Sam With the Red Hat

How We Created Gold Diggers

He sits at the same corner of the bar every night. Sam's red hat is soiled and worn and has comfortably conformed to the tufts of dusty gray hair that curl up from its frayed edges. He seldom engages in conversation and even his interactions with Michelle, the bartender, are almost ritualistic. As one Miller Light is finished, he removes it from the tattered blue beer bottle snuggy, and Michelle promptly pulls another from the cooler, pushes it into the insulator, and deftly pops off the top with her bar buddy opener. Sam nods gratefully and continues to silently survey the scene. 

The social world revolves around two power brokers, the men of means, and the beautiful women. The rest are destined to varying degrees of mediocrity and loneliness, or have made peace with their compromised expectations of a life partner in order to avoid the emptiness of solitude. 


Laura is often at the bar too, but less frequently than Sam. She has not been graced with the attributes that western culture has defined as beauty. She is in her late forties and overweight. She is judged first on those characteristics, as people are so inclined to do in this modern world. As she laughs with various people at the bar it seems as though she may have once been "attractive", but has now resorted to artificial exuberance while giving up on appearance. In between conversations, her loneliness is palpable, despite manifesting itself in an opposite set of outward behaviors than Sam's despair. 

Neither Sam nor Laura have settled for less than they expected from life. They have not compromised their values in a life partner, and as a result, they have ended up alone. They are locked into a social stratification that parallels our economic strata. The rules say that blue collar ends up with blue collar, poor end up with poor, overweight ends up with overweight, and those without the attributes somewhat arbitrarily determined as signifying beauty, end up with like partners. Certainly, the rules are sometimes flexed and even shattered, but by and large, they hold. It is a socioeconomic/physical appearance "Caste System".

The people who ignore the rules are the power brokers: the men of means and the women of beauty.  Wealthy men are made by society. Their creation seems to be rooted in various combinations of drive, intellect, testosterone, people manipulation skills, and/or luck. They have successfully transferred the alpha traits of our primate relatives to the modern world and are often driven by the same primitive brain chemistry, the need for power, control, and even conquest. The materialism of western culture has exacerbated the power of primitive men and is at least partially responsible for their development as caste breakers, my term for those who, at will, transcend the barriers that are embedded in our indoctrination. Sam and Laura are powerless among them.

You have seen it and made the call. Pretty woman walks hand and hand with older, much less attractive man, and you have perceived the rule breaking. You may have even whispered to someone, "He must have money". You may have watched them get into the $150,000 car to confirm your suspicions. You have known of women who made themselves throw up after eating or who diet incessantly just to make themselves more attractive to a man of means. You have seen women enhance their breast size, endure plastic surgery, Botox injections, and starvation to maintain their role as a man's accessory. The result is heartbreaking confusion about what is really important about people. 

Women, not just beautiful ones, have found the allure of breaking caste so overwhelming, that they have grown more and more willing to sell out on their own needs for personal relationships in favor of the promise of endless access to shopping, travel, prestige, and security. Conversation, humor, connections, and other personal needs are replaced by material needs. Amidst strings of extravagant denial, these women rationalize and pretend away their lives in this socially accepted form of prostitution. They subsist on pretending to love a man to whom they are little more than an accessory, a Lamborghini, a Patek Philip watch, a showpiece for social engagements. 

Women of beauty have also been nurtured from childhood with pressures to be thin enough, pretty enough, smart enough, and perpetually young enough to attract powerful men. Much as the men have linked so much of their self worth with what they have instead of what they are, these women have been taught that their personal worth in this world stems from their appearance and the caliber of man that they can attract with it. The profoundly sad result of the way our culture determines value is, in part, Sam and Laura. These are people who are valueless in the eyes of much of the world, barely worth of a glance in the bar, and destined to either settle for someone else of no perceived value, or to be alone.

Sam never had a chance in this world of social power brokering and nurtured prostitution. You can see it in his deep-set brown eyes. The unkempt white eyebrows and sunken cheeks are testaments to Sam's furrowed existence. His perpetual presence in the corner stool at the bar is how he manages his craving for being with people, even though they will generally fail to see his innate value. Laura sleeps with men, actually, most any man who will temporarily make her feel the value that our society has denied her. 

My reflections, as a man of middling appearance, average means, high compassion, and high intellect, are admittedly colored with some resentment. I have a healthy disdain for beautiful women who compromise their own values to rationalize an existence with a wealthy man. I take their judgment of me personally and become frustrated with their utter stupidity. I am equally frustrated with the materialism that created these skewed female forms known in some circles as gold diggers, in others as just prostitutes. I am frustrated by a world that values beauty and wealth over compassion and intelligence. I concede that these values have evolved from our primitive pasts and are still present in parallel forms throughout the animal kingdom, and I even hold out hope that they are not as pervasive as indicated by my typically cynical perception.   

Even though seventy-five percent of women surveyed stated that they would marry for money, I am interested in the other twenty-five percent. I believe that most of the others are emotionally vacant beings who will ultimately realize their flawed judgment when they realize that they have spent a lifetime faking a loving relationship. One day, the bar will be filled with the empty discarded old souls of the gold-diggers. 

Today, I saw a red hat in the store. I picked it up and tried it on. It didn't fit.