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March 4, 2010
The Source: Dr. Pat Love, My Primetime
The Dilemma: "[My fiancé] doesn't like me to use any type of sexual verbiage even when making love. He doesn't think it's ladylike…It's not just 'sex talk' either. For instance I once called my ex-husband a 'fart' and you should have seen the look of disapproval I got for it... Sometimes I am afraid to open my mouth for fear of offending him or looking bad in his eyes. Our sex life is fabulous — I have never had better... So how do you suggest I adjust?"
The Advice: "Your question is a good one and illustrates how opposites do attract... Over time you and your fiancé will experience many changes in your preferences and will need to adjust accordingly... Use one another as a resource. What is it that he loves about you? How could you use this trait to address this issue? What is it you love about him? How could he use this trait to address this difference? ...It sounds like you have a strong love and are one fortunate couple. How are you going to handle your good fortune?"
The Rebuttal: Dr. Love's response is all very touchy-feely and empathetic but I don't understand a word of it. This is not a matter of handling anyone's "good fortune", although with the letter writer enjoying her best sex ever, it's not hard to see why Dr. Love uses that term. Fact: he doesn't like salty language. Fact: she doesn't like behaving like a Duggar. Have a frank (well, not too frank) discussion about what you both can and can't deal with and make some mutual concessions for fudge's sake. It's not that flippin' hard.
The Dilemma: You need a little help communicating with your girlfriend.
The Advice: Fret not. Esquire is here, with "The Words She Really Wants to Hear", the men's mag's most exciting piece since June 2006's gripping expose on French cuffs.
A choice snippet:
If she says: "Do you like what I'm wearing?"
You're supposed to say: "You look beautiful."
This is because: "A little bit of ambiguity goes a long way. Leave specific criticisms to her friends. She doesn't love you for your informed opinions on culottes."
The Rebuttal: The world is not a CW sitcom and it's possible to give a woman constructive criticism about their clothing. In fact, it's vital. If I'm going to a job interview or your parents' house and I look like an ass, I want you to tell me about it. As a fellow rent payer, I dare say it's part of your job. Friends are great, but they're not there when we're getting dressed in the morning. You are. If you don't like it, just say something like, "What you've got on is okay, but I like your blue dress/houndstooth jacket/nipple clamps a little better." We promise we won't fall apart.
The Source: Veronica Vixen, Lowrider Magazine
The Dilemma: "Every girl I have been with has ended up being a ho. How do I tell the difference between a ho and a housewife?"
The Advice: "I know that some people think it's wrong, but I think the best way to test if your girl is a ho is the friend test. Get one of your friends to try and holla at ya girl. If she doesn't instantly start yelling at your homeboy, then run to you and tell you how much of an ass your friend is, then she definitely ain't the one to take home to momma."
The Rebuttal: If Veronica's method fails to resolve the issue, the question asker can always turn to this Ho-bags and Housewives photography project, or do the sensible thing and seek out the informed medical opinion of Dr. Dre. He could also do something really wacky, like broadening his definition of womanhood in order to stop coming off like such a wank-knob and attract a better class of female.
The Source: Robbyne Kaamil, GaySocialites.com
The Dilemma: "I love my job and can see myself growing with this company. I get along with everyone but I think my boss has a crush on me. He is always asking me to go out with him and other co-workers for after work drinks…He recently asked that he and I meet up for Sunday brunch. I agreed to go. On Monday at work he asked me jokingly 'Did we make out yesterday?' I don't want to start a relationship with him but I'm starting to feel some sexual tension between us. How do I stay on good terms with my boss and keep my job?"
The Advice: "You are wise not to spread your legs for your boss man…You don't have to go out every time with your boss and co-workers…Regarding the sexual tension between you and your boss I wouldn't get worked up over that. Just because you let a dog have a sniff of meat doesn't mean you have to let him take a bite. Besides, I doubt that your boss wants a sexual harassment suit on his hands."
The Rebuttal: How come there's no male equivalent of "spread your legs", a phrase which always makes it sound like a woman is doing something tawdry and awful? "Don't accept every coworker invite" is good advice, but I wouldn't assume the boss is automatically going to control himself. Avoid hanging out with him one-on-one and put a framed picture of a "boyfriend" on your desk. If all else fails, hit up Human Resources.
Commentarium (29 Comments)
While getting dressed for work one morning, I had some thoughts that the white pants I was going to wear might be a bit see-through. We have a small mirror, and using it, I realized that my panties could be seen, so I opted to go commando. Before leaving, I asked my husband if he could tell I wasn't wearing panties, and if my pants looked see-through (my mirror was too small for me to tell). He told me I looked beautiful. Got to work, and I was incredibly embarrassed after my boss took me aside around 2 o'clock (after almost a full day of seeing clients at the hospital I work at) and told me that everyone had been staring at my butthole. Men: If a woman doesn't look good in an outfit, tell her, otherwise she's just going to be embarrassed when she finds out later.
Mining "Lowrider" Magazine for bad advice columns now are we Erin? And acting shocked by what we find!? Go figure!
But what was best is the condescending advice from the liberal elite -"broaden your definition of womanhood"! But what if, for the readers of Lowrider, all the available women really are just ho or housewives? They still need a test to tell the two apart!
I bet your husband said you looked beautiful because he could see your butthole!
so I have to clear my cookies each time?
Betty, I hope you're joking. What sane person would think they could get away with that?
I'm sure he just didn't notice right?
Oh for pity's sake; the first three rules any man learns--or should learn--from his father:
1. Never tell your beloved that her outfit is unattractive or that she looks bad in it.
2. Never buy your beloved a household appliance for a present.
3. Never attempt to win an argument by explaining "why" you did something.
Sure, there are exceptions, and only an idiot would not tell someone an outfit is torn or stained or--if desperate--would not use womanspeak to convey an important point ("I think that transparent look is quite striking from behind"). Still, the world would be a better, calmer place if these three rules were followed.
AlanK: You mean dishonesty, impracticality, and abandoning logical reasoning?
I thought we lived in a progressive and enlightened time.
Wow, is there anything more pathetic than "NN", who rushes to comment on *every single column* Erin writes (8am?!) and froths desperately at the mouth each time about "the liberal elite " and his bizarre, crackpot opinions on every single word she writes? I think if I was so unstable that I obsessed over each utterance of someone I professed to hate yet kept reading, I'd have to either decide to get a life, or kill myself.
(Maybe Erin made a crack about tiny penises one time and he took it personally...? That and intense loneliness, obviously. Poor little guy!)
I agree. Though, of course, spilling more ink that NN did and ridiculing her for her ridicule of Erin kind of makes you look like a small dicked crackpot yourself no?
Maybe if you don't like NN's comments you just shouldn't read them?
Uh, your idiocy is getting a little recursively meta there, don't you think? (FYI, I've commented once. NN has repeated that same song & dance a dozen times or more. So no cookie for you, sorry.)
Sorry @HA, some things are just too ridiculous to resist calling out and obsessively trolling Erin's column and then accusing HER of trying to hard to find something to criticize is one of them.
Also if it's "liberal" and "elite" to suggest that growing up and getting over your big, fat Madonna/whore complex might be a good step towards finding a woman of substance, then this society is truly sick. Which I suspect is the case anyway, but you know what I mean.
I didn't mean to get too complicated for you. I just meant "don't feed the trolls!!". They just find a way to attack you too.
Anyway lets face it folks, Erin's column is troll-bait because all she does is troll the columns of others. NN is surely a dick but he is no worse than Erin - she makes a living as a parasite on the work/problems of others!! Presumably NN just does it for kicks!
I don't see anything parasitic about Erin or her column. What's so bad about pointing out the absurdity of a lot of the conventional wisdom about dating and relationships that you find in mainstream publications? She may do it in an essentially silly and lightweight way (and I don't think this column has any pretensions of being anything but) but it's still a perfectly fine thing to do. And anyway, I think providing people like me with a little escapist entertainment in the form of snarky commentary on pop culture is a perfectly legitimate and benign way to make a buck. But lying in wait for a columnist you don't like to say something you disagree with so you can fulminate semi-coherently about it in the comments section seems a bit silly and lame and quite a different thing altogether, no?
Oh, but btw Erin, I'm surprised you're not more skeeved out by the fiance in question in the Doctor Love column. It's one thing to not like dirty talk but to want to constantly police her language in order to enforce his ideas of what "ladies" should act like? That definitely pinged my "controlling creep" radar.
It would be one thing if Erin pointed out "the absurdity of a lot of the conventional wisdom about dating and relationships that you find in mainstream publications" but she doesn't. She mines the most whack job low rent publications she can find including Lowrider, the Western Courier, MyPrimetime and various blogs. She is out there actively looking for crap she disagrees with so she can make snarky comments about it.
Say want you want about NN -"fulminate semi-coherently"- she is, in fact, coherent and she imitates exactly what Erin does. Which is simply to point out Erin is speaking to a certain demographic and that entertainment value trumps advice value in all cases. Look at it this way, Erin is out exposing herself to crap and breathlessly trying to mine it for a paycheck, NN presumably just reads her column when she gets up in the morning, drops her troll bomb and then waits for the hilarity to ensure when Erin's defends try to draw a distinction between what NN does and what Erin does.
@HA--a good portion of nerve is snarky commentary on pop culture and random inane stuff you find on the internet and TV. It's supposed to be a funny, silly diversion. You know, ENTERTAINMENT. There's a lot of really stupid, silly, and absurd stuff out there and "mining it for a paycheck" is a very large part of what all comedians and humorists do. It's a job. A very harmless one.
Riffing on liberal elitism and other nonsense and making a point of personally attacking a particular columnist every chance you get, on the other hand, is just the behavior of some loser who really needs some healthier ways to get out his/her aggression.
I expect NN finds what she does very entertaining. As far as finding better ways to vent one's aggression, how is perpetuating a troll by making ever more fine grained distinctions working for you?
I see four posts by you to NN's one! That's as much as we heard from NN in the last month.
Um, how am I being aggressive? I'm participating in a discussion, which I could not do by myself, btw. And it's really only antagonistic on your end. Recall that it began when you responded rather aggressively to a poster who wasn't even addressing you. And, personally, I don't really care whether or not I'm encouraging trolls. They do their thing anyway. Why not express disagreement with a statement I find completely ridiculous? It's a comments section of a fluffy humor column. The stakes are really not that high here, one way or the other. I hope you remember that.
I'd say you are being aggressive in that same way you claimed NN was. By being bold enough to voice displeasure in the comments section. But now that you have basically admitted that what Erin does amounts to trite fluff and is mere entertainment, it seems like the grounds for claiming that NN was overly aggressive was that she was being insufficiently amused by Erin's column or, perhaps, that NN's comments weren't entertaining enough.
You express disagreement with NN, Erin does that same with Lowrider mag and NN finds fit to call Erin an elitist for sticking it to Lowrider. Where is a distinction between you all to be found?
It seems like your position is that snarky disagreement is only ok if one gets a paycheck for it or doesn't do it too often or if it is done by you.
What a tangled web of critique you weave. NN sounds more coherent by the second.
lol, critique? How very seriously you take all of this. You're a bigger troll than NN...
""And, personally, I don’t really care whether or not I’m encouraging trolls.""
Sorry didn't mean to speak above the level you had set for the comments section.
Perhaps you'd prefer 'criticism', 'bitching', 'harping' or 'histrionics' ?
Looks like we've got a flame war. Fortunately I brought some marshmallows. Anybody got a stick?
The funniest part is how "@HA" has convinced some of those responding to him that he's not also "NN", just by randomly switching to "she" for NN at one point.
Awww, isn't it cute how NN thinks he can make his opinion look popular by creating sockpuppets? Too bad about IP addresses, eh?
Can you imagine how up his own ass a moron like that is?
Wow you must be able to see into the matrix or some shit with your ability to see IP addresses. All the rest of us can see are names.
Talk about being 'up your own ass'!!
I can't stand it when a guy is too aggressive. I wrote about it on my blog!
http://sexandloveblog.com/component/myblog/super-aggressive-men.html
I really liked the article, and the very cool blog
9hIO6V Received the letter. I agree to exchange the articlesss
Now you say something