Dan Rubin: Sensitive New Age Guy/Secret Bigot

Since Beverly Hills, 90210 started back from the beginning on SOAPnet a couple of months back, my esteemed colleague Sarah D. Bunting and I have gotten way into the question of whether Dylan or Brandon is the more objectionable avatar for '90s masculinity — and though recent installments have found Sarah coming around to my (anti-Brandon) way of thinking, truly, no one is really a winner in their race to the bottom. But in the early going of the series run, one forgets the even worse guys who will eventually come into our lives — guys like John Sears, and Josh Richland, and Dan Rubin.

In case you have forgotten or never knew: when Andrea enrolls at "California University" and moves into a dorm, Dan Rubin is her R.A. (That's...him up top. And the back of her tragically mumsy Season 4 haircut.) He's a "perpetual grad student" — in English, so he ends up being the T.A. in Andrea's English class. He's Jewish, the son of a doctor, the taker of Andrea's virginity, tall, did I say English student already? Backing up (as it were): yes, Dan is somehow attracted enough to Andrea — the character we've all by this point spent three years rolling our eyes at when we weren't wondering what she did to the costumers to make them buy her so many goddamn vests — to want to put his penis in her.

Prior to this point, we've obviously seen Andrea pine for Brandon and date guys who are, as high-achieving nerds, her counterparts, like Jordan and Jay. We've also seen her develop inappropriate crushes on her male teachers, like Gil Meyers and Chris Suiter. So Dan is, in many ways, the perfect guy for her: just enough of a teacher to catch her eye, but not so much older than she that her hooking up with him is inappropriate. There's also the fact that Dan is...I mean, I hate the phrase "politically correct," but that's the only term that fits. He calls himself a feminist, is leery of the Greek system, and when Andrea tells him she's a virgin, he is super-solicitous of her feelings and parts. I don't think we ever hear him refer to God as "Her," but he's that guy. And all of that makes him perfect for Andrea too: he's enough of a Corey to be a cover model on Non-Threatening Boys magazine.

Of course, all of this is my perspective on Dan now. At the time, I thought for sure he was just the sort of guy I would marry — gentle and kind, with whom I would delightedly play Scrabble and talk about the status of women and novels and stuff. When I was a teenager, you see, I hadn't yet figured out that I don't like Scrabble (because I suck at it); that the status of women is important but kind of a boner killer; and that I would eventually stop reading novels because they competed with my demanding TV schedule.

My crush abruptly ended around the time that the show's producers decided to make Dan a bigot. You see, Andrea keeps running into this guy Jesse at parties he works as a bartender; there's an instant attraction, and she ends up dumping Dan to date Jesse, who gets her pregnant and becomes her husband — normal freshman-year-of-college stuff. Even with Dan's many faults, he's still cuter than Jesse (I thought it then and still think it; yes, Dan has dumb hair, but at least, unlike Jesse, he isn't balding), so I think someone decided that they needed to put a thumb on the guy scale. Remember how sensitive Dan was when he was participating in Take Back The Night marches and shit? Well, turns out he's racist, and we just never knew because Jesse was the first Latino whose path he ever crossed.

The wisdom of years has taught me that Dan was full of shit all along, not just when he started slinging ethnic slurs. But the memory of the ideal man I thought he was still stings.