Romance for Real Women

Well, ladies, hurricanes trump romance, even for real women. In fact, the most romantic gesture I expect from my partner is his willingness to help move the patio furniture, tape the windows and fill buckets of water.

Today, that’s what we’re doing. Shopping for tinned foods; filling our tanks; and, buying batteries. Then there is always the emergency run to the liquor store where my partner reports there are no lines. Those pails have to be filled, too.

Edouard is out in the Gulf of Mexico and moving toward us at eight miles an hour with wind speeds up to fifty miles an hour. Our gleeful local reporters are warning it could easily turn into a hurricane given the warm waters of the gulf. (Tropical storms turn into hurricanes at seventy four miles an hour.) Less gleeful local officials are activating emergency preparedness systems.

I’m activating my own emergency preparedness system. The children are with Miss Moonbeam, who has called repeatedly this morning with instructions, commentary and warnings. I’m filling the tubs, inventorying tinned food, and laying in additional supplies.

I’ve contacted my friends, warriors with whom I sat out the Rita threat a few years ago. (Rita, a Cat 3 hurricane, was coming directly at us, but veered off to the northwest at the last minute. We stayed up as long as we could, finally going to sleep in the early morning. We woke to an eerie quiet, but no hurricane. We naturally congratulated ourselves on our perspicacity in not evacuating to join the rest of the state on stopped highways. In reality, we’d all left our preparations too late to evacuate.)

My friends aren’t as concerned about Edouard. It’s “only” a tropical storm. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I’m off to inspect the pails.

As you know, I consider myself something of an expert in sexy lingerie. (If you’re remotely interested, the cause of my obsession with sexy lingerie is described in Lingerie: My Backstory. Quite naturally, I blame it on my Mother, Miss Moonbeam.)

So, how, I ask myself, did I miss this story about Shirley of Hollywood? I consider Shirley one of the finest suppliers of exotic lingerie and have bought Shirley of Hollywood lingerie for years.

It must have been the heat. The perspiration in my eyes. My temperature induced fugue state. Real women don’t do well in the heat. (Oh, perhaps some of you do. I don’t.)

Because I missed it…Shirley’s Celebration of 60 Years of Sexy.

The private company is owned by the Schlobohm family and apparently really started expanding back in the sixties when it became a major supplier of Frederick’s of Hollywood. In the seventies, the company led the way in developing the “split crotch panty,” certainly an innovation as important as the microwave in the opinion of this real woman. The eighties saw the rise of Madonna and her “lingerie as outerwear” style, for which if nothing else, we can thank Madonna. The company went with the times in the nineties with outrageous and dramatic corsetry. And, Shirley’s is still growing. As CEO Roy Schlobohm says “there’s nothing compared to a woman in lingerie.” Amen to that, Roy.

To celebrate its anniversary, the company has rolled out a commemorative collection of lingerie showcasing a retrospective of sultry looks from 1948 to the present. And, it’s gorgeous. Check it out at www.shirleyofhollywood.com. Of course, these are all special orders and a little rich for me. But I can look.

More affordable are the wonderful new products featured by my favorite on-line lingerie store, www.inhisdreams.com

The company is posting lots of new goodies and this morning, I noticed it’s having a sale on its lace low-rise boy leg panties which I love.

But, I digress. Shirley is also sponsoring a contest for its next “Sexy Stars of Shirley,” models who will grace the pages of Shirley’s catalogues and calendars. www.inhisdreams.com posts the rules and for a moment, just for a moment, I was tempted.

But I’m way too warm for the hot lights of Hollywood, not to mention way too old. Nevertheless, I will be following the results. So, if you’re interested, ladies, take a look. Go to inhisdreams and click on the Shirley icon.

It could be fun.

As we limp through these hot, sticky dog days of summer, not much captures my attention except the prospect of an afternoon in a pool, an air conditioner turned to an extravagant seventy degrees and never ending sources of liquid beginning in the morning with ice coffee and progressing through soda, ice tea, and water to pails of alcoholic beverages at night.

The children are off with Miss Moonbeam to a cooler climate and thank goodness as my nerves are shot. Patience may be a virtue, but one hard to cultivate in a climate where nothing is thriving, water might be rationed and giggling newscasters nightly discuss record temperatures.

However, one news item did make me pull my blouse from my sticky back and put down my fan. I understand Los Angeles is prohibiting fast food chains from opening in sections of the city. Its citizens are too obese, proclaim the presumably svelte members of the city council.

It’s hard to work up any kind of outrage in these temperatures, but this one did it and not because I object, as all real women must object, to choice being imposed by local government.

Before the children left for their holiday, I had three mouths to feed. As I am a wage slave, there was no question of nightly excursions to any kind of restaurant, healthy or otherwise. We eat at home.

I would stagger from the office into the heat and to the super market and pick up something simple for dinner, vegetables I could grill, chicken breasts, hamburger, whatever was on sale. Grilling I am told keeps the ambient temperature in the house down.

But it doesn’t do a thing for my temperature. Five minutes outside and I’m a puddle. Not pretty.

I pass several fast food restaurants on my way to work. I began to notice them. They began to loom large in my rear view mirror. One morning as I was blinking perspiration from my eyes and cursing my car’s unreliable air conditioner, I saw a large blinking sign out in front of one that said, “Lesli, stop here tonight.”

I was on to something. Despite Miss Moonbeam, who was horrified, despite my own convictions about healthy food, convenience won. That and the fact I didn’t need to light a grill, an oven or my gas top stove.

The children were delighted. Hamburgers. Tacos. Those five dollar sandwiches. And, yes, fried chicken. This summer, we’ve had them all.

As you know, Miss Moonbeam is a vegetarian and disdainful of pop culture in which she includes fast food chains. When the children, despite my admonitions, babbled to her about the nightly feasts, she pushed up the date of their vacation, swooped in and with only a telling glare at me, took them off.

Thank God for Mothers.

Thank God for fast food.

Down with the LA City Council.

Now, I gotta go and unwrap dinner.

Having blogged sexy underwear, I think it’s at least as important to blog the subject of British royalty. So, for real women everywhere, the question of the day: Is Camilla Parker-Jones really a dog?

I, like everyone I know, with the exception of real men, adored Princess Di. When I woke up on that dreadful day, my partner told me she’d broken her arm in an accident in Paris. (The first reports out of Paris suggested a less horrific accident.) Ignoring any other responsibility, I promptly hit the couch and wound up watching TV for an entire week.

I remember those darling boys; the miserable way the queen behaved; and, of course, Christopher Hitchens who wondered why people cared so much because she was “after all, just Euro trash.”

I didn’t disagree, but I watched.

The fascination with Diana continues more than a decade after her death. Tina Brown, the brilliant former editor of Vanity Fair, released a book last June called “The Diana Chronicles,” a major step up from the various degrees of merde released by the sleazy hangers on and former lovers who apparently surrounded Diana. And, didn’t the British High Court recently release yet another finding that really, really, really Prince Phillip had nothing to do with her death?

So, poor Camilla. She is rather long-faced and leathery and certainly those of us who remember the leaked love tape with Charles still cringe at his assertion he wanted to be “her tampon.” (I won’t dwell on what that might imply about the royal member.)

The problem with Camilla is that she’s just not relevant. She’s not gorgeous, mistreated or anorexic. However, she does put up with a guy who talks to plants, powers his car with wine and who is given to the kind of wacky assertions we might expect from a man waiting for his mother to die. So maybe she is a victim.

Nah.

I have to admit, I have a sneaking sort of sympathy for her. Remember Diana used to call her “The Rottweiler?” The tag, so apposite, gives lie, BTW, to Hitchens’s implication that Diana was brainless, unlike, say, Dodi Al Fayed.

So, maybe the question is “where do real women stand on the issue of Camilla Parker-Jones?”

That one I can answer.

We don’t care.

Most real women are far too frugal to buy books in hard back. But there are some exceptions.

Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child are one exception. For those of you who don’t know, Jack Reacher is the itinerant ex-military cop who wanders the U.S., stumbling into situations requiring his special skills of calculation mixed with a hard headed willingness to do serious violence. He carries only essentials with him, a folded toothbrush, an ATM card and an expired passport. Every couple of days he buys a new set of clothes, discarding the old one. He occasionally works the odd job, but lives mostly on his savings.

Reacher’s operating principle is forward movement. He hates to go back. In Nothing to Lose, the new Reacher novel, he’s “taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally” from Calais, Maine to San Diego, California. As the book opens, Reacher is in Hope, Colorado where he is intrigued enough by the name of the neighboring town, Despair, to make a side trip to it.

In Despair, he is picked up by the police, tagged a “vagrant” by the town judge and driven back to the border between Hope and Despair. His decision to stick around is described this way: “Six blocks to Main Street, Reacher figured. If he turns left, takes me onward to the west, maybe I’ll let it go. But if he turns right, takes me back east to Hope, maybe I won’t.”

Reacher has been called “One of the most popular characters in contemporary thrillers, a perfect hero” (Chicago Sun-Times) and “the thinking man’s action hero.” (Denver Post).

He is intriguing. And, he is “thinking” in the sense that he is calculating and not just when he is faced with violence where the odds are against him. Here, his operating principle is “Get your retaliation in first.” And there are other odd flashes of calculation as for example when he calls upon the judge in Despair. “In Reacher’s experience the average delay when knocking at a suburban door in the middle of the evening was about twenty seconds.”

What an extraordinary thing for a character to know!

But there is more. After a woman answers the door she “stood still and said nothing. In Reacher’s experience the husband would show up if the doorstep interview lasted any longer than thirty seconds.”

Wow.

But he is not a crusader in the sense that John MacDonald’s Travis McGee was a knight in tarnished armor defending the weak or wronged. Far from it. His only motivation to investigate Despair and trigger the events of the book is the right turn made by the cop. Once the town’s ugly secrets begin to emerge, he is on the “right” side, but only by happenstance.

I once read a review where Lee Child was quoted as saying “Reacher is an animal.” (That might not be exactly the word he used, but it’s close enough.)

He is. A fascinating and brilliant animal. And Lee Child has given us a fascinating and brilliant book.

It’s number one on my summer reading list.

Real women know that post-coital etiquette is an important element in romance. So, let’s discuss.

You’ve decided to do it. You do it. Now what? Take a little control, that’s what. Don’t leave the entire post- coital glow up to him.

You know he’s going to be hungry. All men are always hungry. What you do not want is for the two of you to be pawing through your leftovers in what should be a romantic moment.

But what they eat and drink depends on their type.

So, think it through.

Say he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy. He likes beer, not wine. So have a platter of sliced sausage and cheese ready in the refrigerator. Have frosted beer glasses in the freezer. Be sure the beer is cold. Sure, his breath might be a little garlicy, but you’ve already signed on for that.

He’s maybe a little more sophisticated. Have grapes and brie, of course, with water crackers and champagne. He’ll appreciate your understanding of what he likes. And, remember, grapes are always associated with romance. It’s a nice, subtle signal.

The point is finger food is best. You really don’t want to be slopping around with Irish stew at this point.

Here’s an important tip. Make sure whatever you decide to offer him fits on one platter, a platter you can gracefully carry to the bedroom. If you’re very confident and have laid in a lot of supplies, have him carry the platter while you take up the slack with the bottles and glasses.

Tip number two. Use a breakfast tray if you have to, but ensure there is a place to put it that is not on the bed. Keep that area clear for other activities that may come up. Get it? Clear off your nightstand. No sense sweeping your tissues and romance books into a drawer in front of him. Too ad hoc.

Tip number three. Whether he’s a meat and potatoes guy or a sophisticate, you’ll need napkins. If you give him sausage, trust me, he’ll eat it, but he’ll get his fingers greasy. If there isn’t any room on the platter, drape the napkins over the food.

Tip number four. If you’re uncomfortable padding around naked, have a chemise or peignoir draped artfully over a chair…within reach. Slip into it on the way to the kitchen. Practice this move if you have to.

Tip number five. Don’t fight him for food and don’t take the biggest pieces. He’ll notice.

Advance planning is the key. If he’s very alert and has been very well trained, he’ll know this kind of effort required a little planning. That’s nothing to worry about. If he mentions it, tell him you’ve dreamed of what just happened. Tell him, you’d hoped it would.

He’ll eat that up, too.

One of my friends, Alouette, distributes “Hot Guy Friday,” a delicious pictorial treat of beautiful men. Sometimes the images are ads, sometimes they’re action shots and occasionally they’re funny. But the guys are always hot.

Everyone on Alouette’s list looks forward to it and gets in touch with her if we don’t get it by mid-Friday.

She knows what is apparently news to our local newspaper. When David Beckham’s new ads for Armani underwear began appearing in local department stores, our local beacon of first amendment freedoms sent a reporter to check on female reactions to the image. (You will certainly remember it. Beckham is sprawled on a bed, his legs wide open, wearing the close fitting underwear. The ads are so hot, they reportedly stopped traffic in Milan and London where they were shown on billboards.)

“Now it’s our turn (to look),” said a “giggling” local female the reporter located in a department store. He apparently found her insight so newsworthy, he quoted her in the third paragraph of the story.

Well, it may have been news to him, but not to us. Real women like to look. It’s one of the reasons we go to movies, buy magazines and surf the net. It’s also one of the reasons some of us might feel compelled to weigh in on whether or not we really believe Beckham is also packing a tennis ball in the ads, something many bloggers appeared to believe.

The story went on to compare the “assets” of Beckham and Djimon Hounsou, also an Armani model.

I am not going to get into that discussion although I will point out that Mark Wahlberg, who did some of the early sexy underwear ads for Calvin Klein, looked pretty good to this real woman back then.

However potent the tennis ball issue, the truth is we do like to look. So in the interests of sharing the eye candy, Alouette has agreed to post Hot Guy Friday on this blog beginning tomorrow.

Enjoy. In the meantime, here is one of the Armani ads.

A friend and self-proclaimed real woman came over last night to vent about her partner’s inadequacies.

Normally, I automatically side with a woman. Women tend to understand each other. But this time, I confess, I just couldn’t see it. All her complaints focused on the minor, practical details of living together. He’d failed to take out the garbage, although it was his job. He’d failed to wash the dishes although it was his turn. He’d failed to put the toilet seat up, although she’d repeatedly insisted he remember to do it.

After listening to her for a couple of hours and drinking at least three glasses of wine, I began to realize something about my friend. She’s is the kind of woman who will never be pleased; who will never allow herself to be happy. And, if she finds someone who loves her, she’ll hammer at it until it’s gone.

Another friend did exactly that. She married a young, ambitious guy and she wanted everything he could give her: a big house, jewelry, an ample credit line and big cars. To get them for her, he had to work and work hard. As he began to move up the ranks in the big electronics company he worked for, he began to travel extensively to Asia and Europe.

That was the trade off. No travel, no big house, no credit cards, no jewelry.

But she wouldn’t uphold her end of the bargain. Every time he came home, she bitched and bitched and bitched. He didn’t take out the garbage. She had to deal with the kids alone (never mind that she had plenty of help). He wouldn’t do this; he wouldn’t do that. Her complaints were endless and so very, very minor.

He offered to move the family to Asia to reduce their time apart. But, she wasn’t having any of that. No sir. She had the big house in the suburbs and that’s where she was staying.

Finally, he started coming home less and less. She started spending more and more and at last exceeded their very comfortable means. When he took control of the finances, she hired a divorce lawyer as a tactic. He was served. And, he agreed to the divorce. She was stunned and devastated.

Last night, I told my friend this story. I’m not sure she understood my point, although she did sense some criticism where she thought she’d get unconditional support. But I know her guy. I know he’s a sweet, hardworking fellow who’d do anything for her, although I guess he did forget to take out the garbage and put down the toilet seat.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m as willing as the next person to go to the mat on important issues. Forgetting to pick up the kids, for example. Now that, I’ll tussle about. But this stuff, no.

I suspect this relationship is going to fail soon. I also suspect my friend is going to be devastated. She’s never going to see it coming.

If you’re a man, getting a date can be hard. If you read some of the relationship gurus who are popping up by the dozens on the web, getting a date can be harder than say, storming the beaches at Normandy or getting the kids to sleep at bedtime. But, if it wasn’t hard, then relationship gurus would have nothing to sell.

Real women know men need to be careful what they buy. A case in point is a fellow who runs a website called “Alpha Unleashed, the official new alpha resource for success in life and in love.”
Michael “Bishop” Emery, who owns the blog, recently posted an entry asserting that women “test” men before giving out a phone number or accepting a date.

This is true. Real women certainly don’t give their telephone numbers to anyone who asks. We look a guy over. There are obvious factual issues to consider. Is he married? We look for the “tell,” say, the tan line on his ring finger. Divorced? How many times? Does he seem to care about his children? (This would be indicated by knowing their gender, their ages, even where they go to school.) Does he support himself? What kind of work does he do?

Then there is instinct. Can he put together a simple sentence? Can he look you in the eye? If you’re in a public place, is he caging money from his buddies? Does he need a bath? Do they all? Women note these things instinctively and insofar as you might want to suggest these are “tests,” you’d be right.

But women don’t run the kind of tests Emery suggests. He’d want his followers to believe that women formulate specific questions for men and then want men to ignore them. By ignoring them, Emery says, men assert their power, power women find irresistible. This is the insight he’s selling.

Here is a direct excerpt from his Thursday, May 29 blog entitled “How Women Test Men – How to Pass”

So, the next time you’re standing in front of a beautiful women who you’ve just asked for her number and she says, “why don’t you just give me your number and I’ll call YOU…” try CHUCKLING out loud and saying:

Then hand her a pen, point to the paper, and look her in the eye expectantly.

Once I got over the bends, I doubled checked the column to be sure he is completely serious. I then had an insight of my own. I realized that this isn’t just half-way funny bad advice. It is, in fact, dangerously aggressive stuff.

I wonder what he’d suggest if the woman in question persisted in declining to give out her number. I hesitate to think.

If you’re confronted with the kind of situation Emery proposes, don’t stop to ask if the guy is a fan or has bought “Fire of Seduction,” the book he’s is peddling. This is not the time to chat. Run away. Quickly. Quickly.

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.