Maybe I'm neurotic but if I know I can speed up my application 100x by typing .addEventListener('click', fn) instead of .click(fn) I'm going to do that every time and not lose any sleep over it.
* I'm sure Matthew realises but just gave the first example that came to him.
You can't though, not even close. You can speed up your application significantly by using event delegation on a parent instead of binding an event to each element, but the raw DOM makes this a giant pain in the ass in the general case.
var i = 100; while(i--) els[i].addEventListener("click",fn);
it'd be untrue jQuery is nowhere _near_ 100x slower. Profiling this is totally ridiculous because there's no use case that requires adding event listeners at a scale that could _ever_ be a performance concern, but anyway - http://jsperf.com/jquery-on-vs-native/3. So just 10x slower on even this - completely not performance critical and therefore nobody would bother optimising it - method.