December 31, 2004
-
I'm honestly not cranking up '70s music on the stereo and eating ice cream out of the container while I dream about that one very special guy who will love me enough to overcome his otherwise overwhelming "primordial" instinct to act like a manipulative jackass. Gee... that's what I'm doing. Except, y'know, I'm dreaming about a female.
-
i'm hoping that at some point in our society, pairing up will not be seen as such a necessity. especially for women.
-
Oh, man, am I glad someone wrote something like this. It saved me the trouble. :)
-
I'm hoping someday being single won't be seen as a disease or a situation to be pitied. I hate the men are asses and women should learn to live with it attitude in this book. I know lots of wonderful men, men whose emotions are far more complex than this book portrays. I also know plenty of women who act like asses and treat men like dirt. The only sound advice here is to not waste time on a man (or woman) who doesn't give you the attention and respect you deserve - the rest is just regurgitated cosmo shit.
-
We have more to worry about in the world right now than this kind of atavism. I hardly think any but a minority of co-dependent women will pay any attention to this. It's laughable.
-
You'd be surprised, Nostrildamus. A good chunk of my single female friends have been sucked into this book.
-
Hmmm. /thinks
-
I've never heard of this book. I'd like to say that I can't believe women would actually buy this kind of garbage and use it as legitimate advice, but I know that they do on a grand scale. Why is that? Is it the "I'm your buddy" tone that the author uses (that makes me want whack said author over the head repeatedly with a keyboard)? Is it because we are force fed a diet of family values-based crap and as a result women are reverting to the mindset that females who aren't yet married in their early 20s are "doomed" to be spinsters? And what the hell is wrong with being a spinster? Some of us are truly happy being single and the old song and dance about how we need a man (or woman) to make us "complete" is false and overused. Stick a fork in it. Why the hell are people so afraid of being alone? Some of us prefer solitude and some prefer a more social existence- can these preferences not co-exist without one being represented as a sad state of affairs? The older I get, the more irritated I am by these kinds of messages. And truly, no offense intended to happily coupled monkeys. Keep in mind I am a happily divorced middle-aged woman with a plethora of gay friends and 7 cats. I'll take the full-fat cheese and red wine, thank you very much.
-
Every few years a book like this is very popular and while this one is not as offensive as The Rules was it still spits out those same ideas that many people here have already touched on: *Men are lazy, selfish, simple-minded and more should not be expected of them. *Women are sad and lonely, waiting to be married. *Manipulative plotting works to get you what you want. But despite many (of us) disagreeing with these ridiculous myths many people still buy into them.
-
well, i'm just not that into manipulative women ... i guarantee anyone who takes that book seriously isn't going to have me around for long ... i need to know that she's interested and not into manipulation ...
-
My opinion of women sinks lower every time a book like this, or the above-mentioned The Rules, becomes a bestseller. Not that men don't buy their share of idiotic tripe. Where is independence and self-respect in all this? I would no more want to go out with a passive manipulator than with a rock. If you want a guy to be "into you" (no pun intended), just be interesting, be fun, be honest and direct, be yourself. THEN maybe he'll stick around a while and you won't have to wonder why yet another one has run off when he discovered that you are nothing like the pose you adopted to attract him (which is what most of the "Sex and the City" types seem to spend the majority of their time doing). It ain't rocket science, people.
-
Color me a female misogynist, but my own kind (sigh) seem to feed on this kind of book due to a combination of nature and nurture issues. Add to that, though, that I suspect some male equivalent of this crap will be on the shelves in the next three months.
-
I was fine with the review until she started hatin' on zoo monkeys. Seriously, I don't trust the review because the reviewer seems so caught up in justifying her own life sitch. It could be that horrible, or she could be swept away by her own passion. (Sadly, Oprah has shown no interest in my book, The Tao Of Coupling: For Christ's Sake, Girl, It'll Happen When It Happens, So Just Chill, Okay?.) The Amazon capsules take diverse viewpoints. Also, I love their Customers who bought this book also bought suggestions: A slice of the Oprah world right there.
-
hurray for bibliochick! my kind o' gal
-
It would seem to me that people of either sex could ask another out (including asking a same sex person out) for a variety of reasons, and there's a variety of ways to respond to being asked out, AND there's a variety of possible resulting relationships. All these things put together are more to less satisfying to the people involved. I would guess the combinations suggested in the article to be closer to the "less" scale for all involved, but people are free to feel what they want.
-
*correction: people are free to feel what they will.
-
Nostril, what bugs me about the atavism is that it plays to the same sort of nasty instinct that drives other problems I consider much more serious. If Men are Men (cheatin' nasty fools) and Girls are Girls (show your self-respect by being a doormat) and Never the Twain Shall Meet, there's your underlying justification for gay relationships/behavior being Unnatural. I haven't read the book and don't intend to. This review and others have left me with the impression that even if I were still on the market, it would do nothing for me. (And bibliochick, I endorse your sentiments 100%. I am happier with someone, but I know people who groove on being alone. My mother is one of them. She gets away with it by being a 69-year-old widow who must still be pining after my dad. The truth is she misses him, but after 17 years she likes her single life and doesn't want to trade it in for a man.)
-
people are free to feel what they want/will does that include body parts?
-
Odd that the authors are alumni of Sex and the City (and even took the title from a line on the show) since that show, like it or not, celebrated it being OK for women to be single like no other show ever has. As for stuff like "The Rules," I guess it will work to "catch" a certain kind of man, if you view a man as an animal and marriage as a beartrap. Personally, I have no interest in a serious realtionship with a woman unless she wants to be my equal. Not because I am some "male feminist," just because I dont see the point of having a relationship with someone who just wants to be a possession or servant. I'd rather have a dog.
-
does that include body parts? No, that's free to feel what they can.
-
It would seem to me that people of either sex could ask another out (including asking a same sex person out) for a variety of reasons, and there's a variety of ways to respond to being asked out, AND there's a variety of possible resulting relationships. And that's exactly the problem, because a lot of people don't LIKE complexity. It scares them and they don't know how to deal with it. So they'll accept a bad-but-simple solution over a good-but-complex one.
-
goetter ... that's a scary list
-
Argh, books like this and "the Drools" rile me senseless. I watched "Sex And The City" occasionally for the (approximately) one good joke per episode, but the "independent successful women are really neurotic men-obsessed stick insects" vibe really grated. Celebrating the New Year solo with good music and toasted crumpets. Mmmmmmm
-
arrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!!!! When will women LEARN not to buy into this shit!! so much for all the work we did to "liberate" women--I give up on the younger generation GETALIFE,PEOPLE Bibs, Sidey, I'm so with you babes. I be married, and be gonna stick it out to the end, but if he croaks before I do, that's IT. No more male live-ins. Love 'em and leave 'em or most likely, just ignore 'em.
-
This whole discussion is yuk. Why the pathological analysis of male-female relationships? Either you get along or you don't.
-
I could base a relationship service off of that idea.
-
I read the excerpts linked above, and had a debate about it without my roommate. She goes ahead and dates; I never have (I've always found my lovers thru groups of friends). She says this philosophy has a place in her dating world. I'm a feminist, always have been and always will, and don't like power games to have a place outside of sex. What's the point of the fun in playing with someone otherwise?
-
Wait, that didn't come out the way I meant. Never mind.
-
The ideas discussed in the review are some of the more controversial ones from the book. Some of the other ones make alot of sense, and are designed to stop women from fabricating excuses for the men they're dating. For example . . . if you go on a date or dates and he doesn't call you, stop thinking about him and imagining excuses for why he might not be calling. He just doesn't like you that much. If he says he's going to call you over the weekend and doesn't call until much later, he's not respecting you enough to call you when he said he would. Wouldn't you rather date a guy who likes you enough to want to talk to you at regular intervals? If he says he loves you but is not in love with you, what he really means is that he loves you only as a friend and doesn't want to hurt you. Move on. This is not the great romance of your life. The book goes overboard in places, perhaps, but some of what the authors say does make sense, and gives women the freedom to get out of relationships that they otherwise would have wasted alot of time, effort, hope, and creative talent on in fashioning excuses for their men. It's easy to write the book off as silly or sensationalist, but I appreciated alot of it as quite good advice. (And alot of it is no brainer advice, such as don't date married guys; don't date guys who say they don't want to get married if marriage is important to you; don't date guys who have broken up with you, etc.)
-
Also, some people seem to be interpreting the book to be emphasizing coupledom above all else, as though "spinsterhood" is some awful fate. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite, because the advice all boils down to not settling for someone who isn't a really good match for you. Again, I'll just say that there's something very liberating about looking back on that relationship where the guy didn't call enough and I felt like I was doing alot of the work of the relationship and realizing, hey, it's not that he was busy, or having a hard time with his family, or trapped someplace where there was no phone service. He just didn't like me that much. Aha! Fine. Makes it that much easier to move on.
-
Am re-evaluating this wisdom. See, I'm just not that into someone who's evidently into me. Avoidance is a pretty seductive notion in this situation. Should I employ the published avoidance tactics, or tell him, plainly and with honest regret, that the spark isn't mutual? I think I'll screw up some courage and tell him - it's only fair. [But my god it's hard to do.]