Open Letter From A Grenade

People of Earth, I’m a grenade. While Vinny, The Situation and Pauly D haven’t formally appointed me to grenade status, I’m sure they would if we ever happened to cross paths.

I know my friends who choose to read this will want to immediately dismiss the notion that I am, according to Urban Dictionary (who needs Merriam-Webster?): “The solitary ugly girl always found with a group of hotties. If the grenade doesn’t get any action, then neither does anyone else.”

I know all you hot bros out there have dedicated your lives to playing social G.I. Joes by eradicating the existence of grenades. Begging your least-attractive (and often most-annoying) friend to sleep with us isn’t exactly Silver Star territory, so let’s at least be honest with each other.

Guys, I am not trying to ruin your lives. I don’t, as one genius from The Johns Hopkins News-Letter posited, “hang out with more aesthetically pleasing girls to leech off the perks that come naturally with their biological success.”

This same burgeoning Seymour Hersh theorized that “hot girls associate with fat chicks as a means to boost their level of relative sex appeal.” Well, aside from a dangling modifier and unclear subject-verb agreement, homeboy might have a point. I don’t know why all of my friends, who I will gladly admit are gorgeous, both by traditional standards and by measures that count (i.e. being intelligent and talented, not spitting on the homeless, etc.), have a grenade friend. As I’ve written previously, I think my old friends probably liked the security and self-esteem boost associated with having a chubby-and-nonthreatening friend. But no, I didn’t seek out my current friends so that I could get invited to lingeraves (not only has society wisely beat me down enough to make me not even consider a lingerie party as a social option, almost all of my gorgeous friends – the ones guys want to see in lace and little else – are still too shy/feminist to bare all for frat dudes).

My friends are driven, smart, acerbic and yes, totally fuckable (or so I’ve heard). Those first three reasons are why we hang out. I like being surrounded by fellow females who have opinions about The Daily Show and Bono but also like making fun of people like Mr. Fat Chicks are Ruining the World (Apparently, his name is Greg Sgammato).

[There’s the grenade, eating a sucker (of course) and ruining the night for men everywhere.]

Here’s another big misunderstanding: I have far too much self-respect to profit from my friends’ hotness, and I think most grenades would agree. We don’t want to date your ugly and annoying friends. We don’t want to garner pity fucks so you can go home with our BFFs (and eventually break their hearts because you can’t handle commitment). I am not so desperate for attention that I’ll pair off with your social sacrificial lamb. In fact, when confronted with that possibility, most of us dash in another direction. Granted, Jersey Shore’s Mount Rushmore probably wouldn’t look twice at me unless it was to call me a “hippo,” but I’m OK with that, mostly because you’ve got to be out of your mind to think that I’d be grateful that anyone with so little self-respect to proudly refer to himself as a Guido would take me home to boost his friends’ sex fortunes.

I’ve realized that the problem between grenades and guys is this: You’re so self-centered that you think we exist solely to ruin your night. You think we’re unpredictable. We’re likely to explode as soon as we don’t get our way, leaving a trail of blue balls in our wake. Why else would a fat girl leave her puppy chow and chick-flick marathon to go out to a party? Allow me to drop a knowledge bomb, if I may: I have a personality, I like to have fun and I have friends (both male and female) who invite me to parties. You can’t honestly believe all these fat chicks are plus-ones, right? Sometimes grenades are directly invited to parties for reasons having nothing to do with our hot friends or our fat status. Of course, I know that’s a revolutionary idea, given that Sgammato actually referred to fat women as bison, wildebeest, mammoths, livestock and a host of other flattering terms that were cataloged here on Jezebel.

Guys’ grenade problems are symbolic of something much bigger in society: taking away women’s autonomy. The notion is that a girl can’t leave a party with a guy unless her friend has someone to go home with too. Bullshit. Girls do that all the time. Plus, people hook up at parties and then still leave with their friends, so don’t peddle this crap about how you have to give the grenade someone to love lest being resigned to spend another night alone with “The Girls Next Door.” Guys, if a girl wants to sleep with you, she will. She will call her friend a cab, she will get your number and call you later, she will have sex with you in a hallway while her friend get another drink; a girl will find a way to sleep with you if you’re worth it. If a guy is going home alone, there’s usually a good reason, and it has more to do with him calling a chick a grenade than a girl actually being one. But, given that any guy who refers to fat girls as “its” because they are subhuman is probably not prone to introspection, it’s a lot easier to blame your shortcomings on girls like me.

What guys with grenade problems don’t want to deal with is the truth: Nice guys finish first. Notice how good guys don’t need to take to the pages of their college rags to opine on the grenade epidemic? Because it isn’t a problem for them.

Don’t buy me drinks so I’ll “let” my friends go home with you. Be nice to me because I’m a human being. Treat my hot friends well because they deserve it. Quit pretending to be good guys. Just be good guys and it won’t matter how fat I am or why I have hot friends. And if my hot friends still don’t want to sleep with you, don’t blame me.

And a note for all you guys out there trying to “impress” the grenades: We already have a drink. Try buying us mozzarella sticks.