Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste

and remember what peace there may be in silence.

Ever since I can remember, the Desiderata was on my mother's dressing table, framed. I didn't think of it as a 'poem,' so much as just 'the Desiderata.' I absorbed it wholesale while having my hair dried as a child, and when I grew up and left home, it only seemed natural to print up a copy, frame it, and hang it by my own dressing table. My last ex-boyfriend from hell once suggested that I take it down and put up some other, different inspirational words, since 'those have been there long enough.' What a nitwit. The ex-boyfriend is long gone, the words are still there.

But lately, in this time of economic struggle and career confusion, I've been thinking about the ways in which my principles have shaped my life. Have they been good ones? Should I keep them? Or should I go in search of some other principles, ones which might bring me--well, if I can't have fame and fortune, solvency would be nice.

So I am inspired to re-examine the Desiderata in light of its specific effects on my life, hitherto. Line by line. If you get bored, there's the whole wide Internet out there. Hie thee hence.


As it happens, I do go placidly amid the noise and haste, and always have. Even when rioting in San Francisco in the early 90's, I was placid. That's probably why I didn't get arrested. I carry with me a serenity that is like a rope attached to an anchor in the center of the earth. When other people are panicking around me, flailing and gibbering and generating drama, I get progressively more placid and serene, in order to balance them out.

This is probably really annoying to people who aren't emotional parasites, which is probably why I have had a lifelong habit of attracting emotional parasites. (Present company excepted; emotional parasites don't read.) In latter years I have found that allowing myself to occasionally freak out--to show weakness and confusion, to admit that I am not, in fact, the Buddha--has allowed me to grow closer to healthy people, and keep the people at bay who like to put serene people on pedestals, then knock them off those pedestals and stomp on them.

Lesson learned: stay away from folks bearing pedestals.

I do indeed remember what peace there may be in silence. If a person has a problem with silence--that companionable silence of sitting in the same room, reading or working alongside one another for hours on end--that's a Red Flag. As in, "I can't do my Pilates workout/work in the garden/have sex with you, with you sitting there reading/sleeping on the couch/sewing like that. Stop it."

Silence is all the more peaceful when one of these individuals has left the building forever.

To be continued.

Letter to YOU, dear Narcissist

The narcissist is emotionally attached to only one thing: his disorder. The narcissist loves his disorder, desires it passionately, cultivates it tenderly, is proud of its "achievements" (and in my case, I make a living off it). His emotions are misdirected. Where normal people love others and empathise with them, the narcissist loves his False Self and identifies with it to the exclusion of all else – his True Self included.

--Sam Vaknin, author of 'Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited'

Hi honey! Pretty Lady is writing this Special Letter to you, and only you, because you are So Special. She is aware that you may not read it, because in general you only read things that mention you By Name, but Pretty Lady knows that you are so very clever that you will eventually figure out that this letter is for you. Specially.

Confidentially, dear, this little thing called narcissism has come between the two of us. Pretty Lady loves you dearly, she always has, she always will, and you know that. But frankly, at the same time, Pretty Lady can no longer stand to be around you, which is why she cut off all communication with you--how long has it been? Years! And she has no intention of ever letting you soil her life with your presence again. That's firm, and she hopes you understand.

If you've even noticed yet...

But dear. Being the superbly clever person you are--some have even used the word 'brilliant'--it cannot have escaped your attention that you have a little Issue. Pretty Lady even recalls hearing a certain accurate self-diagnosis from your very own lips. 'Narcissist.' Such a pretty word. How beautiful it sounds, when you croon it in that seductive manner.

So Pretty Lady is sorry to tell you that 'narcissist' is not how people view you. Sadly, it is true. That scintillating word, and all of its clever, tangled, brilliant associations simply does not occur to all those inferior yahoos who have been graced with your glorious presence. The word that springs to the vast majority of minds when they think of you (when they think of you at all) is 'asshole.' A great many modifiers are variously applied to this moniker--tacky, vulgar, banal, rude, ignorant, self-absorbed, selfish, repetitive, petty, trivial, treacherous, invasive, pretentious, vain, immature, illiberal and boring, to name a few--but the word 'asshole,' Pretty Lady feels, covers the general opinion nicely.

Now, of course all these people are ignorant peons who cannot understand you. Of course. Their opinions matter less than nothing, just like they do. But honey. Just where is your superiority, if there is no-one around to recognize it? Why are you even bothering to perform all that outrageous posturing you do, if the audience does not matter? Let us face facts, dear. The mirror of others' opinions matters terribly to you, and the unanimous verdict of that mirror is 'asshole.' You are, dear, an asshole, tried and convicted by your own chosen court, and there is no appeal.

I would not be saying this if I did not clearly perceive the peril in which you find yourself. You know I love you.

So darling. Sam Vaknin, in all his expert enlightenment, says there is no hope for you. He may be right. He may also be right when he says that 'religion is the opiate of the masses, as well as a potential source of narcissistic supply.' You yourself, I seem to recall, have echoed Sam Vaknin on these particular points.

But sweetie, I would like to make a suggestion as regards this identity/mirror issue of yours. I would like to suggest a purely intellectual postulate, befitting the very high intellect that you possess. I would like to offer the notion that if there were, hypothetically, a God--an omnipotent, omnipresent, benevolent Creator--than this truly, evidently and incontrovertibly superior being would have created you. I know this notion is abhorrent to you, but hold on a minute.

If this infinitely superior Creator were responsible for your existence, then your value, dear narcissist, would come from Him. Since He is, hypothetically, Perfect, then it follows that He could not make a mistake in you. Which would mean that you, sweetie, would indubitably be as unassailably perfect as you always thought you were.

Hey!

But we must Follow, dear friend. We must approach this issue with Intellectual Rigor. If this Creator created everything, and is solely responsible for your value, which cannot be diminished or taken away, then this must be true of everybody else, too. They must be just as perfectly valuable as you are. There's no way around it.

Hard pill to swallow, I know.

So, let us review our options. On the one hand, according to your preferred method of Narcissist Accounting, your true value is that of 'asshole.' On the other, we have 'perfect child of God.' Which would you like to the be the true one, dear? You, being the ad hoc Arbiter of Value, have the power to make it so. All you have to do is pick one, and behave accordingly.

For if you are truly to be perfect, love, you must know in your bones that those pettifogging others, those peons, those sources of Narcissistic Supply, are perfect too. And you must respect them by word and deed accordingly. Just as if they mattered, in and of themselves.

So cheerio, love! See you in Hell!

Impeach George W. Bush

WASHINGTON - President Bush, in a constitutional showdown with Congress, claimed executive privilege Thursday and rejected demands for White House documents and testimony about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

His decision was denounced as "Nixonian stonewalling" by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bush rejected subpoenas for documents from former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor. The White House made clear neither one would testify next month, as directed by the subpoenas.

Can this be any clearer? We have a President who fully believes that he is Above the Law.

We have a President, dear friends, who has spied illegally on U.S. citizens. He has authorized indefinite imprisonment without charges. He has authorized, nay, encouraged torture of those imprisoned, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. He has embroiled us in an unwinnable and monstrously expensive war under false pretences. He has attempted to foist legislation upon us which makes a mockery of the very notion of 'citizenship.' He is a liar, a jackass and a fool.

Pretty Lady believes that it is morally incumbent upon every citizen of this once-great country to impeach this man. She is absolutely serious about this. If we do not impeach this stupid, scurrilous, hubristic, narcissistic, self-righteous, incompetent excuse for a human being, we do not deserve to call ourselves 'citizens' any longer. We are merely the easily manipulated cardboard idiots which our fatuous ass of a President and his cronies assume us to be, and we deserve the desecration of our civil rights which will inevitably follow.

What Faith Is Not

Pretty Lady has always understood, more or less, why a significant percentage of rational humans get all squirrelly and uncomfortable when she discusses Faith. That is because what passes for Faith in many echelons of society, up to and including, most unfortunately, the current executive administration, is a form of narcissistic magical thinking.

Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
...
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

Pretty Lady must make it crystal clear that when she discusses Faith, this is NOT WHAT SHE MEANS. This is NOT IT. At all. Ever. This sort of 'faith' is nothing but childish, abusive stupidity. It is the rantings of an Alpha ape who believes that he should be in charge, not merely because he happens to find himself in charge, but because God ordained it.

No no no no no.

Faith, in the way Pretty Lady means it, is an anchor with an infinitely long rope. That is all. It does not dismiss or reject the notion of Facts. It is strong enough, not to override the Facts, but to look the worst of them in the eye unblinking and accept them, integrate them, and move forward, encompassing them.

Because if one is to assume that God created all, that means that he created Facts as well. He created the Shiites, and the Sunnis, and rational thinking. When a person purports to trust God for 'protection' against God's creation, that person is not faithful, that person is insane. This person is purporting to accept God as he simultaneously rejects Him, which is, of course, impossible.

True faith then requires an exceptionally strong mind, and an exceptionally strong stomach. True faith is not pretty, nor is it simple.

That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.

''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.''

And what is that?

''Easy certainty.''

Ingredients of Evil

Regardless of its illustration of obvious fact that if a person possesses a hammer, the whole world begins to resemble a sticky-outy nail, Pretty Lady quite liked Cintra's article:

Malignant narcissists seek a "narcissistic load" -- their drug of choice -- which is ATTENTION. Positive attention and negative attention are one and the same -- attention is attention. People suffering from this disorder tend to blame others for their difficulties, fly into a "narcissistic rages," and seek revenge as their due. Attention is the drug, the victory, the raison d'etre -- the narcissist simply needs to be the center of attention, and will get his fix by any means necessary.

Cho's successful domination of the news cycles condones, justifies and rewards his behavior... and encourages it in others who suffer from this affliction. Infamy is the same thing as Fame, for the malignant narcissist.

She wonders, though; is it genuinely, thoroughly true that an essential component of Evil (and Pretty Lady will not entertain the notion that Evil is merely a semantic construct, and is prepared to pulverize those foolish individuals who seriously propound it) is a need for Notoriety? Are those evil people not equally dangerous who hide in the shadows, fearing and loathing the light beyond all else?

She must think on it.

The Question of Motive

Pretty Lady was about to give all of you a tongue-lashing--yes, truly, she was. She is shocked. As much as it pains her to do so, she will quote, without attribution, a few of the comments which so distressed her:

you particularly have chosen a faith which says I'm going to Hell. You could've chosen a faith which doesn't give a crap about unbelievers...I think that's impolite.

The thing that truly bothers you is that merest microscopic fraction of a chance that we are right, and that you are wrong.

You've got to be putting me on. Either that or you're quite the narcissist.

There was more, much more, but Pretty Lady hopes by now that you have got the gist of it.

Since when, darlings, have all of you become such experts upon the motives of others?

For it strikes Pretty Lady that grown men are capable of having an intellectual disagreement without becoming pejorative about it. Further, it strikes her that what most often causes offense is primarily not the intellectual disagreement itself, but the high-handed presumption and unparalleled condescension of attributing a specific motive to another person's belief or action. It is when overwrought and extreme accusations of motivation go hurling around like javelins that all hope of rational communication must be given up.

Pretty Lady has one thing to say to all of you, and that is:

'You don't have to put other people down in order to build yourself up. I know that you're just acting that way because you're insecure, and you don't need to be.'

Do you hate her, now?

If you don't, you are a better person by far than Pretty Lady, who peremptorily terminated a long-term friendship upon finding herself on the receiving end of just these words. For in Pretty Lady's personal view, at that particular time, the truth of the matter was: 1) she hadn't been putting anyone down; 2) she hadn't been building herself up; 3) she wasn't insecure; and 4) she knew damn well that she didn't need to be, because she wasn't. Thus, in two masterful sentences, her suddenly-former friend had managed to slander and patronize her so thoroughly that Pretty Lady had no interest in hearing from her again. Ever.

It is exceptionally dangerous, friends, to believe that we can see into the hearts and minds of others, more clearly than they can see into their own. It is even more exceptionally tactless to let on that we believe we can. The habit of thinking we know someone better than they know themselves can lead to a wholesale dismissal of anything that person may have to say on a subject, even, 'Excuse me, but your pants are on fire.'

So stop it. Back up about six paces, and take several deep breaths. Then please draw your attention to the fact that Pretty Lady has already postulated a paradigm of Hell that neither puts the Bible to the lie, when taken in a metaphorical context, nor attributes the existence of such a Hell to any ingrained malice on the part of a theoretical and loving Creator. Now apply your quite-considerable intellects to the task of refuting this proposition.

And if you adhere to a linear literalism in your refutations, Pretty Lady will smack you.

The Nature of Hell

Since we are on the topic, and since today is Pretty Lady's ad hoc Day Off (unless the phone should happen to ring, which, strangely, it never seems to do on Thursdays), Pretty Lady has decided to explain What She Means by Hell. In the spirit of serious debate, she has even come up with some Biblical support for her assertions, by the efficient means of hanging out in her spare time with a Bible-thumper or two, who obligingly gave her the quote.

However, to please the Humanist contingent, she will not start with Biblical rhetoric; instead she will hark back to the hectic days of her Freshman year, when she and a group of hyperintellectual companions went, on a lark, to see Sartre's 'No Exit.'

(For those one or two of you who were thankfully spared a sophomoric infatuation with Jean-Paul & Co., let me summarize the plot: Three people find themselves in Hell. Hell is a room with three people in it. These three people are an Intellectual, an Adultress, and a Lesbian. ((The reasons for these people being committed to Hell are taken as read.)) They all proceed to attempt to seduce, impress, and scorn the others, with circular degrees of success and failure. In short, they are all trying to prove their own validity at the expense of the others.

They all fail at this; once the Intellectual seduces the Adultress, he despises her, and only wishes for validation from the Lesbian. The Lesbian despises the Intellectual, and only wishes for validation from the Adultress, who despises her forthwith; the Adultress wishes for validation from the Intellectual, who despises her, having seduced her.

Thus the French.)

At any rate, once Pretty Lady and her hyperintellectual friends had left the theatre, Pretty Lady's Greenwich Village friend laughed, with knowing cynicism, and declared, "Hell is other people." Proving by this casual comment that intellectuals are, all too often, petty narcissists who utterly fail to grasp the point.

Indeed, Pretty Lady is not entirely sure that J.P. himself grasped the point which he so elegantly illustrated; posthumous publication of his much-vaunted correspondence with S. de B.V. has proven that these two superior minds spent the vast majority of their private lives in despising everyone around them. Ipso facto, creating a lovely little Hell of their very own, on this very earth which, they purported to believe, was the only thing allotted to them.

For the point, as Pretty Lady understands it, is that Hell is NOT Other People; it is the natural consequence of treating other people as though they were the mining grounds for the aggrandizement of Self. This process does not ever work as intended. Other people have this pesky habit of failing to submit to cannibalistic agendas; they continually exhibit symptoms of having Minds of their Own. So troublesome of them.

However, if a person instead chooses to accept for all time the notion that the validity of Self is bestowed by a loving Creator, and that all others are equally valid and complete, all this mutual scrabbling and cannibalism simply ceases. There is no reason for it. One's Self stands revealed as a manifestation of the Divine, and all one's brothers equally so. Thus there is nothing to do but dance around and celebrate.

As a case study of what happens when one applies the principles of Sartre on a large scale, Pretty Lady would now like to present the example of Lagos, Nigeria. Astute readers will recall that the primary export of this African 'megacity' is the 419 scam, which is too familiar by now to anyone with an email account, to require explanation. Pretty Lady was saddened, but not surprised, to learn that the entire city is run upon 419 principles. Very little honest, paid employment is available; this does not stop 600,000 eager individuals from streaming in from the countryside every year, in the hopes of Making it Big. It is one vast, filthy, sprawling slum, whose inhabitants steal, cheat, lie, manipulate and control one another in the vague hopes of attaining the supreme role of Lord High Kleptocrat.

For this, indeed, is the template that all denizens of Hell Lagos are following. In the 1980's, the corrupt Nigerian government first gained control of All Industry; then the government sold All Industry, and absconded with the proceeds. It is no wonder that their only lasting cultural Myth is of millions of dollars' worth of ill-gotten gains, sitting in a bank somewhere, waiting for someone to come and claim it.

What most struck Pretty Lady about this tragic history is that, although life in Lagos is one of unremitting misery, nobody ever leaves. When the author asked them why, the answer seemed to be, 'because then we'd have to admit to the folks back in the village that we weren't such big-shots after all.' In other words, Pride.

All this is a very long-winded explanation of why Pretty Lady cannot understand why people are so all-fired worried that God will send them to Hell. Darlings, here we are. As soon as we forget to love God, accept Grace, and scratch for some personal validation at the expense of our gorgeous Neighbor, here we are. God has nothing to do with it. God is merely sitting there, loving us, and patiently explaining that we are doing this to ourselves. He has many methods of explanation; He may exhort, command, threaten, suggest, illustrate, plead, nudge, whisper, coax, tease, cajole, wheedle, sing, poeticize, and dictate long books of instructions in different languages. But he cannot force us, because he cannot force a piece of Himself to be anything other than what it is.

Which brings Pretty Lady, at last, to that Biblical quote she promised you.

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," and "by the prince of demons he casts out the demons." And he called them to him and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

If we are divided against one another, darlings, we cannot stand. If we wish to see our brother in Hell, there we go with him. If we love and forgive him, we are loved and forgiven.

Any questions?

Therapy hour

Pretty Lady has, however inadvertantly, struck a nerve with Crom:

Those gentlemen furtively clicking their sperm counts away are compensating for the fact that to try and get her in the mood is only slightly less difficult than neurosurgery or requires a layout of cash on useless jewelry that could pay for the mortgage, handily. The sad part is that many of these men really do love their wives despite the fact that what they would do daily the wife only wants once a week, maybe. Men are wired to want it more often than they do a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, hence the explosion of all the alternative forms of gratification.

The man with an eager wife is blessed indeed, for the number of women like this are rapidly approaching extinction levels.

Pretty Lady herself has, thankfully, never been married to a porn addict. Although this may seem to discount her from commenting knowledgeably upon the subject, it also invests her perspective with a certain degree of detachment; a lack of overt bias, if you will. Also, in the course of her wide travels and variegated relationships, she has been upon intimate (though not directly sexual) terms with a great number of committed couples, many of whom are in the habit of speaking candidly to her about their sex lives.

Therefore she would like to make a few observations.

1) It seems we are in a situation, here, where each gender is forcefully blaming the other gender, society, culture, feminism, anti-feminism, repression, openness, monogamy, polygamy, religion, atheism, and their parents for the crisis at hand. The only entity one is not inclined to blame, in any given situation, is oneself. This has always seemed to Pretty Lady to be a wilfully counter-productive attitude; see all archives.

2) In the course of her observations of the trials and tribulations of committed couples, Pretty Lady has come to one single empirical truth about intra-coupular dynamics; that it ALWAYS goes two ways. ALWAYS. All other details are subject to infinite variability. Thus, whenever there is a problem, it is both people's problem. That is implicit in the definition of the word 'couple.' Blaming one's spouse exclusively for an untenable situation, then, ensures that the situation will never, never, never be resolved, except in dissolution of the couple. Period.

3) The dynamics of each and every couple are different. This may seem to be so obvious as to be a tautology; however, when enthusiastic crusaders get swept up in a wave of political rhetoric, this obvious fact often seems to be abandoned on the seashore. Thus, mandating a solution that involves a sea-change in the attitude of an entire gender, particularly one that is not one's own, is not only silly, but would not resolve your own personal problem even if, by some miracle, it occurred.

So. What now?

WHEN there is a disagreement about Sex within a couple (and there are ALWAYS disagreements about sex within couples), these disagreements generally hinge upon two factors: 1) difference in sex drives and 2) difference in priorities. The stereotypical situation is that the lady has the lower sex drive, and thus the lower sex priority, but Pretty Lady is here to tell you that this is not always the case. Not by a long shot.

When embarking upon the necessary reconciliation of these differences, three factors are key. 1) Trust, 2) Commitment, and 3) Communication. Without a nearly unlimited supply of these three factors, the relationship is doomed.

Pretty Lady could write an entire saga on the subject of Trust alone; suffice it to say that trust is not something to be bestowed, either rapidly or indiscriminately. It must be earned. And one has no right to demand it of someone if one's actions are not generally trustworthy. That is to say: If you make a habit of lying to your spouse, manipulating this person, controlling them, draining their energy, acting in ways which are contrary to your spouse's best interests, or habitually abusing them in any way, even verbally or emotionally (those 'feminine' intangibles), your spouse has no reason to trust you.

And since mutual trust is the very essence of committed, mindblowing, off-the-charts, body-mind-soul sex, you have shot yourself in the foot at the starting gate.

Thus Trust, as well, generally accompanies Commitment. If you require the first but are constitutionally allergic to the second, please go to hell.

That baseline established, we move onto the third element in our Continued Great Sex Prescription Package; Communication.

Never, it seems, have so many people talked so much to achieve so little. They talk about themselves; their needs, wants, requirements, fantasies, pet moral philosophies, frustrations, and trivial daily incidents. They complain. They whine. They blog. What they do a great deal less of is listening. The times when they listen the least, when they actually seem to reach into their eardrums and hit the 'mute' button, is when a person close to them is telling them something about themselves that they do not wish to hear.

Pretty Lady is here to tell you that this is precisely the thing you NEED to hear. It will be painful. It will be humbling. It will require some thought, some honest soul-searching, and some adjustment on your part. But the results may very well be phenomenal.

And Pretty Lady must remind you, in case you have forgotten, during the course of reading this long, serious, less-than-sprightly post: It goes both ways. If you have been listening to your spouse, really truly, for a long time; if you have been taking this listening to heart, and loving this person, and adjusting for this person, and the time comes for you to communicate your needs, lovingly and responsibly, and this person absolutely refuses to listen, guess what? You do not have a spouse. You are a single person who is legally chained to a narcissist.

The best you can do for yourself, then, is to walk away. You do not have to file for divorce, instantly, when your spouse falls asleep during foreplay; what you can and must do, eventually, after you have put your best efforts into facilitating communication, is to make it clear that an unacceptable situation is unacceptable. You may take a long vacation. You may take another apartment. You may go on a meditation retreat.

If your spouse takes advantage of your vacation to jump into bed with the nearest hottie, THEN you file for divorce. But if the seriousness of your intention finally becomes clear, and your spouse actually starts to listen--well, then.

It has been known to happen.

Bars, beers, and clueless characters

A Wiser Man Than I interrupts this bucolic idyll for a pressing question:

I don't wish to unduly bother you while you are down on the farm, but
an interesting thing happened over the weekend which begs your keen
insight.

As a student at an engineering school, most of my friends are men.  We
were out bar-hopping last Saturday with a solitary--and
unattached--female in our group.  At some point, an unsavory character
began to hone in on the lone female.  After the barest amount of small talk,
he offered to buy her a drink.  She refused, but upon his insistence
accepted a drink.

While he was at the bar, I told her to tell him I was her boyfriend,
lest things tend toward worse.

He continued to demonstrate his lack of charm, even going so far as to
asking, "You know why I bought you that drink, don't you?" and then
asking her out.  She pointed me out as the "boyfriend" and we eventually shook
him as our game of darts mercifully finished.

Obviously this man needs PL's help, but anyone in his mid 40's--I'm
guessing--who thinks hitting on college girls is a good idea may beyond
even your powers.

However, my friend felt guilty for taking a free drink, though we all
told her not to worry about it.  My question then, is what are the rules for
accepting a drink?  Is there a minimal amount of conversation one must
engage in?  Does this depend on the nature of the buyer--as
conversation could be shortened in the case of extreme creepiness? 
I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Dear Wiser,

Pretty Lady's thoughts on such situations can generally be summed up very simply. 'Hmph. Typical,' is her short answer to your question. She can, furthermore, refer you to Cynthia Heimel on the topic: "Be careful when accepting drinks from strangers. In some parts of the country, they still think this means you are definitely going to sleep with them."

However, the essence of civilization is progress. And since you, a gentleman in progress, have had the grace to ask this question, Pretty Lady will elaborate upon the niceties and nuances of this typical social situation, which you have so kindly described in detail.

Your story, brief and sordid as it is, has nevertheless touched upon the heart of the labyrinthine social tangles which an unattached female must perpetually negotiate, whenever she leaves the house. Your rank-and-file clueless male, generally of the rougher social order, is psychologically incapable of accepting a lady's boundary, either stated or projected, unless it includes a prior commitment to another male. In other words, the only acceptable rebuttal to the question, implied or stated, "Hey, wanna fuck?" is "No, I'm married."

Never mind an independent lack of inclination upon the lady's part. Never mind that your teeth are rotting out of your head, you visibly lack education beyond sixth-grade special-ed and a stable source of income, not to mention your total ignorance of social graces. No, a Husband with a Gun is the only thing that prevents us wanton temptresses from falling into the arms of every random man who asks. Indeed, women are the source of all evil.

Sorry about that. Pretty Lady is still getting the industrial waste out of her lungs.

In this case, then, Pretty Lady must congratulate you. A Wiser Man is, truly, wise; you remind me of my dear friend Richard, who rescued me once in the dorm lobby just as Smarmy Ben was about to slobber all over my shoulder. Dear Richard ran interference just in time; although the two of us shared a strictly Platonic (intensely Platonic, in fact--Richard was, and is, a career philosopher) relationship, upon this one occasion Richard draped an arm round my imperilled shoulder, murmured into my ear 'hold my hand as you go toward the elevator. Smarm is on your tail', and escorted me safely to the elevator in question, apologizing quietly for this emergency violation of my personal space. Smarmy Ben leaped back in the manner of a puppy encountering an electric fence.

(This was only a temporary remedy, though--there were a couple of months there when my friends had to surround me, chattering, at all times, lest Smarmy Ben get a slobber in edgewise. I will forever blame Carin Knoop for this. Carin allowed him to sit next to her in History class; therefore I was civil to him, and spent the next three years regretting the error.)

Hmph.

As Pretty Lady was saying, she gives you full marks for your handling of the situation. Would that more gentlemen were so quick on the uptake. Pretty Lady once had to create a scene in a Mexican bar, despite the fact that several of her male 'friends' (I use this term loosely) had spent a number of minutes passively observing a drunken peasant urging her and her friend Elaine to provide him with free transport to the United States, and hospitality therein, with benefits. After she and Elaine had politely explained, several times, that they didn't speak Spanish and were not interested in continuing the conversation, the drunkard nevertheless dared to place his hand on Pretty Lady's shoulder. Her loud and fluent response, in Spanish, to this gross breach of etiquette shocked the entire bar into silence, and instantly caused the drunkard to evaporate, out of sheer craven humiliation.

Had any of her male 'friends' responded sooner, by forthrightly ordering the fool to leave the ladies alone, this debacle might have been avoided. It would have allowed everyone to save face; the social order would have been maintained. By allowing clueless pesterers to pester ladies unchallenged, such men are contributing to the decline of civilization.

However, this is all mere anecdotal rambling. What you really want to know is, "How does a lady handle the offer of a drink from a stranger, strings visibly attached or no?"

It is, of course, perfectly polite to accept a drink from anyone at any time, and perfectly scurrilous for the buyer of the drink to place any onus of obligation, sexual or otherwise, upon the drinker. If at all possible, it is polite to converse with the buyer of the drink for the amount of time it takes to drink it. However, as you say, if the drink-buyer demonstrates signs of extreme creepiness, it is also entirely correct to cut the conversation short.

In latter days, Pretty Lady has had excellent results with the phrase, "You know, you're acting kind of creepy. Please leave me alone." Clueless people do surprisingly well when things are spelled out thus explicitly.

In addition, Pretty Lady has realized that it was partly her training in genteel civility, within a good Christian home, that ironically subjected her to the worst of clueless sleazebags. By 'treating everyone with equal courtesy,' by smiling agreeably, by chatting with buyers of drinks, Pretty Lady was inadvertantly encouraging them. As she has grown older and wiser, she has developed a certain technique to counteract sleaziness in strangers, which seems rather effective.

This technique consists of a certain non-verbal queenliness of manner. It is akin to the technique she employed while working as a temporary secretary, to avoid abuse by insecure and tyrranical middle-managers. It involves a calm, gracious acquiescence to any reasonable request, accompanied by the subtle implication that one is doing the requester a favor.

Thus, when the tyrranical middle-manager orders you to obtain the Fluxus file without delay, you reply, graciously, "Sure!" and competently hand it over, in a friendly but disinterested manner. When a stranger offers to buy you a drink, you reply, "How very kind of you!" and proceed to interview this kind stranger as though the two of you were lone, stray travelers meeting in a dive bar in Shanghai. During this interview, you cultivate an interested, sexless detachment, which conveys the wordless but unmistakeable message, "I am Not Available."

If the sleazebag is sufficiently drunk or clueless to miss this message entirely (and, once you get it down, you will be surprised at how effective it is), you may then graduate to the raised eyebrow, the cold 'I beg your pardon?' and, as a last resort, the immortal 'Please Leave Me Alone.'

All of this is, of course, quite exhausting, the more so because kind gentlemen such as yourself have no inkling of the training we ladies go through to attain it. The world is a simpler place for gentlemen.

Practicing Scales

Pretty Lady just can't seem to stick to the Topic at Hand. Morgan's round-table gay marriage debate is utterly enthralling, except that the issue doesn't concern Pretty Lady in the slightest. Her opinions on gay marriage were decided on the day she discovered that gay people were, in fact, people. QED.

No, Pretty Lady had to go careening off on a tangent, central to her personal concerns, on the Nature of Commitment. She is passionately, vehemently strident in her opinion that you cannot Park a Person. Nay, this is not an opinion at all--it is Fact. It is a Fact, however, that narcissistic klunkheads persist in denying, to the tragedy of all.

Now, let me explain. Pretty Lady is all for Biblical Law. She considers the Ten Commandments to be basic, obvious practical advice. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment; the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

(Father Worrell, bless his soul, used to intone this phrase with the emphasis on "HANG all the Law and the Prophets," which gave Pretty Lady a vivid mental picture of the Law and the Prophets twisting by the neck on a scaffold, which might not be such a bad idea. But never mind.)

At any rate, though, Pretty Lady has found, through a life of spiritual practice and study, that these Commandments are merely the beginning. If any one of you has ever listened to a child learn to play the violin via the Suzuki method, you may understand what she means.

The Suzuki method is based upon the rote instillation of principles. One shows the student how to perform a C major scale, and the student saws out C major until her fingers and your eardrums are raw. Then you move on to G. Via the Suzuki method, six-year-olds have become modest violin prodigies.

However, even the most prodigious six-year-old, learning via the Suzuki method, has yet to become a musician. This Suzuki-trained violinist is still the aesthetic equivalent of a monkey playing a wind-up organ. Artistry upon the violin is based upon far more than scales, note-reading, and technique. It is only when these techniques have become second nature that the violinist becomes capable of truly making her instrument sing, with a deeply personal yet universal interpretation of the notes played upon it.

It is Pretty Lady's observation that the Ten Commandments, in terms of spiritual practice, are the C major scale. They are a required starting point in the practice of Divine Love. You are not loving someone, generally, while you are murdering them. Ditto envy, theft, casual sexual betrayal of one's spouse or partner, etc. The Ten Commandments are just good manners.

However, if one limits oneself to the literal, plodding adherence to the Ten Commandments, while steadfastly ignoring signs of subtle distress, or not-so-subtle nervous breakdowns, on the part of one's nearest and dearest, this is the spiritual equivalent of playing a rusty tape of a C major scale loudly enough to drown out the symphony next door. You are then missing the Whole Damn Point.

You see, commitments between individuals are not merely a dry contract between static entities. Human beings, by their very nature, grow, learn, and change. If one marries a person expecting them not to do so, one is a jerk and an asshole and a fool. A person who gets married, expecting that the spouse will continue to cook and clean and bear children, or work and bring home money like a robot, no matter whether or not you listen, consider their needs, support their growth as a person, or communicate with them in a meaningful manner, this marriage is doomed to misery and stagnation. Persons who stay in a marriage of this nature may be adhering to the letter of God's commandments, but the spirit is utterly absent.

No, friends, a true 'commitment' is not a fetter; it is a tool. It is an agreement that at best, gives two persons an incentive to discover more about the nature of love, with the mutual assurance that the partner will not decamp as soon as a prettier bottom marches by. To continue the musical analogy--it is the understanding that if G major proves to be difficult on the violin, the student will not throw it down and take up drums instead.

You cannot, generally, avoid your issues by switching partners. Since the root of most personal problems is in the self, trading partners, or taking extra ones, is usually an avoidance tactic. At best, one is simply stalling for another few years, until one fetches up against precisely the same problem that ended the former relationship.

But then there are those occasions when it becomes obvious that 1) your spouse has Parked you; he does not share, he does not communicate, he stares at a glowing screen all day while you tear at your face with your fingernails and throw breakables against the wall; or 2) you selected a partner in your youth, with more of an eye toward pulchritude and malleability than intellect or character, and, ten years out, find that her endless repetition of bland platitudes makes you want to push her face mercilessly into a banana cream pie; or 3) the two of you simply have no interests, goals, or conversational topics in common any more. You have come to the end of the marital line.

What do the Ten Commandments have to say about that?

Well, principally, they say to Love thy Neighbor as Thyself. Love, in these circumstances, could be a lot of things. It could include things like couples counselling, antidepressants, separate dwellings, night classes, or a screaming tantrum. If there are children involved, it definitely includes a great many more considerations. As a last resort, it might even include divorce. But only after all other options have been sincerely exhausted.

What Love does not include, in Pretty Lady's opinion, is locking a miserable person in a cage and throwing away the key; then telling them that this is God's Will, that they are going to Heaven as a reward for their misery, and turning back toward the flickering screen.

Canines in the feeding trough

As well-traveled, richly experienced, and psychologically perspicacious as Pretty Lady may be, there is still one thing she hasn't figured out. Perhaps the gentlemen among her readership can enlighten her, although she suspects that few of them are the type which perplex her. Feel free to offer an opinion; ladies too.

Why, then, are the most openly non-monagamous, self-righteously philandering, womanizing rat-bastards of the male species the ones who throw the MOST petulant jealous tantrums?

Pretty Lady can't figure it out. She was thinking, today, of her old friend the Cuban Expressionist. (Poor Cuban painters. Pretty Lady knew most of the representative ones in New York at one point, and none of them seemed to have realized that Abstract Expressionism was over, say, fifty years ago.) She was pondering again the sad fact that he never did get the bee out of his bonnet, and she has no idea where he is today because of it.

The Cuban Expressionist was the closest thing Pretty Lady has ever known to a professional gigolo. He charmed his way out of Cuba, across Russia, France and Mexico, scattering illegitimate offspring like manna. Drifting along behind him was his common-law spouse, a little engineer named Maria, adoring the ground upon which he tread. He was careful to keep her mostly under wraps, leeching quietly off her steady income while he played the role of unattached swashbuckler in public.

Pretty Lady met him when he fetched up against a friend of hers in Mexico. She avoided him at first, because his accent made her nervous; he talked too fast and swallowed all his consonants. Also, Pretty Lady's friend was a domineering and territorial personality. It was wise not to get in her way.

However, New York City is the Holy Grail for any serious artist, and eventually both Pretty Lady and the Cuban ended up there. The Cuban arrived about six months before she did, but it frankly did not occur to her to call him. When at last the mutual friend came to visit, and he discovered she'd been in town for three whole months, he was monstrously aggrieved.

"Why you no call me?" he demanded.

"I can't understand your accent," Pretty Lady replied, honestly. "It's worse over the telephone." (This is true. The prospect of having a conversation on the phone in a foreign language with a virtual stranger always makes Pretty Lady break out in a cold sweat. Much is communicated with facial expression and hand gesture; the naked phone is a formidable instrument.)

"Okay," said the Cuban, and proceeded to pester her forthwith.

Those were interesting days. The economy was beyond dreadful, and both Pretty Lady and the Cuban were in the position of having to cadge odd jobs at every turn. The Cuban was both a spiritually generous individual, and had no sense of shame; he dragged Pretty Lady all over town, in pursuit of any tenuous opportunity to sell a painting or earn a buck. The 'friends' he introduced her to were all ladies of semi-elevated social status, who all squealed "Mario!" and looked narrowly at Pretty Lady as though she were an adder in the thicket. Pretty Lady was careful to present a buddy-like and non-territorial aspect.

Eventually, Pretty Lady and the Cuban developed the notion of starting a small joint enterprise, selling original erotic artwork on the sidewalk in Soho. Pretty Lady provided transportation, the Cuban supplied carpentry and engineering, and both of them spent their days drawing like fiends. On weekends, they met on the pavement before dawn to stake out territory, then took turns defrosting in the café until the tourists arrived, around eleven.

Watching the Cuban in action was an ever-enlightening experience. He flowed with a steady stream of patter that, by rights, ought to have got him arrested, but instead brought him an onslaught of business. "Hey lady, lady, lady, come buy. Oooo, erotica, yes? La, la, hey lady." And the ladies would giggle and come over for a look.

Now, whenever engaging upon a career of seduction, it is paramount to understand one thing; affection is mandatory. Nothing is ever accomplished, nothing is ever communicated, without a genuine appreciation for the object of one's predations. Mario appreciated women, all women. The women sensed this, and responded to it. The trouble was, once they realized the appreciation was universal, they tended to get testy.

Mario told me that once, when he had an opening in Mexico City, he invited all five of his girlfriends, because he didn't want any of them to hear about it later and get their feelings hurt. When one of them noticed just how many other women were casually grinding up against him as they passed, however, she got jealous and threw a glass of red wine all over the exhibit. "It was my mistake," he said. "I shouldn't have invited them."

Pretty Lady, meanwhile, was largely immune to Mario's coarser charms. This was partly due to the fact of having recently emerged from a 'relationship' with one of Mexico's more notorious operators, and not wanting to go through that ever again. Also, her good friend was a member of Mario's harem, and there is a strict code of non-interference with previously established social groupings, among honorable Latino womanizers. Also, Mario's common-law spouse rather attached herself. It would have taken a spawn of Satan to knowingly make that lady's life more miserable than it was already.

Also, good heavens. By virtue of her 'buddy' status, Pretty Lady was privy to more of the sordid details of Mario's life than anybody. This man was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Good Catch. He was entertaining, darling, sweet, adorable. But gracious. Pretty Lady would have to be a much bigger fool than she is. She was about ready to settle down, and not with anyone remotely resembling Mario. She believed that Mario understood this implicitly.

But then she met the Angry Atheist.

Mario was invited to the fateful weekend upstate, which shifted everything. It was quite a houseparty, jammed with bohemian artist types, and fraught with subtext. Surprisingly, the common-law spouse decided to come, and was miserable. Mario flirted outrageously with every female on the property, except his spouse. This was duly noted and excoriated by present company. It was to Mario's extreme detriment that he had yet to understand the niceties of American Puritan moral heritage. In all of his previous countries of residence, such behavior is noted as a sign of virility and elevated social class; in America it is frowned upon.

Pretty Lady, meanwhile, was stalking the man who seemed, at the time, to be her dream come true. (More fool she.) She challenged the Angry Atheist to a left-handed arm-wrestling match. Not intending to humiliate him; she is wiser than that. But Pretty Lady can give a fellow a run for his money, with her left hand.

The arm-wrestling match turned out to be one of the highlights of Thanksgiving weekend. This being a bohemian houseparty, there was more than one video camera in circulation. All of them emerged, once Pretty Lady got the Atheist in an arm lock and he realized his victory was by no means assured. People were circling; people were shouting. When Pretty Lady finally conceded defeat, the Angry Atheist was hurting.

"Woman!" he exclaimed.

Mario was Not Happy.

Pretty Lady did not think to wonder, at the time, why Mario was suddenly swarming all over her, asking for a backrub. Nor did she particularly think about it when he stole someone's camera and trained it on her for much too long a time, when she got dreamy and started spinning to some excellent trance music. But she was a bit perturbed when, for no apparent reason, the Angry Atheist suddenly stormed off to his private room and didn't come out for the rest of the weekend. She thought things were going so well.

On the way home, after Mario and a subdued spouse were dropped off in West New York, Pretty Lady's best friend offered an observation. "Mario sure was running interference, there."

Hum.

After about two months' more of stop-and-go, Pretty Lady and the Atheist, were, regrettably, an established item. When she called Mario to give him the news, buddy-to-buddy, he sounded a little chokey. She joshed him about it. "Jealous? You? Come on. Get over it." Really, she thought he was joking.

Evidently not. The lady at the Cuban center (Mario only screwed her once; it was brief and he didn't even kiss her, she complained) reported that Mario was in a state of the sulks. "Pretty Lady has a boyfriend," he announced, gratuitously. Pretty Lady still figured he'd get over it. After all, sex is sex; Mario had sex with everybody. What matters one lady more or less? And the friendship was the same as ever.

Only not. Not by Pretty Lady's choice, of course; when she opened a little gallery in the Atheist's building, naturally she offered Mario a show. He accepted with a minimal amount of grace, and tried her patience sorely with his uncharacteristic reticence and irresponsibility. By the time his show came down, Pretty Lady honestly didn't care if she never saw him again.

Many months later, she ran into him downtown. "Maria had a baby," he reported, gloomily. "Es un poco dificil, la vida." Hmph. As if he'd had nothing to do with it. Pretty Lady applauded Maria's resourcefulness, particularly in getting her mother imported from Cuba and installed in their basement apartment. Mario, pushed to the wall, dumped her at last and moved out. Pretty Lady's friend reported that he'd been through a depression and lost a lot of weight, but seemed to be coming out of it.

So, insightful gentlemen all, what is this about? Pretty Lady is not so narcissistic that she thinks it was Love. She knew a passel of the Cuban's mistresses, and a lot of them are just as awesome as she; he left them all without a trace of regret. She doesn't think it was Ego, completely--any man who hits on every woman he meets, must get turned down more often than not. Another Cuban artist thought it might be 'celos de cariño,' jealousy of friendship; this could be the case, but why, then, would he eradicate the friendship?

Pretty Lady confesses herself stumped.

Fetching the Dictionary

Pretty Lady is delighted that her fan base tends to be Persons of Quality. She feels that she must be doing something right, to attract such a number of earnest ladies and gentlemen, desiring to become better ones. Thus, perhaps, she is preaching to the choir when she hauls out the dictionary, for a precise definition of one of the most under-considered words (in her opinion) of both the current and previous centuries.

integrity n 1: an unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS 2: firm adherence to a code of esp. moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY 3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided: COMPLETENESS syn 1 see HONEST ant duplicity 2 see UNITY

Pretty Lady's extensive personal experience has led her to the empirical observation that if you haven't got this, you're screwed. Pretty much.

The important thing to observe, as you are contemplating the three sub-definitions of this deep and mysterious word, is that all three of them apply equally, in consideration of character. One must be, at the same time, sound, incorruptible, and complete. Also honest. Do not forget honest. One must first be honest with oneself, before one can be so with others.

But hang all of this philosophical exploration. What you really want to hear is the juicy details of why Pretty Lady didn't marry any of those jerks.

Much has been made of Pretty Lady's Terrible Taste in Men, but little consideration has been paid to the details of this terribility. Pretty Lady has one Achilles flaw--she can't STAND being bored. She requires a partner who keeps her on her toes. She prefers the company of one curly-headed anarchist who traipses the hills of Mexico with random blonde women, airily spinning theories of psychology and social philosophy off the top of his head, to a truckload of Wealthy and Upstanding Echo Chambers. This is NOT because she has an abiding interest in anarchy, or hiking, or compulsive womanizing; she just needs to be intellectually challenged. To be Predictable, with Pretty Lady, is to be Toast.

So Pretty Lady went from the Social Activist S/M Bondage addict, to the Emotionally Abusive Buddhist Monk, to the Curly Headed Womanizer, to the Angry Atheist. All these men had three things in common--enormously high intelligence, a habit of thinking outside the box, and a fractured psyche. The third element was what torched the relationship. One cannot relate wholly to another person when one is busy avoiding oneself.

This does not have to be so.

You see, friends, the true personality of an individual never adheres to stereotype. The nature of a human is to be deep and contradictory. The difficulty comes in when one attempts to rigidly adhere to a code, any code, while roughly suppressing most of one's psyche, or ignoring it, and letting it atrophy. This is the true reason for those hordes of automatons who parrot the party line ad nauseam, whatever party it might be--Democrat, Republican, Fundamentalist, or "yes, dear." These people are simply too lazy and frightened to think, and Pretty Lady despises them all.

None of these are in present company, she trusts.

No, the trap Pretty Lady has consistently fallen into is to get engrossed, not in the complications of a smart fellow earnestly trying to understand himself, but those of a smart fellow, seriously messed up. Avoidance of one's own deep mental fractures can provide, roughly, a year and a half's worth of fascinating and labyrinthine tangles, before the tape starts its repeat loop. It is not a coincidence that a year and a half is roughly the half-life of Pretty Lady's relationships.

So what to do? How do you tell which complicated, striving young man is worth the effort, and which is a bright but avoidant loser?

Pretty Lady postulates the Occam's Razor:

petty adj 1: having secondary rank or importance: MINOR, SUBORDINATE 2: having little or no importance or significance 3: marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies: SMALL-MINDED

When Pretty Lady looks back over her life, the first Red Flag has always been when somebody got petty with her. When the Angry Atheist refused to visit her apartment because parking might be difficult, despite the fact that parking was equally difficult (and earlier) in his neighborhood. When the Curly Headed Womanizer walked too fast on the way to the theatre. When the Pretty Narcissist barked at her for folding back the last page of an ancient science magazine. When the Psychotic Ex threw a tantrum because her friends talked about something that didn't interest him.

Pettiness is a sign of avoidance. Because when someone goes nuts over which movie to see, a stain on their clothing, an aversion to feathers, it is never about that. It's about some huge gap in their mental landscape which they are desperately trying to conceal. It's about a deep-seated fear of commitment, an unwillingness to assume responsibility, low self-esteem, poisonous envy, or existential terror. Petty people are dangerous. They will throw you into the jaws of their dragons, in order to avoid slaying them themselves.

Which is unutterably foolish, because then they are left with the dragon and without Pretty Lady, who makes a profession out of coaching people through the basics of dragon handling and slaughter. But one must never equate "intelligent" with "rational."

On Picking Up Checks

Spent a lovely afternoon in Chelsea Books, browsing dear Maureen's new book. I was heartened to read, among her rather statistical musings on gender (never look at statistics, my dears, statistics lie. Humans are unique individuals, all of them; always remember that) that the younger women have evidently wised up. The chapter I perused was full of examples of young women who refuse to date men who fail to pick up the check at the conclusion of a dinner date. Ms. Dowd seemed to decry this phenomenon; Ms. Dowd is a foolish woman. The younger women are exercising the greatest common sense, and I applaud them.

Women, girls, self-described 'feminists' all: listen to the voice of experience. Check-paying has nothing to do with equality between the genders, good sex, or feminism. Check-paying is the simplest, most accurate method of ascertaining whether you are on a date with a man, or with a bizarre specimen of animated pond slime. Heed this warning at your extreme peril.

A man who does not pick up the check at dinner is a man who will cheat. He will not even call it cheating. He will sleep with your best friend; he will sleep with your best friend's best friend. When confronted and called a two-timing rat-bastard, he will declare, shamelessly, "so what?"

A man who does not pick up the check is a either a man with low self-esteem who will never amount to a hill of mouse droppings, or a man whose ego is so out of control that he believes he is God's gift to promiscuous women. He will borrow your housekeeping money and spend it on dominatrixes in Washington, D.C. He will forget his toothbrush on a weeklong vacation and decide to save money by not brushing his teeth. He will not take you out on your birthday; instead he will stay in, watching while you ransack the back cabinets to produce an inferior meal of creamed canned salmon over pasta past its sell-by date. He will not wash the dishes.

A man who does not pick up the check is a man who values his pocketbook more than he values your opinion. He is a man who shirks responsibility. He is a man who, when walking on a secluded beach with you in a foreign land, will cut and run when the local police force approach and suggest he leave you alone with them. He will abandon you at a keg party without a ride home. Should the unthinkable occur, he will not only expect you to get an abortion; he will also expect you to get a second job stocking groceries at Piggly-Wiggly to pay for the abortion. He will never pay alimony, child-support, or ask you to marry him in the first place. He will criticize your body, question your sexual preference, and insult your parentage.

A man who does not pick up the check is a man who uses false notions of liberalism in order to exploit women. He is the sort of man who would never have dreamed of using a condom before the advent of AIDS. He is narcissistic, squirrelly, improvident and fearful of intimacy. He is quite likely to become verbally or physically abusive under stress.

In short, any man who does not appreciate the privilege of being allowed to take you to dinner for the simple glory of your lustrous presence should be shunned like the mutant he is. Do not be manipulated into believing that he respects your equality; the only thing he respects is the dictates of his reptile brain.