Yesterday, in between writing poetry, ranting on twitter, and watching Big Brother, I also took some time to catch up on the latest in international news.  This story, from CNN.com, especially caught my attention:

Paris Teens Charged in Bare-Breasted Robberies

Paris, France (CNN) — French police believe they’ve gotten to the bottom of a series of robberies in which teenage girls exposed their breasts to distract men withdrawing money from Paris cash machines

(….)

Police say that on August 7, a man inserted a card into a cash machine in central Paris to withdraw money when two young females approached him and asked for money. The girls waved a newspaper at the man in an attempt to distract him, but the technique didn’t work.

So the girls tried another strategy: One of them bared her breasts and put her hand on the man’s genitals while the other took the opportunity to withdraw 300 euros, police said.

The story goes on to state that the two girls, both under the age of 18, have been arrested for the “crime” and are accused of taking part in two other ATM robberies.

Now, to me, it’s pointless to read any news story online without then reading some of the comments that others have posted concerning it.  To me, those comments — usually made by people who remain anonymous and therefore feel safe expressing what they’re really thinking — are usually the real story.

The majority of the comments were predictable examples of “Thanks for the mamaries” type humor.  There were quite a few comments that were apparently left by a guy who is so insecure that he felt the need to even let the Internet know that he’s such a robust heterosexual that he could literally spend hours talking about how much he likes to stare at boobs.  As I said, nothing surprising.

And then there were a few comments that had an oddly defensive tone to them.

For instance, ttruth2 stated, “girls can’t be too smart….the guy would have paid 1000 euros……..”

BusterHymen (yeah, nice online name, asshole) adds, “This isn’t news. This happens in any given strip club nightly across america…”

txntv suggests, “Since they were the type of girls that are quick to flash and grope, it seems the victim could of talked them into ways of “earning” the money.”

That comment apparently inspired Guest26094 to contribute this: “hahhaha prostitution is legal if you’re a woman stealing from men in the form of cars, dinners, dates, marriage, etc.”

I started to post my own response to him, asking what it was like to be a 33 year-old virgin still living at home with mom but I decided not to.  He may be a pig but he’s also a guest, apparently.  And, being a Southern girl, I’ve been taught to treat guests politely even if they’re total “dumbfugs” (as my cousin Erica is fond of saying).

Finally, Buttersnap7 snaps, “You have to be a sucker to let that happen to you. Someone getting money out of me better have a gun. Not a knife, a gun. And, certainly not breasts. I’m a little smarter than that. Women have been using their “goods” since the beginning of time, and men have been weaklings in regards to it.”

Tough words from a man named Buttersnap.  “Women have been using their goods since the beginning of time…”  Perhaps but so have men.  It’s just that we happen to have different goods.  Men seem to have no trouble with the “goods” except when we use them to our advantage.  Is Buttersnap upset that “men have been weaklings” or is he upset because we know it?  Men love to obsess on how to use our boobs but seem to resent it when we do the same.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not attempting to make a claim that these girls were engaged in a revolutionary act or to try to hold them up as feminist icons for the 21st Century.  But then again, sometimes the truest acts of revolution are unintentional farces that reveal a greater truth.

Consider the comments that I mentioned above.  The majority of them seemed to be fixated on the point that the girls could have made more money doing the same thing dancing in a strip club or selling their bodies to any man who wanders by (never mind, of course, that prostitutes are the favored victims of sadists worldwide).  Perhaps they could have.  They could have made more money and the men could have retained the illusion of control (“she’s dancing for me,” “she did exactly what I paid her to do…”)  But they didn’t.  One of them chose to lift up her top, the other one chose to grope the man, and in the end, the man lost both his money and, briefly, his power.  And perhaps that explains why this seemingly odd little story invoked such a reaction from some of the people who read it.

To me, the point of this story is not that a girl bared her breasts to rob a man at an ATM, a man who already knew that the girls were after his money.  The point is that it worked.