UPDATE: The lawsuit has been dropped! Details at the end of the post.
A brave hero in Austin Texas has taken his fight against the evils of misandry to the courts, filing a suit against a woman who skipped out on a date with him after he criticized what he saw as her excessive texting.
He is asking for S17.31 in damages, the cost of a ticket to a showing of the 3-D version of Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Galactic Boogaloo, or whatever it’s called, I don’t have time for fact checking.
Let’s go to KVUE.com to hear his side of the story:
Brandon Vezmar met the Round Rock woman on Bumble, a dating app. They went on a first date to a movie theater to see “Guardians of the Galaxy.” During the movie, Vezmar claims that she opened her phone between 10 and 20 times to read and send text messages.
This, Vezmar claims, is in “direct violation of the theater’s police” and adversely affected “the viewing experience of Plaintiff and others.”
“I said ‘listen, your texting is driving me a little nuts’ and she said ‘I can’t not text my friend.’ I said ‘maybe you can take it outside to the lobby, I’ve seen people get kicked out movies for this,” Vezmar explained.
The woman took his advice and left the theater, but did not come back.
According to Vezmer, he is less interested in getting his 17 bucks back than he is in the “principle” at stake here, “as Defendant’s behavior is a threat to civilized society.” He thinks her behavior represented some sort of civilization-threatening abdication of “personal responsibility.”
Needless to say, the woman’s version of events is a little different. She told KVUE she deserted her date because he was creeping her the hell out. And he still is.
I did have a very brief date with Brandon, that I chose to end prematurely. His behavior made me extremely uncomfortable, and I felt I needed to remove myself from the situation for my own safety. He has escalated the situation far past what any mentally healthy person would. I feel sorry that I hurt his feelings badly enough that he felt he needed to commit so much time and effort into seeking revenge. I hope one day he can move past this and find peace in his life.
Somehow I don’t think that will ever happen. Especially since this may be Vezmer’s last date for a very long time.
Check out the video on KVUE.com to see the literally neckbearded (not that there’s anything wrong with that) Vezmer explain his crusade in a little more detail. The odds that he’s a Redditor seem extremely high.
UPDATE: Check out this interview, where he explains how he’s fighting for men who are being “exploited” by women on dates. The article makes even more clear what a creepy stalker he is.
UPDATE 2: The lawsuit has been dropped! She basically paid him off so he’d leave her alone. Here’s the AV Club on how this all shook out:
We’re saved everyone: By Inside Edition, of all things. Apparently as sick of this story as the rest of us, IE set up a meeting between Vezmar and his date, so that she could give him the $17.31 back. In return, she asked for him to please god, “just leave this alone.” Vezmar carefully counted out all the money, and agreed to drop his lawsuit. We’d like to say that this will be the last we hear of this, but we would undoubtedly be wrong.
H/T — @RemingtonWild and @ami_angelwings on Twitter
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qnTUgTNMowc/T4mMEHgaaLI/AAAAAAAAAcc/8JccK-UILO4/s320/Miss+Manners.jpg
I’d be totally fine with the dating default being everyone pays their own way. There could be exceptions. For example, if one person has a lot of money and the other is broke and the wealthy one wants to do something expensive, they should pay and the poor one shouldn’t have to feel guilty about accepting that if they want.
I just hate how the burden always seems to be on women to change the landscape. I have always taken out my card when the check arrives on first dates. Every time, the guy almost always says no, he’ll get the whole thing. These are progressive guys too. I don’t think I’ve ever gone out with a man without knowing at least a little about his political views first. I’m sure if I did go out with a conservative guy he’d actually be offended. If we’re going to change the default for hetero dates from man pays to splitting the bill, men have to actually accept offers from women to split the bill. We can’t change it all ourselves. Yet, when this topic comes up, it’s almost always exclusively about whether or not women are willing to pay for dates.
As usual, when the topic is opposite gender relationships, it’s women who are expected to be on guard and change their behavior to please men and of course the expectations are contradictory so we’re always wrong.
@Kimstu
Inability to distinguish between a gift and a downpayment is not a feature of capitalism or capitalists. It is a feature of assholes. You may feel that holding the door open for me is an implicit contract that completes with you getting your dick wet, but you’d be wrong, because you are an asshole, you see. This is the major issue behind nice guys; that feeling that they’re “owed”. You’re not owed shit. And nor is every other asshole out there you’re apologising for.
See that tag at the end of the OP? “men who should not be with women ever”?
Yeah.
*ahem* I did do charm school (ok it was a video course, but I completed THE FUCK out of it) and there is only one proper and appropriate reaction to kimstu.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/rammf.gif
I once had the privilege of listening in while a male colleague gave an after-action-report of a date that had gone disastrously (to his mind) wrong. Amongst the awful things were:
– When he asked after what she did, she waved it off with a reference to “finance”, implying that he wouldn’t understand! (The colleague in question certainly wouldn’t have understood, and he probably knew that.)
– She responded to a bawdy joke by laughing and one-upping it, not letting him control the tempo of the conversation!
– She responded to a second joke by mentioning that she’d done the act in question. This made him realise that she was more experienced than him, which crushed his confidence!
– She displayed clear physical attraction to him, making it clear that any sex would be consensual, thus making him not feel like a conqueror!
– She offered to pay, mentioning that she could afford it. This forced him to notice that she was wearing designer-label clothes and so probably had a lot more money than him, making him feel emasculated!
– When he said he wasn’t feeling good and wanted to go, she asked him for contact details for another date!
The horror, the horror.
On a different topic:
@Peevee:
Are those actual modern Miss Manners texts? I’d really like to read something like that.
For example, how does I respond when a bigot mistakes me for Jewish and hurls antisemitic abuse? What’s the correct etiquette when talking to my girlfriend’s husband? What should I do when I get along with someone well and it turns out that they preferred Aliens to Alien?
@WWTH
Genuinely apropros of nothing, but a couple of years ago I was in a town in Germany, at the Christmas market. There was a giant one of those Nutcrackers – it was about thirty feet high. It was positioned in just such a way that it could stare into the window of my room at night. All night. Fortunately I was stopping in a seminary so I had a some kick-ass nuns to protect me if the thing went all ‘Toy Story’ and started moving. But they are nasty looking little fuckers. Nutcrackers, not nuns. The nuns were very nice and made me a little nativity scene out of gummi bears and biscuits. Though one of them made me ride the elevator with her a disturbing amount.
@ peevee
Please tell me all those book covers are from your own collection. I’d quite like to imagine you spend hours each day walking with books on your head and practicing how to eat a pear with a fork.
@ generally
Etiquette isn’t really synonymous with manners. It’s more a demonstration of arbitrary codes of conduct to indicate you fit in with a particular social group. Literally it’s your ‘ticket’ into that circle.
A major difference is etiquette can be used to exclude people and make them uncomfortable whereas manners is meant put someone at ease.
So, drinking out of a finger bowl is a breach of etiquette but it might be good manners to do so if makes a pauper feel welcome at the top table.
(Points for anyone who gets that reference)
It was mentioned upthread that she recently offered to pay – but someone also hinted that he might not have to accept a simple payment once the suit has been filed?
Is this one of those counterintuitive legal technicality issues? Meaning that if he had any standing, he could now get her to pay not only the $20 restitution but also thousands in court costs? That is, assuming a restitution demand that small won’t get your case automatically dismissed?
Am I making any sense, as an ESL non-lawyer?
I’ve always at least tried to pay my own way on a date unless the guy and I were in a relationship. In the interest of not fighting over a bill for hours, I would give up after three tries on any particular date. I started dating in the early 1970s, when this was not done. Practically every time I did it, the server or the ticket seller would say, “Oh! She’s paying your way tonight?”
One reason I fell for my college boyfriend was that he was relaxed about the whole issue. Once we were in a restaurant and he offered to buy me a sandwich. No. Then he said, “Okay, would you buy me a sandwich?” I like a guy who makes me laugh!
@PeeVee
I see that you have a book by Gay Head!!!1!!
I had one of her books back in junior high. I believe it was called How to Be the Most Popular Girl in Your Class. I never did become the most popular girl, which, if you ask me, is often more about power than about actually being liked — but it was reassuring to read that other girls had the same concerns that I did.
@EJ
I’m no Miss Manners, but I’ve done my best to tackle your questions.
I still get stumped by stuff like this, probably because I’m in shock.
This one’s simple. Treat him with disinterested friendliness.
Whoa. I don’t think Miss Manners herself would know what to do in this situation. You’re on your own! Sorry, EJ.
‘I hate the formal rules, though, so my personal policy for gifts is: I give it, I no longer have a say about what happens to it. I receive it, you no longer have a say about what happens to it.’
When I got married my mom gave my then-husband and me a large amount of money as a wedding gift. We used some of it for a honeymoon trip and then split the rest. He used part of his share to buy himself a motorcycle. When my mom found out she was pretty upset, and I had to explain this rule to her (though I’d edit it slightly to account for someone giving a gift and specifically saying ‘I want you to do x with it’–e.g. giving someone money and saying ‘please spend this on yourself and not on bills’)–of course she never told us specifically how she wanted us to use her gift, so how could she justify being upset about S. using it to buy something he wanted? (She didn’t have a problem with motorcycles themselves; I had two at the time and used to take my sister for rides.)
@ guest
I’ve been helping a mate out with her brother’s divorce proceedings (normally try to avoid this area, but hey ho). As is not uncommon the parents had contributed to the deposit for a house. As is equally common there ended up being a big row as to whether that was a gift or a loan.
What was particularly funny is the families involved are from a Sikh background. The judge was trying to be all culturally sensitive, but he just kept putting his foot in it.
“Now forgive my ignorance, but was this by way of a dowry?”
“No, we’re in Huddersfield not the Punjab. This was by way of tax avoidance.”
…Oh my, and I had most deeply hoped that we would be so blessed as to have etiquette thoroughly mansplained here on this blog! Dreams DO come true!
(Just not the one where mansplainers, trolls, misogynists, seagull-eating MGTOWs and so forth embark on their broken bits of legos-paved road march, never to be heard from again.)
I wonder if it’s the guy from the OP or someone who knows him and shares the same dating philosophy. Probably not, but you never can be sure…
@alan Ha, your comment brings up two things I’d literally never thought of before–first, that my mom may have had a tax benefit from giving us money (I doubt it, she’s as ignorant of finance as I am, but it never occurred to me) and second, which is more plausible, maybe…I wonder if she’d tacitly expected us to spend the money on a house? She certainly never said so, either before or after the motorcycle incident, and it literally occurred to neither of us to do that–I guess partly because although it seemed like a large amount of money to us it wouldn’t have been enough for even a significant part of a down payment on a house in the area we lived. Although my dad’s job was well-paying enough for our family to have owned the houses we lived in when I was growing up, my parents were from a culture that didn’t own real estate; I’m not sure if my mom had internalised suburban homeowning mores enough by that time to have assumed that she was ‘supposed’ to give us money that we were ‘supposed’ to spend on a house, or not–but I don’t know and had never thought about it before.
@ guest
In England, you can make an inter vivos gift. Then, so long as you survive for seven years, you don’t have to pay inheritance tax. But of course the argument then became the deposit wasn’t a gift, just a loan (or even buying a %age interest in the house).
A suitably judicial fudge, sorry compromise, was achieved. So the parents don’t get the money back straight away but they now have a ‘charge’ on the property which means they get paid if it’s ever sold.
ETA: of course we’re now having a row about whether one of the exes buying the other out counts as a ‘sale’.
@Kat:
Thanks very much for the guidance. I agree that #3 is a toughie; hopefully the world’s experts could come together to agree on a rough set of steps to be used in such a catastrophe.
@guest:
I once gave a friend some money under the condition that it be used to pay rent and not to buy drugs. You can probably guess what happened.
Kimstu is mangling etiquette, btw. The “rule” being cited here is not a real rule.
What Kimstu is probably thinking about here (and misinterpreting) is a pair of rules. The first is that one does not accept gifts from someone if one wants nothing to do with that person. This is not something esoteric – we all know this one, really. The etiquette rule for how to reject the gifts is to refuse them, or return them immediately if they were mailed or delivered, unopened if possible. Offers of hospitality should definitely be refused.
The other is that one doesn’t accept gifts that are of an inappropriate magnitude given the relationship one has with the giver. Again: not something that really needs to be explained for 3 pages. If someone tries to give you a $2000 piece of jewelry on the second date, it is correct to refuse to accept it. If one accepted it anyway (due to being too shocked in the moment to know what to do, for example), one is not required to return it later, but may do so if one feels bad and weird about it. The right way to do this is with the non-explanation, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept this,” and repeat as necessary until the giver takes it back (or just have it delivered).
The woman in question here violated neither of these rules, because she didn’t know initially that she didn’t like this guy, and the gift was totally appropriate in magnitude for the first date.
It would be acceptable for her to return his gift after she discovered what a weirdo he is, but not required.
Obviously, the dude is totally wrong in wanting his money back. He asked her out, which makes him obligated to pay for the outing, and it’s super-rude to ask for a gift back in any case. But I don’t notice Kimstu hammering on about this, mysteriously. All the criticism is leveled at her and none at him. I wonder why that could possibly be. Surely misogyny has nothing to do with it!
@Pie:
Absolutely! And if you’re not an asshole, you generally don’t want to accept a gift from an asshole. And you also don’t want to accept a downpayment from an asshole on an “exchange” you never agreed to participate in.
So what do you do when you’ve accepted a gift or other expenditure on your behalf from someone who then turns out to be an asshole, by revealing that they expect some kind of compensation for what they spent on you?
Some people think that you should just keep what you got and tell the asshole, in effect, “Your loss, asshole, it was technically a gift according to accepted social rules, so I’m keeping it and not repaying you for it”.
But that kind of puts you in the false position of deliberately hanging on to a gift from an asshole. Better to just reject all association with the asshole entirely by returning to them whatever it was they gave/spent on you.
(And to reiterate, of course it’s not in dispute that the asshole’s own behavior in such a situation is by far the worst part, and the root of the whole problem in the first place.)
Go back to bed, @Kimstu.
One thing I find bemusing about MRA types is how often their real world views were previously the stuff of comedy scripts.
Watch from 23:00
Wow. Go out for an evening, get home late, and come back next morning and look what happens, I miss the troll! No great loss, though.
Ignore Sandra – (from way back on page 2) Oh, nothing to do with generosity! Offering the guy $50 for his silence would be about being able to imagine him trying not to explode while not being able to crow on social or popular media about his big manure-o-sphere-style “win.”
@Kimstu
Speaking of which, I believe you owe Hippodameia.
@Alan
I dunno, it sort of seems like a lot of those MRA/MGTOW types are lacking the ubiquitous sidekick/friend that comedy scripts feature. 😛 They’re supposedly going their own way, on the internet to bitch about women. I’d feel bad for them if they didn’t set themselves up for the misery they continually experience (and bitch about on the internet).