Romance for Real Women

Real women know that some subjects are much too rich to be mined adequately in just one blog. Such is the case with the recent University of Texas study I mentioned yesterday.The headlines focused on the fact that the study found that beautiful woman want it all…status, economic prospects, resource acquisition potential (whatever that means), etc. The study was carried on major news outlets like ABC and FOX with all the correspondents agog at this seemingly new and fantastic fact.

All of them overlooked the truth that after, say, the age of twenty, beautiful women have to work at being beautiful. Duh. Also, that there is a point to all this effort…getting and keeping a guy. It’s their job, honey. Of course, they want the most for their efforts. Duh.

Your faithful correspondent, however, took the time to read the entire news reports and thus came upon the nugget, buried at the end of the stories, that all of the interviewees, beautiful or otherwise, rated intelligence as the least important of desirable “mate value” qualities in a partner.

I don’t know about you, but it is taking me a little time to assimilate this factoid.

I e-mailed the study to my partner who heretofore I was unashamed to admit is highly intelligent.

“Whaaat?” he said. Notice the one syllable word. Perhaps that counts.

“Who authored it?”

“The University of Texas issued it,” I said. “It’s apparently in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychology.” I added, just so he would know I’d done my research. Opps. Too intelligent. Aware my mate value was plummeting egregiously, I quickly mumbled, “I don’t know.”

“Huh?” he said.

Bravo, I thought. Perhaps he is, after all, on the evolutionary curve.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked, switching gears. Ah, hah, I thought, this is great. A short attention span. An inability to focus. Gotta be headed in the right direction.

But I floundered. The study didn’t indicate whether pulling together a hot meal on time has mate value. It does, after all, take a modicum of intelligence to plan, cook and have a meal ready. Or at least, that’s what I always thought.

So, I took refuge in an old trick. I stuck my fingers in my hair and pulled, just slightly. But, he didn’t see my mate value enhancing confusion. We were on the phone.

I didn’t say anything. I waited. He waited. Damn, this stuff is hard. So, at last I ventured. “I don’t know.”

He sighed and it wasn’t a pretty sound. I’d promised him something special. But I want to be on the evolutionary curve, too.

“How about I pick something up?” he finally said.

“Great,” I started to say, but then thought maybe just an “Okay” might have higher evolutionary mate value.

“Are you all right?” he asked and I felt a nice wave of concern.

“Fine,” I mumbled. “See you later.”

I clicked the off button on my cell phone and sat there for a few minutes looking at it.

“Fuck this,” I thought in words of one syllable.

I thawed a steak and had a glass of wine. Then I e-mailed him and told him to forget the Chinese.

            In most markets, the quality of local media range from mediocre to poor. Real women know there are some exceptions, but not many.

            This is not such an exception.

            Yesterday I posted a report from University of California at Davis about men confusing a comment such as “it’s getting late” with “let’s skip the preliminaries and get it on.”

            This is egregious stuff. After finally dragging rape out of the shadows; after all the serious work that’s been done in the area of spousal and child abuse; after all the sensitivity courses in the workplace and in school, it appears that a large number of men still confuse what they want to hear with what’s actually said.

            This isn’t funny.

            But it apparently did tickle the funny bone of a Davis CBS13 reporter Mike Dello Stritto who went to the Davis campus and chatted up some of the students about the report.

            Led by an infallible news sense, Stritto asked the kids some of the same questions the professor posed on his study.

Yuk. Yuk. Giggle. Giggle. 

How did he think those kids would react when asked about their sex lives with a camera pointed in their noses?

Lost was any sense of the serious implications of the study.  Although as noted the professor did not study rape, this is moving very close to the line.  And it ain’t funny.

Check out this meathead and his compadres on the news desk.  And it may interest you to know that later in his video blog Stritto opined “this was kind of funny and a fun story to do.”

What a jerk.

The video is at http://cbs13.com/local/men.hear.yes.2.706568.html

A new study out of University of California at Davis ought to have real women calling their collage age daughters right this minute.

Scratch that.

Call your daughters however old they are. Call them at work. Get them in the kitchen after school for a chat. Do it now. And, while you’re at it, call your friends, too.

The study, by communication professor Michael Motley, found that men frequently, no, make that nearly always, misinterpret “indirect” messages from women resisting the “escalation of sexual intimacy.”

According to Motley, when a woman says, “It’s getting late,” the male hears, “Let’s get it on more quickly.” When she says, “Let’s be friends,” the male hears, “I’m not committed, but let’s get it on.”

UC Davis reports that fully eighty five percent of college women have had at least one “unpleasant” experience where physical intimacy escalated without her consent.

The study did not look at rape. But if you ask me, this kind of stuff is getting pretty close to it.

It’s hair raising.

When you’re talking with your daughters, tell them to forget being “nice.” Tell them to forget worrying about his feelings.

If the guy is pawing them beyond what they like, they have to be unambiguous.

“Knock it off.”

“Quit that.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“I’m going home.”

You undoubtedly can think of other, similar unambiguous messages.

Make your daughter repeat them after you.

I’m going to.

Right now.

Real women should take note of a study that could actually give them useful clues into the psyches of their partners. Clues, I might add, that apparently didn’t even occur to the researchers themselves.

The study on postpartum depression in men was conducted by researchers at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, VA. It was published in the August, 2007 issue of the journal Pediatrics although interestingly, the general media have just reported on it today, May 6, 2008, which really goes to show you how the Democrat primaries have saturated the news.

Nevertheless, apart from the cognitive dissonance real women might feel upon hearing that men suffer from postpartum depression, the study does yield some interesting findings. But only if you know how to look.

The researchers studied more than 5,000 two-parent families. Got that, ladies? Two parent families.

It found that one in ten of these new dads suffered from postpartum depression.

The reasons?

Anxiety over supporting a family.

Anxiety over relationships with their wives.

Worry over the cost of raising a child to twenty-one.

Have you got that, everyone?

These are the good guys.

In another study, the University of Chicago reports that 31% or 22.5 million of the nation’s children don’t live with either parent. Add to that the 18% or 11.9 million children who live with only one parent, usually the mother.

You can betcha those guys don’t suffer from postpartum depression.

One question the folks at Eastern Virginia don’t seem to have asked is when these new dads last had a good night’s sleep.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not belittling depression. But my advice to real women whose husbands are adjusting to the new kid by worrying about how to support their family is to uncork the champagne, pull on some sexy lingerie and dim the lights. After the fun, let him sleep all night.

He’s a keeper.

And now real women have another relationship guru to contend with, a miserable little toad called Marc Rudov who recently surfaced on national television, presenting himself as an authority on romance, relationships and women.

Mr. Rudov’s appearance was apparently prompted by the debut of his radio show, “The Mark Rudov Show” which in a perfect world should sink without a ripple.

Mr. Rudov contends that most women are “little girls occupying women’s bodies.” He further contends that men are depressed because “they’ve allowed women to take over the world.”

Huh?

Real women know we rule…behind the scenes. We don’t flaunt our authority. We don’t want men depressed. We love men. We want them happy. Really. We go to great lengths to make them happy. And, we know they’re happiest when they follow our direction.

If you must, go to www.marcrudovradio.com But, in my opinion, this is a toad not worth kissing.