably, they know something that we do not. Similarly, both statistics and experience tell us that there are men who do not have this confidence because they also know something that we do not. That’s right, tiny hands. This may be exhibited by the small glove wearers behaving like toddlers to over-compensate for their feelings of inadequacy over being able to squash their danny pats into children’s gloves. I think that none of us have to think very hard to find an example of someone like that.

This leaves us women in something of a quandary because for obvious reasons it is not possible for us to have this confidence. And frankly, if a large vagina was something that we all aspired to, then pelvic floor exercises would not exist. Yet, there are women who fall into both categories; tiny hands and big feet. The woman who told me I was training the Hound all wrong (see The Dog’s B*******) – tiny hands. The woman who woefully misjudged Sister B when out shopping and thought it acceptable to be rude to her and not get a mouthful back (see Generation XX) – lego-sized hands. The person who interrupted a point I was making, suggested to me that reading a legal document meant that they were just as qualified to offer legal advice as me, and then proceeded to tell me what I ought to be advising – teeny, tiny hands.

Take the flip side: Big Feet. Sister B for merely giving the rude woman a mouthful and not clothes-lining her: BDE. Colleague who didn’t leap across the desk and chin the person who may as well as said “you’re an idiot” when they had asked a simple question: BDE. Myself for putting one hand on one ear and another over my mouth to stop myself being breathtakingly rude back to someone: BDE. And my friend who could see me literally wrestling the desire to verbally tear someone to shreds, poised to kick me in the shins in order to save me from straying into a Tiny Hands Moment myself (or a dropping a Donald as I shall now call it): BDE.

All of these examples show two things.  First,  when faced with someone dropping a Donald in our direction, we are at risk of being so enraged by the appalling behaviour that stems from their inadequacy, we end up behaving in a similar way ourselves. The only purpose that can ultimately serve is a world full of people putting their own wants and needs first and trampling over other people in order to do so. That can’t be a good thing.  Second, and don’t get me wrong, sometimes people just need telling, whether they want to hear it or not –  because the world seems to be filled with tiny hands-type people – stupid, over-confident and utterly oblivious to both. But having BDE is one thing; knowing what to do with it is quite another.