Breakfast at Tiffany’s is an iconic film. Girls love Audrey’s outfits and the macking in the rain because it’s oh-so-classy. It’s easy to forget, when focusing on the romanticized features of the film, that Holly Golightly pretty much makes her living off a two-part plan.
First, she capitalizes on her hotness to lure wealthy guys in and make them buy her nice things. She then cockblocks the shit out of herself so she doesn’t have to return any favors. Climbing out the bathroom window is her specialty. What a lady.
What I deduced from the film is it pays to be a master cockblock sometimes, whether you’re doing it on behalf of a friend, out of spite for an enemy or merely to shield yourself. However, cockblocking can also piss people off. Very much.
Ideally, every guy’s got a wingman to help him score. Ideally, every girl’s got a friend who’s there solely for the purpose of dragging her out of that pop stand once it appears she may actually score. These are conflicting ideals.
Whether this girl is acting out of genuine concern for her friend or jealousy is a variable in the situation.
“One of my friends doesn’t like it when her friends get more attention than she does,” says Goldie Shore Breeze. “So she slept on the floor in the same room that someone was hooking up in.”
On the boys’ take, sometimes the wingman plan failblogs completely, thus transforming a friend into the antithesis of a wingman: the cockblocker.
“My asshole roommate came home one night and puked in the living room, derailing the two hours of Mamma Mia that I had put myself through because this girl wanted to watch it,” says Tucker Avalon. “She helped me clean it up and then left pretty soon after. Mamma Mia. That’s fucking unforgivable.”
While your friends may have the best of intentions, only you decide whether their cockblocking services are needed. Sometimes they leave you when you need them the most, and other times they hustle you out when you wish they would just get lost.
It’s no secret guys sometimes establish pre-meditated “get the hell out” signals when they want to be alone with a girl. In defense of your lovely friends, it’s not like they could telepathically figure out you liked it when the weird, tall guy with the man purse used the line, “Can you help me look for my dog? I think he ran into that cheap motel room.”
When left to fend for yourself, methods can vary from the mild to the desperate.
“Her name was Hope, and my friend had no hope of getting with her,” says Elvis Champagne, recounting a brief tale of a girl who claimed to not have a cell phone to avoid giving out her number.
I once got cornered and took it upon myself to feign passing out mid-makeout until the guy went away. After waiting an obligatory 10 minutes or so to make the pass out seem plausible, you can bet your ass I booked it out of there as fast as I could.
Now, you may think that self-cockblocking is strictly chick business, but as countless authority figures have probably told you, generalization is a bad thing. The crown jewel of self-cockblocking stories is from my friend Yoshi Paradise. Once upon a time, there was a girl. He wanted so badly to keep her hands off his genitals that he went to jail.
“This girl wouldn’t leave me alone,” he says. “I face-planted while I was trying to run away in the big kid park near Cuarto. When some cops helped me up, I was like, ‘Help me! This girl is trying to molest me!'”
He was “detained for personal safety,” which is cop talk for left to rot in the drunk tank. In Woodland. He was not allowed to leave until he was sober at 4 p.m. the next day.
Honestly, the best way to play it is to do like the D.A.R.E guys tell you and just say no. It sounds cliché because it is. But we live in a sick world, one where there are people who are so afraid of rejection from conscious beings they resort to attempting sex with unconscious beings. You probably want to avoid that.
On the flipside, if it was meant to be, no puking roommate or jealous friend should be able to trammel it. And if they do, never fear. This is college, a place where opportunities are like buses. They come along every 15 minutes.
MICHELLE RICK was once on a D.A.R.E. trading card. She now regrets it because it’s a complete and total waste of tax money. Send cockblocking advice to marick@ucdavis.edu.
