Dream Phone: No Fun With Frenchmen.

If the American 1990s were a mountain, Dream Phone would be its mystifying, captivating, hot-pink summit. Dream Phone was a culmination of every ion of 1990s American culture wrestled into a cardboard box with pictures of cute boys all over it. It was 1991 when the Dream Phone was released, and after that the Nineties basically brushed their shoulders off and said "we're done! Let's pack it in, folks, it's all down hill from here."Dream Phone was the Nineties Stone Tablets handed down to Nineties Moses (Zack Morris?), if that tablet were black with neon geometric shapes and hot pink script drawn all over it: the outline for all that was good and pure and right in 1991.

It was a board game, basically. It was Clue, except instead of finding a cold-blooded murderer, you ticked names off a crib sheet to figure out who, who, who, had a crush on you.

There are photos of "cute" boys around the board, and I use the term loosely because they are cute by definition of the Nineties: a system of judgement that has sadly gone by the wayside. So basically it's a bunch of enthusiastic young men with fades and Flock-of-Seagulls haircuts. And neon lettermen's jackets. And neon mesh sleeveless T's. And neon visors. And shades. O, the shades! Basically, anything you can picture your dad wearing to embarrass you at a family outing to the zoo, these guys are sporting totally un-ironically. Above the photographs, and I can not stress enough that these are actual photographs of young male models of the nineties who are now all adults with crippling cocaine addictions or dead from all the cocaine afforded to young male models of the nineties, there are silhouette illustrations of each respective gentleman highlighting (in neon, but do I really need to keep specifying that?) either an article of clothing that they're wearing, something funky-fresh that they are eating such as maybe an over-decorated cupcake or a slice of pizza (the proud traditional food of 1991) or some overwhelmingly nineties-y activity, like fucking surfing.

They all have nineties-y names, too, but I'm not sure exactly how that's possible. It's just barely twenty years ago, and yet if I say the name "Chad", you and I both know that dick is from the nineties. I guess he and all the "Jamal"s and "Bruce"s of the world just died there, because there sure as hell aren't any of them in this decade.

Anyway, there's a giant pink electronic phone in the center, and you have to dial the numbers of the boys (calling BOYS? OOO YOU SO BAD) and narrow your list down to the one guy who has a crush on you. They'll give you clues that start out loud and turn into a whisper. For instance, it could start out "HE'LL EAT ALMOST ANYTHING...." and then, softly, like a butterfly lighting on your waiting ear: "but not hot dogs." Sometimes you get a phone call from one of your girlfriends with a clue, and sometimes one of the guys is a total and complete asshole and just hangs up on you. "I know who it is, but I'm not telling! Ha, ha!" It doesn't look anywhere near as obnoxious as it sounds, you really have to hear it. It's been more than once that I've accidentally reset the game after throwing the phone against the wall over that dick. And I don't even know which one it is, because all their voices sound the same. One day...

It's worth noting that you just push a button to start the game. You don't program the number of players into it, and so the one guy who has a "crush on you", actually has a crush on whoever figures it out first and calls him. This fact absolutely enraged my male feminist friend who bought me the original 1991 game for my birthday. It took him a full minute to overcome the shock that his crush wouldn't be personalized if he won. I guess it is kind of tragically romantic to think of the other identically robot-voiced Nineties Studs waiting inside the enormous Dream Phone, pining for their one true love, hoping against hope that she'll piece together the clues. The real tragedy was that it took a man to be insulted that he didn't get a personal trophy: the countless girls who've played it through the years just accepted it.

So, I have the Dream Phone game. And it's hilarious. And it's even more hilarious when playing it with a bunch of American men, because the ridiculous, over-the-top, girlishly gleeful design of the game stands in stark contrast to how these men are supposed to behave. I have photos of a straight Canadian man (basically American, let's be real) and a gay American man, posing with the gigantic pink phone in enthusiastically girly poses, and they're adorable and funny and snarky.

Do not play this game with a French man. 

Here's the thing: French men will ruin this god-damn game for you. They will play the game with a genuinely earnest, if slightly confused, politesse that makes it fucking useless. You will take one look at the French man across from you, studying his photo of fucking "Brad" to get the phone number right, dialing this enormous pink nineties cell phone without a hint of irony, and waiting patiently for his clue before diligently marking it down on the crib sheet, and you will feel an emptiness that you haven't felt since your singing Power Rangers motion-activated bedroom door sign lost its juice and started sounding like the Power Rangers were melting.

Because honestly, this game sucks. The only great part of it is the ridiculous absurdity, and it's completely lost on the French. First of all, it's sort of difficult for them to sort through the bits of Americana that are earnest and the parts that are satiric or ironic, so in the name of etiquette they sort of have to carefully avoid eye contact with any Americans in the room whenever there's an absurd and outrageous bit of culture staring them in the face, lest they risk insulting one of us and getting killed in one of our "mass shootings", the festivals we hold regularly to celebrate freedom.

The French just aren't raised on the sort of brash commercialism that Americans know intimately and subtly enough to be able to parody, and, to be honest, they don't commodify and over-infantilize their young girls to the same extent that we do here. They don't understand how we mock the shamefulness of being a silly girl (or a girlish boy), because it isn't ingrained in them to be ashamed of being a girl in the same way. Of course, I'm not arguing that French society is a Utopia of equality and harmony (if you've read the news lately, you can't abide that), but on an individual level, I have noted that French women, at least, tend to be comfortable in their own skin in a way that I rarely notice in Americans. An American woman might give you a sidelong glance to make sure her butt is cuter while the French woman is concentrating on the notes of cucumber in her cocktail. American women are suspicious of men if you give them a compliment. They disagree vehemently and assume you're only saying it in order to have sex with them. If you tell a French woman she's beautiful, she'll say "merci beaucoup" and move the fuck on.

It's not our fault. We're raised to believe we're silly, and incompetent, and our value lies in our appearance. Even when an American girl has a wonderful, supportive family with a kick-ass father with his values in the right place, our culture is so saturated with media--lazy media that uses shortcuts and stereotypes to push a product--that a girl can be helpless to succumb.

I don't want to extemporize too much, so I'll just make this note: Obviously, this is not the case across-the-board for every American woman, every minute of every day. It's more like a foul disease that we have to keep at bay, that can grip us when we least expect it. It's not an absolutely curable disease, like the chicken-pox. It's more like depression, with a daily maintenance requirement: awareness is key. The most ass-kickingest, strident, powerful, awesomely smart, rock-and-roll women I know have their moments when all the insulting rhetoric and idealized bodies and men on the street get to them, and it doesn't make them any less powerful, but in fact, stronger for the wear because they've endured.

I've known a few French men who have been blindsided and confused by this American behavior; that American women will pigeonhole the French as sexual predators, or Pepe La Pews, simply because Frenchmen find it useful to say things earnestly, while their American counterparts, products of a media-saturated extended adolescence, will childishly berate the women they find attractive, or act like they don't exist, because they've never grown out of the phase where you pull the girl's pigtail when you have a crush on her. "I find you wonderful" has become a reason for suspicion.

So, I suggest to these Frenchmen to pick up a copy of Dream Phone 1991 Edition, for the low-low price of like seventy bucks on Ebay, and discover for yourselves why American women don't know how to digest your straight-forward approach. Because in a world where we're all competing for the one Robot Chad who's available to whichever the hell one of us gets there first because we're all the same anyway, we can easily sometimes forget our own worth. Which is a fucking bummer, dude.