I’ve been told by people who earn a lot more money than I do on the web that having a “Comment Of The Day” is a great way to get your readers involved with topics and to build a community. I’m sure that’s true but from what I saw on Jalopnik it often encouraged fawning behavior, excessive attempts at meme creation, and a polar vortex of thoroughly unfunny inside-baseball jokey comments.

Nevertheless, the comment by fellow smooth-jazz stalwart kvndoom deserves recognition. To emphasize the unique wisdom of his post, and to discourage even the mildest impulse on the part of any of my friends — and I think of all of you as my friends — to go COTD-hunting, I’ve struck preemptively and have named this Comment Of The Year, 2015. It’s brilliant because, like the best philosophical allegories, it works on two levels.

No matter how much shit they talk, they can’t un-fuck you. This is, of course, literally true, and it’s a modern update on They Can’t Take That Away From Me. Put aside your black-and-white-with-rose-tint glasses for a moment; when the singer says “They”, he means “You,” and you is the woman.

Our romance won’t end on a sorrowful note
Though by tomorrow you’re gone
The song has ended but as the song writer wrote
The melody lingers on
They may take you from me
I’ll miss your fond caress
But though they take you from me
I’ll still possess

The way you wear your hat
The way you sip your tea
The memory of all that
No no they can’t take that away from me

The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you changed my life
No no they can’t take that away from me

We may never never meet again
On the bumpy read to love
Still I’ll always always keep the memory of

The way you hold your knife
The way we danced ’til three
The way you changed my life
No no they can’t take that away from me
No they can’t take that away from me

And again, I hasten to remind you, “they” aren’t really the US Army or the Kaiser (this was a pre-WWII song) or the press of business in foreign countries. In fact, I’d like to briefly update this song for a friend of mine who still misses a girl he met on Tinder:

The way you gave it up
It was immediately
Just like 2 Girls 1 Cup
No, they can’t take that away from me

You naked but for socks
While we tried sodomy
The picture of your box
No, they can’t take that away from me

The only thing that kept Gershwin from writing that was

a) they didn’t have Tinder back then;
b) public society was expected to provide the barest modicum of decency lest the proles take heart from explicit expressions of sexual degradation, run wild, and elect somebody like Bill Clinton.

You can’t un-fuck someone, if you’re a woman. You cannot go back in time and remove the satisfaction that someone had knowing that you were (willing to/excited that you were going to/prepared to accept money in order to) have sex with them. And not even two hundred episodes of Sex And The City can out-shout that still, small voice inside all decent women that tells them that each new face above them in bed should matter, even if it’s just a little bit. Yeah, there are hardened warriors of the sexual revolution who will sleep with anybody for any reason, but they are few and far between, just like real Navy Seal Team Six members. Far more often, you get women who claim to be that way but are lying to you and themselves about it, just like you meet a hundred wannabes for every real killer out there.

If you disbelieve me, then ask yourself how often you ever had a woman not contact you after a one-night stand, assuming you gave her a real name and not something like “Bark”.

The undeniable biological fact is that a man’s choice to have sex has no value whatsoever. Men can and do have sex with pillows, stuffed animals, shoes full of raw veal, warm pies, Fleshlights, and each other. Men have an unlimited supply of biological material and the equipment still works nearly as long as the heart holds out. I was on the elliptical machine last night watching a biopic of Bob Marley and the interviewer asked Marley’s wife,

“Was Bob faithful?”

“Faithful to Jah? Absolutely.” Then the text flashed on the screen: Bob Marley had children with eleven different women. Hey, if that’s enough to be faithful to Jah, then the next time you see I and I, know that I and I will be praying to Selassie, mon. Can you imagine, say, Carole King having children with eleven different men? Of course not. Women get about two hundred and fifty chances to get pregnant in their lives and usually under five chances to actually carry a child to term. Each shot has to mean something. As a man, you’re not subject to those same conditions. If you don’t like it, write to God, or Jah, or Richard Dawkins, or Selassie.

So when a man and woman sleep together, and the man doesn’t pay the going Vegas high-end rate, then the man is getting the best of the deal. Even if the man is famous, or handsome, or a brilliant artist, or nine years younger than you are. And the woman can’t un-make her decision to trade something of value for something valueless. They can’t un-fuck you.

The male equivalent, by the way, is marrying a woman who is only occasionally willing to sleep with you, or who loses her looks/charm/kindness/whatever. You can’t un-marry a woman. You can only divorce her.

Alright, so that’s the surface interpreation of kvndoom‘s comment. What about the deeper meaning? I’d suggest that it’s this: you — meaning everybody — cannot un-fuck anything. I once knew a female judge who would smirk and say “You can’t un-ring a bell.” And that was her little way of letting the prosecutor know that she’d permit a certain amount of disrespect for the legal tradition in her courtroom, that she’d permit the prosecutor to lie or misrepresent things or mention excluded evidence and she, the judge, would just instruct the jury to “forget” things. But she was right. You cannot un-ring a bell. Which is why they say that, in my hometown, the grand jury would indict a ham sandwich for murder, and a jury would convict.

You can’t un-lose a race. You can’t undo a bad investment decision, you can’t un-say terrible things that you’ve said to someone. You can’t undo the hurt you do to a person when you have them in your power and you misuse that power. You can’t click your heels three times and disappear from the cabin of an airliner as it’s plunging towards the ocean.

And, as I’ve learned, you cannot un-crash a car, you cannot un-injure people, you cannot un-damage them.

So, you know, as the man used to say on the television show I watched when I was ten or eleven years old, be careful out there.