Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about the image I want to convey and the impression that I want to leave. This has led to an awful lot of pondering about what it means to be respectable. Sure, I could say that I don’t care what people think about me, but it seems that somewhere in there, nearly all self-respecting people care at least a little about how others see them.

I’m not a huge bar person, so when I’m out, I’m not there looking to impress anyone. I really don’t believe in finding quality relationships in bars. A wise friend (who is male) once told me that the guys I would meet in such establishments are not the kind of guys I would want to date, anyway. When I go out, I like to observe, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of sizing people up from afar. Is that judgmental? Maybe, but I don’t really think it is. And besides, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fast to say that judgment is a bad thing. Good judgment has kept me away from a lot of unfavorable situations and unsavory people. It’s also helped me to realize why self-respect is so important.

Everything that we do sends off some kind of message. While I can’t comment on the personalities of any of these people, they tell me quite enough with the way they dress, the things they say, and their body language. The easiest people to spot in a bar are the party girls and party guys. The girls are always wearing obnoxiously tight clothing that looks like it was stolen from Jenna Jameson’s trailer. Their breasts are amped up and barely covered and they’ll make sure everyone notices them, too (by “them,” I mean the girls and their breasts). Note that I keep referring to them as girls. I refuse to refer to them as women because the term “woman” invokes a sense of maturity, and that is clearly lacking with this breed of bar-fly. They are loud. They are boisterous. They scream obscenities and swear like sailors so that the entire bar can hear them. For some reason, they also think this is funny. I always get the impression that these girls’ lives revolve around the bar and party scenes. Most of the time they’re 21 or 22, but the older they get beyond that, the more pathetic they seem to me. Who taught them that this behavior was favorable? What father wants to think of his little girl doing a shot referred to as a “blow job” out of another girl’s cleavage? The best part is that they take pictures of all of this and put them online for everyone to see (that’s a problem I’ll get to in a bit, as it’s a whole other issue). Later they complain that people don’t respect them. I’m not saying that I believe they should have every inch of skin prudishly covered, but what I am saying is that I don’t even need to know girls like this to know that they don’t respect themselves. If they don’t respect themselves, they’re not going to respect other people, and therefore, I don’t respect them.

I also don’t respect the guys who dote on these girls. These are the guys who come in dressed in terribly trendy clothes that make them look like every single other guy in there (the frat-boy look). They might be attractive, but I would never take them seriously based on the fact that they can’t even think enough for themselves to wear different clothes. They’re always bathed in some kind of awful cologne, too. It might not be quite so awful if all the colognes didn’t mix together to smell like embalming fluid. Your nose will always tell you when you’ve approached a group of these people. The smell of cologne has mixed with the girls’ perfume. All of this has an odor of cigarette smoke stuck to it (it’s worse if it’s a smoking bar), and the end result smells a lot like how I imagine a cheap roadside whorehouse smells. Was that harsh? The truth hurts sometimes. Anyway, these guys are always glued to those girls for reasons unknown. I keep wondering at what age the male species starts to realize that a girl being “hot” means very little, and I suppose that maybe they only invest time because the girls look easy. These girls are busy exploiting themselves, so what do they care? They think they look cute, anyway.

I always end up wondering to myself, why are these people so proud to be trashy?

Sure, I don’t necessarily know these people, so it may be a bit unfair to size them up like that. But those girls are dressed like hookers and those guys respond the way they do for a reason. The things these people say and do are so telling, and it’s so easy to watch them. Thanks to social media, I don’t even necessarily need to leave home anymore to do this (and good news! – neither do your employers or anyone else you want to take you seriously!). Everyone has followed the Facebook breadcrumbs at some point. You click on a random friend of a friend, and then onto one of that person’s friends, and so on.  The stuff that people choose to reveal about themselves publicly on the Internet absolutely astounds me. I don’t know you, but if I go to your page and you inform me via your “about me” section that you “have issues” and you “enjoy being a bitch” or one of your hobbies is actually “dressing up like a slut” and “partying with the girls”, well, of course I’m going to believe that you have issues, that you’re a huge bitch, and a slut, and your whole life revolves around partying. Girls are the absolute worst with this. I once visited a MySpace page where a girl had her profile picture set to the silhouette of her breasts on the wall while she was clearly straddling someone. This was someone I knew. I immediately lost all respect for her, and that was all it took.

So as I was thinking about all the reasons I have to not respect or to lose respect for someone, I got to thinking about what makes a person respectable. In the end, what I came up with was that self-respect has to be first and foremost. I wear normal clothes. I’m well-educated and can hold an intelligent conversation. I like to have fun, and I can be really random and say silly things, but not in the immature and obnoxious way. Sure, I could take the time to get to know these people who are so opposite from me, but why? I have observed enough to know that I can’t take them seriously. Before someone accuses me of being jealous, let me be quite clear that I am in no way jealous. I feel sorry for the people that think this lifestyle is “cool” – especially the older they get. Let’s be honest, nothing is more pathetic than a woman in her 30s or older who never grew out of the party girl phase. She keeps wearing those tight shirts for the guys, but gravity’s already taken its toll.