In addition to telling me that they are strongly attracted to me (these women always live far away from me) and they long to sleep with me (some of them, believe it or not, have even declared that they are in love with me, always long distance, although that particularly deranged extreme hasn’t occurred in the last year or so, thankfully), they often spend much of their emails in frank erotic discussions of their past sexual experiences, their current lack of adequate erotic intercourse with their husbands or boyfriends, and their sexual fantasies. They almost always end up asking to see samples of my porn (and if I oblige, they tend to be sorry they asked, even though I warn them many times before I send them samples that they really don't want to read them).

Their attentions are flattering, and I try to be pleasant with people who think they like me even if they’re obviously nuts because you CAN’T like someone in that particular way if you’ve never met them.

Anyway, one of these ‘Someday Maybe You Never Know’ chicks recently sent me an email. I deleted it in annoyance, so I can’t reproduce it here, but I do of course remember the gist. The subject line was ‘Happy Holidays’. Then it said something like the following:

From, you know, one of these Women Who Profess To Want To Sleep With Me From A Safe Distance.

I found this very annoying.

* * * Now here’s an anecdote from my last day at work:

One of the few waitresses I get along with there got very annoyed with me around 8 in the evening, and stopped bussing her tables, letting the bus boy do it, or other waitresses do it for her, so she wouldn’t have to come back into the dishroom and encounter me any more. Why did she do this? Because, after six weeks of a cordial and casually friendly relationship, I made the following remark, upon seeing her biting her lip as she brought dishes out: “Hey, don’t bite your lip. Come over here and let me do it.”

Female readers may well be outraged that I would make such a remark as this to any woman in the world, much less a married woman. I intended no offense; it was not a pick up line or a hit-on; it was just a joke, if a slightly (very slightly) risque one. In six weeks I hadn’t ventured so much as a personal compliment to this girl, however, in that time I had seen several other male employees venture far more risque comments to her, to which she had laughed and batted her eyes and acted as if it were no big deal.

While I don’t think I did anything wrong, I had obviously offended her, and while this double standard as applied to me annoyed the living fuck out of me, I was sorry I’d offended her, so later on, I managed to apologize to her. She did not accept my apology; she told me that she did not like comments like that. When I pointed out that she seemed to like comments like that just fine from every other guy at Village Inn but me, and bolstered my argument with a few examples burned into my memory, she just shook her head, glared at me (it is a type of glare I have often been on the receiving end from; it is how an attractive woman tells a man she is immensely displeased with ‘Okay, buddy, I was never ever going to sleep with you in a million years anyway, but BOY am I never going to sleep with you in a million years NOW, you creep’). And it reinforced for me something I have known for decades, namely, that one does not make friends and influence people by being irrefutably right, or, at least, by being so inconsiderate as to demonstrate out loud in an argument that one is irrefutably right.

But that’s not what this is all about.

****In the comment thread to my previous blog entry, dear sweet Tammy wrote the following, in response to my initial musing as to how annoying I found it when attractive women declared to me that they would sleep with me, If Only Things Were Different:

So let’s dive in and try to sort this out.

First, as always, I make no attempt to speak for all males. If I feel I may be speaking for a majority of males, I will try to state so explicitly; in the absence of such a claim, I am speaking for myself alone. And, speaking for myself alone – I do not like it when attractive women tell me that they would sleep with me, If Only Things Were Different.

I also do not like it when women who have told me that at some point in the future they MIGHT actually sleep with me send me what purports to be a holiday greeting that seems to indicate that they might actually have decided to get their asses in a car, on a bus, or up into a plane and come over here and get the hell undressed, and it turns out to be a fucking commercial endorsement for vaccination.

And, lastly, and related but at the other end of the extreme, I do not like it when women who obviously make an effort to make themselves more sexually attractive and provocative to certain males, and who obviously enjoy it when certain males flirt with them and direct sexually provocative comments at them, get shirty with me for doing the same thing. I especially don’t like it when they claim that they ‘just don’t like to hear comments like that’, when in point of fact, they are perfectly happy to have John The Cook direct comments like that at them, they apparently simply don’t like them from fat middle aged dishwashers.

I think the aggravation and frustration involved in these things speaks for itself, and I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t like these things. However, I will mention (and this will make little difference to the women I am mortally offending with this entry, because they know this already, but what the hell) that I haven’t been laid in many years, and there are no imminent prospects for curing that unpleasant condition (which our society and our mass media both assure me, in many overt and subtle ways every day, means there is Something Horribly Horribly Wrong With Me As A Human Being) on my personal horizon. Therefore, I do not like it when women cocktease me.

Oh, yes. I said ‘cocktease’. I know. It’s not a nice word; I know enough about women, in fact, to know that one of the nearly infallible ways to piss any woman off is to accuse her of being a cocktease especially when she is being one. No woman ever made wants to simply admit that she’s a cocktease (or very few of them want to, anyway) but, well, a lot of women do it. They simply don’t like to own up to it. And that is what they are doing, when they basically behave in a manner calculated to cause a specific man (in this case, me) to regard them as a sexual object, when they have absolutely no intention of having sex with that guy.

Look… if a woman tells me about her specific past and current sexual behaviors, if she relates her sexual fantasies to me, if she tells me she is attracted to me, and if she specifically conjures up images of her and I sexually entwined by evoking the situation verbally or textually, then she is basically focusing my attention on her in a sexual fashion. She is, not in effect but very specifically, trying to get me to regard her as desirable, and to acknowledge that she is desirable. Now, I don’t mind a woman doing this if she’s planning to get undressed and horizontal with me in the very near future (‘very near future’ being defined in terms of seconds or minutes, not hours or days). But if she’s simply doing this because nobody has told her she has a fine ass in the last three hours and, hey, Darren’s handy, and he’s always horny, let’s just bounce some tease rays off him and see if he flatters us with the appropriate response… I don’t need that. It’s frustrating and annoying and unnecessary, and, frankly, cruel.

Now, I am absolutely aware that probably ALL the women who have teased me this way in my life would quite furiously declare at this point that they were trying to reassure me, that they were just being nice, and some of the more tactless ones would rather righteously shriek that they were only kidding anyway, they actually wouldn’t sleep with me if some Chinese tailored virus turned every other functional male on the planet into a kangaroo.

To the notion that women do this to make me feel better, I have two responses: (a) It doesn’t, and (b) bullshit.

Women do this because they want to make a man pay sexual attention to them. They want to feel desirable. They do it twenty or thirty or a hundred times a day to men they have no intention of ever so much as showing one of their nipples to, and they do it because they like the sensation of power that they get over us poor overly-priapic guys when they succeed in getting us all turned on with very little effort.

Now, I grant you, there are more direct and even crueler ways to cocktease someone than telling them ‘well, I DO find you attractive and I WOULD go out with you or sleep with you if only things were different’, but still… when women do this, no matter what they tell themselves, they are not doing it to be nice. They are doing it to reassure themselves that yes, Poor Lonely Darren does want to get into a sleeping bag with them, even though he hasn’t a hope in this goddam universe of ever doing so.

Well, I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy it. It’s not fun. If you think you’re doing it to reassure me, stop. It’s not working. Cut it out.

Now, since Tammy has professed to me to find it delightful when I explain, forthrightly and in great honestly, how the male mind works (not that I can, I can only explain how my male mind works) let me explain this (or repeat it, because I mentioned it in the formentioned comment threads):

If an attractive woman wants to make me feel better, to reassure me about my attractiveness, to improve my morale, to cheer me up, to make me happy… FUCK ME.

Okay?

Don’t tell me I’m a great guy and a very attractive man and you know I’ll meet the right girl eventually. I don’t believe you. First, you have no idea I’ll meet the right girl eventually, and frankly, I find your saying so to be obnoxiously arrogant. If you’re that damned sure, tell me when I’ll meet her, what her name is, and what she looks like. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Your vague and pointless reassurances do not reassure me; I’m a grown up and I know a fairy tale when I hear one.

Secondly, and obviously, do NOT tell me I’m an attractive man. Women who have slept with me can tell me I’m cute, or they like how I look, or they find me attractive. I believe them. You know why? THEY SLEPT WITH ME. Women who haven’t slept with me and who never intend to clearly don’t find me attractive (at least, they don’t find me to be attractive enough to be willing to actually jump me) so I don’t want to hear them tell me otherwise. If any attractive woman out there not related to me by blood wants to tell me how good looking I am, she should be ready to prove she really thinks so in the only really meaningful way. Otherwise, she should talk to me about comic books, or SF, or BUFFY, or the Bucs.

Now, as Ed Felsen once remarked to Vincent de’LaGuardia, “If you know some other way I can be honest with you, you gotta tell me what it is”.

All right. I got family Christmas tomorrow, and if any of my female relatives reads this before then, I’m gonna be in SOOOOO much trouble…

A typical Google ego search turned up the following, over at the astonishingly pretentiously named http://www.byzantiumshores.blogspot.com/, a blog by someone I myself don’t think I’ve ever so much as spoken to: