I am not sexist.  Really, I am not.  Also, I have never google-image searched naked pictures of the T-Mobile girl and/or tried to friend her on facebook.  But denials have a curious way of making people wonder why they are necessary.  Indeed, some have expressed concern over my alleged sexism, especially after watching my Fox5 interview.  Towards the end I make this unfortunate statement which, quite understandably, I have been asked to explain: “I also think I’m not special in this [this pulling people off the third rail business].  I think there are tons of men and boys out there that would have done the exact same thing.”

Yup.  Men and boys.  Exactly.  Good thing they did not include the rest of the interview, cause I go on to expound on how all women and girls are worthless cowards.  No.  That is not a true story.  The host, Angelique Proctor, understood what I meant when she said, “Jeremy…believes any of us would have had a similar reaction.”  So why did I say “men and boys”?

Obviously, cause I was a tad stupid.  I cringe when I hear the line.  Alicia cringed too while watching the interview from the other side of our living room.  This was my first interview, and my worst.  I was clueless.  This experience makes me extremely patient with celebrities and politicians who get in trouble because of sound bites.  I have been saying for years that if I was a celebrity I would get caught saying idiotic things all the time.  And, in my fifteen minutes of fame, I proved myself prescient.

Fortunately context saves me.  Often it will not.  I do, in fact, consistently say dumb things.  But this time context saves me.  At the beginning of the interview Angeligue had asked me why I grabbed the guy.  In my answer, I talked, among other things, about how I had been an adventurous, daydreaming boy, who often imagined the day I would rescue damsels in distress on a semi-weekly basis.  As I grew older and started lifting and working out, ostensibly for sports, I knew it was in fact secret superhero training.  Though overstated, I think this rings true for many other boys who, like me, grow up to be men but never quite lost those specific daydreams.  There are lots and lots of us out there.

The “men and boys” comment was meant to bring this context to bear in order to support the broader point that there are many others who would have acted similarly.  Some of these people would be, I think, the people who had developed the silly and noble psychosis that I had.  So I was in fact making fun of men and boys a bit, and my comment was inclusive, not meant to exclude others from being brave, but to note that one of the groups that would be brave in these sorts of situations is a group I have already mentioned.  Of course, none of this was clear from the interview.

There are those who had concerns before the “men and boys” comment.  I certainly hold beliefs and ideas that some find sexist-ish and I espouse them liberally (or conservatively?).  I do not think they are sexist, and Alicia does not think they are sexist either, at least not usually.  I plan on blogging about them and the reader can decide for his or her self.  In the meantime, please accept my apologies if you were offended by my comment on Fox5.  I assure you, in this case at least, I was not sexist, but merely dumb.