Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (17 page)

• Dealing with unwanted attention

When a stranger you aren’t interested in hits on you in public, be kind—assuming you aren’t in a dark alley at the time, in which case you should just be fast.

A Southern California blogger, “UnWinona,” often commutes from North Hollywood to Long Beach on the train. She avoids speaking with other passengers, wears a ring to imply that she’s married, and buries herself in a book. Yet, on “at least half” of her train rides, a man will (
horrors!
) interrupt her reading and ask her about her book. She explains:

This serves the double purpose of getting my attention and trapping me in a conversation. If I stop reading the book I enjoy to talk to you, random stranger, you hit on me or just stay way too close to me. If I tell you to leave me alone, you get mad at me. Because I somehow, as a woman, owe you conversation.

One summer evening, a boy, about eighteen, seated nearby with two guy friends, made the fatal error, asking, “What are you reading?”

She went straight from zero to nasty: “I told them loudly and firmly that I wanted to be left alone to read my book.”

The trio didn’t take that well, sneering “I bet she’s reading
Twilight
or some shit!” and otherwise taunting her. Not because they thought that she “owed” them conversation but because she treated the guy who spoke to her as if he were too insignificant to deserve the perhaps ten-second effort of a considerate response.

After they got off the train, a guy with a bike got on. And yes, he had the gall to ask it: “What are you reading?”

She again went straight to cold bitch mode: “Please leave me alone. I am reading.”

Again, she couldn’t extend herself just a little by saying “It’s just
Blah Blah Blah
” and making some excuse: “I’d love to talk with you, but I’m reading this for work and I’m a little behind” or “Sorry, but I’m married and my husband gets a little jealous when I talk to other guys.” These maybe sound like bullshit excuses, but that’s not what matters. Just that there’s
some
sort of explanation that gives the guy an out for his ego.
(This perhaps seems a contradiction of my advice on the unambiguous shutdown, but a stranger who’s hitting on you in passing in public can be shut down less definitively than a guy who has your phone number and can keep calling to ask you out.)

Bike Guy wasn’t about to be shit on and go quietly. Glaring at her, he bayed in an “angry baby talk voice,”: “PLEASELEAVEMEALONEI’MREADING.”

He marched back and forth in front of his bike, yelling that UnWinona was “a slut, a ho, a bitch.” The few other passengers offered no help, and she feared that he might turn physically violent.

Bike Guy didn’t touch her, but he went full-on scarytime, punching the walls of the train car, screaming right in her face, “SUCK MY DICK, BITCH.… IF I HAD A GUN I’D … FUCKING KILL YOU, BITCH.”

Finally, the train pulled in to a crowded station, and she bolted out, shaking and barely able to breathe, and nearly vomited. Even after she got home, she cried long and uncontrollably and remained on the verge of throwing up.

Afterward, unbelievably, she blamed her situation on “nothing more than being female and not wanting to share,” adding, “I just wanted to read my book. It’s not my fault I’m pretty.”

Outrageous.

These guys didn’t lean over her and sneer, “Hey, sugar tits…” or say they wanted to grab her ass and ride it all the way to Compton. Sure, they were hitting on her, and their attention was unwanted and a bother. And no, she had no obligation to carry on a conversation with any of them, but she also seemed to feel she had no reason to make even the most minor effort to politely duck out of one.

Unfortunately, not “blaming the victim” has come to make it taboo to explore how and why certain people and not others are victimized and whether they were randomly preyed upon or whether they might have done anything differently to keep themselves out of harm’s way. This encourages some women to adopt the attitude that they can do whatever they want and nobody’s “allowed” to do anything back. Lovely thinking but very inapplicable to the real world, where it’s important to take a little responsibility for how you talk to people, especially when you’re a lone woman riding late at night on an almost-empty train. In UnWinona’s case, things would likely have turned out very differently if only she’d treated these guys with a little dignity—as if they have value as humans and their feelings matter.

A safer and more compassionate response involves calling up a little empathy for a guy who’s trying to chat you up. Think about some time when you had to approach a stranger—how you had to work up the courage, how you fretted about what they’d say in response, how you maybe even felt a little queasy walking over and sputtering out your piece. And then, with those feelings in mind, maybe you can respond as I did to a huge nose-wiping guy in dirty overalls in 7-Eleven who spewed little flecks of spit on me as he asked me out. My reply: “Oh, darn! I really wish I could, but I’m married.”

The Date

• Who pays?

Dating turns some men into amateur accountants. They complain that it isn’t fair that they’re often (or usually, depending on their age) the ones paying on dates, especially at the start. Well, it also isn’t “fair” that being a woman involves so much upkeep. Remaining blonde is like having a second car payment. While men buy underwear three to a pack from a bin, a single bra and underwear set can set a woman back over $100. And then there are all the lotions, potions, and pots of makeup. A pot of eye shadow smaller than most hors d’oeuvres can set a woman back $30—or more. Some eye creams are so pricey they should come with an upgrade to business class. Being a man, on the other hand, is much like being a golden retriever. To get ready for a date, a guy pretty much just has to run through the sprinklers and shake off.

But, let’s all put away the calculators. There’s actually good reason for a man to pick up the tab on at least the first few dates, and it goes back to Ye Olde Evolutionary Psychology and how women evolved to feel compelled to seek men who are “providers.” This hasn’t changed, not even for powerful women making a lot of money. Research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss and others has shown that even when women are high-flying big earners, they seem to want men who are higher-flying bigger earners. This is even true of women who consider themselves feminists. Another evolutionary psychologist, Bruce J. Ellis, wrote in
The Adapted Mind
of fifteen feminist leaders’ descriptions of their ideal man—descriptions that included the repeated use of terms connoting high status, like “very rich,” “brilliant,” and “genius.”

In other words, men need to accept that dating costs money and that just because a woman can afford to pay on the first date or first few dates, that doesn’t mean she should. When a man pays, graciously and seamlessly, for the first and second date, he’s meeting a woman’s psychological need to seek a man who is generous and willing to invest.
³⁰
That said, this is the twenty-first century, and studies show that on average, young urban women in their twenties are now making more than men. So, after two people have gone out a few times, the woman needs to unbolt her wallet and start taking turns picking up the tab. And not just the cheap parts of it but the whole tab, on every other date. Of course, the exception would be when the man owns a mansion and a yacht and the woman’s a barista who can either buy their drinks or pay her rent.

But there’s an important caveat: Even if a man is very wealthy, his investment on the first few dates should be
more symbolic than substantial.
In fact, so there isn’t a terribly imbalanced initial investment, it’s important that the first few dates be moderately priced—the sort where the point is getting to know each other over a coffee or a couple of drinks, not introducing the woman to the limit on the man’s American Express Platinum Card.

• First dates should be cheap, short, and local.

On the first date and maybe even the second, you should meet for coffee or happy-hour drinks for an hour or two—
at most
. This helps keep things from going too fast (a big source of misery and resentment) and keeps the guy from needing to shell out much money. Also, if a date turns nightmarish, it will at least be a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty and brutish but also short.

Casual sex: A horny woman can do anything a horny man can do, but there’s a good chance she’ll feel like stepped-on crap afterward.

The feminist message that a woman can do anything a man can do is great for girls who are aspiring NASCAR drivers or U.S. presidents, but let’s not confuse “equal” with “the same” and what a woman
can
do with what actually works. Casual sex is particularly problematic for many women, again probably stemming from women’s evolved drive to seek providers and its neurochemical underpinnings. Some women find that they feel especially emotionally connected to a sex partner upon orgasm, probably because of the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin. Although the most conclusive research is on sexed-up prairie rodents and casual sex often fails to produce orgasms in human women, oxytocin has also been shown to be released by touch and cuddling. This means that whether a woman has an orgasm or not, oxytocin may have an effect, putting her on an emotional leash to the man she slept with. (In a man, testosterone bitchslaps the oxytocin, probably making it easier for him to roll over and be on to the next.)

Anthropologist John Marshall Townsend has done interesting research in this area, finding that even when women were just horny and simply wanted to use and lose some himbo, many felt vulnerable after sex, and “thoughts crossed their minds like ‘Does he care about me, is sex all he was after, will he dump me in the morning?’ These thoughts were difficult to suppress.”

Beyond how unsettled hooking up makes many women feel, it’s a risky gambit unless a woman knows that all she wants is a little nail and bail. There are hookups that lead to happily ever after, but because men tend to devalue women they don’t have to chase, there’s a good chance a hookup will be the fast track to “He’s just not that into you … (but he’ll use you for sex while he’s looking for a woman he is into).”

Ready, set … curl up in a fetal position!

Acknowledging the ugly realities of what men and women want might seem to suck some of the romance out of dating. But actually, being mindful that there’s this war between the sexes and understanding that it’s not personal, just evolutionary, is probably the best way to keep from hating the other side—in addition to possibly being a little kinder in going after your own evolutionary imperatives. Ultimately, being mad that men act like men or that women act like women is like being mad that your dog sniffs other dogs’ butts instead of reading aloud to them from literary fiction.

SOME DATING RUDENESS IS UNISEX

(This is also for all you gay people, who got shafted in the last section.)

Don’t date people you aren’t attracted to.

A reader wrote to me saying she is tall and is really only attracted to tall men—six foot two and up—and was having a hard time finding a boyfriend because of it. Her friends suggested she be “more open-minded” about dating shorter men—which is terrible advice.

I acknowledged that “it’s what’s inside that counts”; it just doesn’t count enough if you don’t want to get naked with what’s on the outside. And think of the guy. What guy wants a girlfriend who’s with him because her friends say it’s the “open-minded” thing to do?

Equally ill-advised is the notion that you should date somebody you aren’t physically attracted to simply because they’re “a good person.” People will suggest that you can work up the hots for somebody like you can get better at playing “Greensleeves” if only you keep pounding it out on the piano. In reality, trying to get attracted to someone is one of the unintentionally crueler things you can do. At first, you can mistake the heat of novelty—of being with someone new and all the exhilaration inherent in that—for the heat of attraction. But no matter how exemplary a human being somebody is, if you find them physically unappealing, they’ll just get more and more repellant to you over time, until you’d arrange to get pecked to death by crows just to avoid having sex with the person.

The realistic (and thus kind) approach is figuring out your minimum standards for attractiveness and sticking to them—as the tall girl did, recognizing that she’d have the lukewarmies for guys under six foot two. You should also figure out any other important must-haves or must-have-nots, like if children or certain fanatical eating habits happen to be a no-go. And remember: If you aren’t attracted to flat-chested women or blond men, this isn’t a character flaw, just a fact. Know it, accept it, and don’t be tempted when the sweetest pea-breasted woman ever or a much-sought-after underwear model named Sven looms on your dating horizon.

Online dating: It should be called “online meeting.”

On a positive note, I have yet to hear of anyone on a dating site who’s misrepresented their species. People do, however, misrepresent just about everything else. Most commonly, they show up on dates looking nothing like their pictures, although one angry reader complained to me that his date wasn’t in the advertised gender. (No, being a woman isn’t “just a state of mind.”)

It’s obviously rude to engage in false advertising, but this can be a relatively fleeting rudeness—if the person it’s perpetrated on doesn’t have online dating practices that help it become an extended and much bigger one. They do this by using the Internet not just for what it’s great for—meeting people to date—but for trying to get to know them at length before ever going out on a date with them. As I’ve written in my column, the same woman who’d go home with a stranger she spent a couple of hours talking to in a bar will spend weeks exchanging e-mail and texts with some online dating prospect to assess how good his grammar is before she’ll feel safe having a coffee with him. In the meantime, she’s getting attached—not to the actual guy but to her idea of the guy and maybe to how smart and funny she is when she’s talking to him. Investing all this time and emotion can make it somewhat devastating when she finally meets the guy and finds that he looks wrong, talks wrong, and smells like the Dumpster behind the meat market.