Imitatio project: Don Draper's Guide to picking up women

It's a pretty safe bet that anytime someone tells you that a sketch on Saturday Night Live was hilarious the actual sketch will be lame. That's mostly because Saturday Night Live is usually lame. Here's a clue people: it's Saturday Night and you're sitting at home watching late-night television! That's what losers do. Late night Saturday, anyone who isn't a loser is either out on the town or in bed.

Anyway, Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women wasn't funny even though I kept reading people saying it's brilliant. You can watch it yourself at this link until the copyright enforcers find it.

I've transcribed the four easy steps:

1. When in doubt, remain absolutely silent.
2. When asked about your past, give vague, open-ended answers.
3. Have a great name.
4. Look fantastic in a suit, look fantastic in casual wear, look fantastic in anything. Look good, sound good, smell good, kiss good, strut around with supreme confidence, be uncannily successful at your job, blow people away anytime you say anything, take six hour lunches, disappear for weeks at a time, lie to everyone about everything, drink and smoke constantly, basically, be Don Draper.

It's the last one that does all the work trying to be funny and it is telling that they are trying too hard, which is why it isn't funny. And they are trying so hard because they are intimidated. I'll go at these one at a time.

But first, a question: Does Don Draper pick up women?  Obviously, he ends up with quite a few but he doesn't pick them up. That's the first thing to note about his approach: he doesn't have one. Okay, the script is on his side and that is why women approach him but there is a lot to be said for this. The last line of the joke is, "basically, be Don Draper". If you look at the way the role is played, however, you'll notice that is what he does.  He doesn't go after women so much as he goes after the role. He is always trying to be Don Draper and he is always trying to be Don Draper because he is not, in fact, Don Draper.

As I've said before, this makes him like a Greek hero. Read the Iliad and you will see that Hector worries about being Hector. He has a role and he knows he has to live up to it and he worries about falling short of it. That's the opposite of what we are told today. We are told to be yourself and then we are advised to go out and pick up women, working with "a wingman" and a whole lot of other bullshit.

Okay, back to the four steps.

The first is actually really good advice. As a man, you should just shut up when in doubt and the world would be a better place if more of us did. Talking too much is asking for it. Don't do it.

The second isn't quite accurate. Don Draper does give vague, open-ended answers but that is because he doesn't talk about himself much. And that, again, is very good advice.

The third is kind of funny in a way that the writers at Saturday Night Live didn't intend. "Don Draper" is actually a very plain WASP name in an era when people have been trying very hard to have exotic names like Laetitia, Beyonce, Jay-Z and the like. There is a lesson here.

The final bit of advice is just lame but there are some telling mistakes in it. Don Draper would never say "kiss good" or use "basically" as an introductory clause. He usually speaks correctly, elegantly and simply. If he does something else for effect, it really has an effect because it is rare for him to do so. A related point, Don Draper not only wouldn't say "kiss good", he wouldn't say "kiss well" either because he is a man and not a fourteen year old girl.

Take away the inflation and deflation that fails to make this funny, and Don Draper is the strong, silent type and that is a good thing to be.

Who is better at separating sex and emotion?

I take it no one is going to accuse me of being sexist for suggesting that women lie about sex. Why am I so confident? Because I remember that all the good, politically correct people insisted that everyone lies about sex during the Lewinsky scandal and the class that is "everyone" necessarily includes women.

In any case, men and women sometimes lie about sex. Perhaps they do it for the same reasons and perhaps they do it for different reasons. Here is one explanation that suggests that they do it for different reasons. Don't read it to agree or disagree but rather to understand the logic. Get inside it. Think the way someone like Dr. Frank Pittman thinks

While there is a common assumption that men and women fall in love at different rates, or that men cheat primarily for sex while women are more likely to be looking for an emotional connection, this may not always be the case. Dr. Frank Pittman suggests that men are typically more honest about the sex than women, perhaps because men are better able to separate the issue of sex from that of emotional attachment. He believes that this is due in large part to the fact that men have their genitals on the outside rather than inside and so men seem to separate sexual response from a lasting and committed relationship more easily than do women.

The line that should jump out at you, because it is so unusual to see men praised for anything these days is, "men are typically more honest about sex than women." That is in direct violation of the Althouse rule that says that it is politically correct to talk about differences between men and women only so long as you do so in a way that is flattering to women.

There is a reason why Dr. Pittman is being critical of women here. It's because he more or less has to be because of the next step in the argument. Admitting that men might be more honest about sex than women allows him to dodge another, even more troubling admission.

In his practice, he says that he has seen many cases where men admit to the sex and deny any emotional connection to the affair partner, while women tend to talk of strong emotions and feelings of love while denying that sex took place. He believes that if a man denies the sexual context of the affair and dwells on the emotional connection above all else, he is probably lying. He finds that women, on the other hand, more easily talk of an emotional connection and the feelings induced by an affair while denying any sexual context to the entire episode.

I've added the emphasis on the words "lying" and "denying" to highlight the dilemma poor Dr. Pittman finds himself on the horns of. Notice that when a man "denies" he is "lying". A woman, on the other hand, is only "denying". So the Althouse rule is allowed to slip in a minor way in the first paragraph I cite in order to save it in the second. Or, to put it another way, Dr. Pittman allows that men are typically more honest about sex than women in order to avoid its obvious corollary, which is that women typically lie about sex.

Before getting to that, let's talk about men. Why would a man be forthright about the emotional connection while lying about the sex? This is not a trick question: he lies about the emotions because he wants to reduce the harm the affair might do to his marriage. In a sense this is crazy because if anything is going to threaten your relationship or marriage it is your wife finding out that you are having sex with another woman. And while that is true, having an affair that involves both sex and an emotional connection is a much more serious risk; it is, in fact, almost certainly fatal to your marriage. Restricting the affair to just sex is safer; you can have a meaningless affair without any risk to your marriage. No, your wife isn't going to see it that way but she doesn't have to find out does she? No, I'm not advocating that. The point is that that is the way the guy thinks and he isn't crazy to do so. An affair that was purely about sex would be the easiest to maintain and the easiest to break off. He avoids building an emotional connect or, if he can't do that, lies to himself about the emotional connection he is building with his lover in order to pretend that this can all be easy.

Remember Sheila, whom we were discussing just the other day? Her affair is like that:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum. Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.'

And it's important to recognize the deep truth here, as hard as you may find it to associate truth with something a cheating spouse said. For the blunt reality is that if Sheila allowed herself to fall in love with Michael she'd put her marriage at immediate risk whereas an affair that is "just about sex" is only threat if she gets caught.

But that is supposed to be the way that only men think, which is what the good Dr. Pittman meant when he said men are typically more honest about sex. But, you know, I don't entirely believe that. Yes, there are some men who are very good at separating sex and emotion. Notoriously so. But most men aren't like that. Most men tend to fall in love with the women who have sex with them. I know I do. In fact, I have tended to be deeply in love with women long before any sex happened.

And the man who can separate sex and emotion could also be described as the man who is unable to connect the two. In fact, he usually is loudly denigrated for this. The only time men are praised for being able to separate sex and emotion and, therefore, to be more honest about sex is when it is necessary to provide cover for women.

Now there are good evolutionary reasons that I won't go into in any depth here why women, all the talk to the contrary, might actually be very good at separating sex and emotion. To give just one example: women typically live longer than men. Being s strong widow who can care for and raise children without a man is a good trait to have in evolutionary terms. Not all women will have this trait but most certainly will.

Men, on the other hand, have considerable reason to bond emotionally with women they have sex with. Your children will have a much better chance of surviving and passing on your genes if you stay with her and help her raise the children. That's one approach. The alternative is the shotgun approach where a man tries to impregnate as many women as possible thereby increasing the chance that some will survive to pass on his genes. And, yes, there is a small subset of men who become notoriously good at having lots of partners while avoiding emotional ties with any or most of them. Less often discussed, there are women who are good at tying one man down emotionally while having lots of affairs. But most men and women will bond with the partner they have sex with and will see continued good sex as part of that love.

There is, however, no reason at all to believe that women are less likely to be good at separating sex and emotion. Again, don't take my word for it: who is it that typically insists that love in a relationship doesn't have to be connected to sex? It isn't usually the man.

There will be more ...

Nothing is ever women's fault, a continuing series

In the book, Bergner ... lays out a diverse body of research that threatens to disrupt all the modern stereotypes of female sexuality: That women are not visual creatures; that their sex drive is lower than men’s; that they’re aroused by love, not sex; and that they’re naturally fitted to be sexual objects, not agents.

And who is to blame for this? If you guessed men, go to the head of the class.

If society didn’t realize all of that before, Bergner writes, it’s because the men who run it didn’t want to. “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force,” he concludes. In the Middle Ages, it was constrained by the idea that “lust-drunk witches … left men ‘smooth,’ devoid of their genitals.” In the last century, it was constrained by Freud’s theory that women have “a weaker sexual instinct” than men. Now, it’s constrained by modern evolutionary psychology that says that “women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.” Across culture, Bergner writes, “with scientific or God-given confidence, girls and women are told how they should feel.” Mostly, they should feel comfortable sexualizing themselves, but not men.

That doesn't pass the smell test.  Men don't want women to recognize their own sexual desire? Does that sound even remotely credible?

Consider, for example, the Facebook app called "Bang With Friends". Created by men, the app allows users to anonymously pick people from their friends list whom they'd like to have sex with. If two people both pick one another, the app lets them both know and they can have sex. Notice the strategy: straight to sex with no complicated social ritual to go through first.

That's not the way all men think all the time but it is the way a lot of men think a lot of the time. Women occasionally feel like that too but only a disgusting pig of a man would go so far as to make a computer app to make it actually possible. To turn around and claim that it is men are telling women that they should not feel these things is bullshit.

And who is it that always insists they want love and not sex?  Or, the dread of it, who insists that they don't want "just sex"? Those are things women say and yet we are supposed to believe that this happens because men are scared of women's  "desire—its inherent range and innate power". That is bullshit on stilts.

No, I don't know why women keep saying they want things they don't actually desire. I don't understand why women fall in love with men they desire and then allow the way they think of him to change so that they no longer desire him. Perhaps they can't help it.

Whatever the reason, Its! Not! Men's! Fault!

The problem needs more careful analysis than what the author of the piece I cite above, Amanda Hess, has given it. For starters, look at stereotype #1 from the list above.  Who is it that tells us that women aren't turned on by visual things? It's women. That tells us that women have, at the very least, internalized the notion that they are not visual creatures when it comes to sex. Or, to put it more baldly, women really believe it when they say they are not turned on by erotic images. But they are aroused by them.

This has been proved by repeated studies in which women were monitored by devices that measure their sexual response while being shown images. And women are not exactly subtle about what they do respond to:

The only strong preference Chivers found among her female subjects? When she presented straight women with photographs of human genitals, their blood “rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen” than when a flaccid penis or a female “crotch shot” appeared.

Well, I'm not surprised by that. Any man who has had a reasonable life has had the wonderful pleasure of watching an aroused woman go gaga over his erect penis and marveled at how very, very different that is from the public image she presents. But ask any woman you know if she'd be interested in looking at porn featuring men with erections and the odds are that she'll say "no". She'll deny that such a thing could possibly do anything for her.

(If you conducted a study where women kept under secret surveillance while left alone with porn, I'm certain that the vast majority would spend some quality time with the porn. And then they'd turn around and lie about it. If forced to admit the truth, a good number would then insist that their reaction that day was unusual and not a reflection of what they are really like.)

Part of the problem is that people, such as the author of the piece I cite here, confuse desire and want. There are lots of things that I desire that I do not want. I might desire to have sex with Hillary but I'm married and so is she and I want my marriage and respect hers whereas I merely desire her body. I don't even know that she'd be interested. Likewise, I may sometimes have a desire to tell my friends certain blunt truths about them but I want their friendship more than I desire to blurt out whatever it is that is bugging me so I don't.

The real problem women have, and it's something right in Bergner's book (although he apparently can't grasp the importance of it), is that women don't understand their own desires. In his book he discusses a study where men and women were show potentially erotic images and their arousal was measured objectively by measuring blood flow to their genitals. At the same time, the test subjects were given a keyboard to record their subjective sense of their arousal. The men's subjective responses were 100 percent in accord with what the objective measurements indicated. Here is what happened with the women:

... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord.

Notice the phrase "especially the straight women". For everyone knows what the cause of the problem is. Women tend not to understand their own desires because they don't want to understand them. More to come in tomorrow's post.

Who is supposed to fix this problem? Part 2

More from that New York Times article that inspired yesterday's post.

Dietrich Klusmann, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, has provided a glimpse into the bedrooms of longtime couples. His surveys, involving a total of almost 2,500 subjects, comprise one of the few systematic comparisons of female and male desire at progressive stages of committed relationships. He shows women and men in new relationships reporting, on average, more or less equal lust for each other. But for women who’ve been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins — and continues, leaving male desire far higher. (Within this plunge, there is a notable pattern: over time, women who don’t live with their partners retain their desire much more than women who do.) 

It's that last paragraph parenthesis that jumps out at me. Similarly, some couples also report that changing to separate bedrooms improves the wife's sex drive.

No, I'm not suggesting that you move out of the house to save your marriage but notice how the moral psychology works. If you normally sleep in different places, it takes a commitment for one of you to walk to the other one's place. Or it takes an effort to entice the other to come to your place.

Let's go back to Linneah and her avoidance tactics from yesterday's post again. She'd go to bed early, concentrate on a book and then not respond to her husband's overtures until he gave up. One reason she can do that is because they are living together and sleeping in the same bed. If, OTOH, they are not always in the same bed together, she has to earn his attention. If she wants to be together with him then she has to show commitment and interest every single time, even if that only amounts to actually getting up and going to his place or inviting him to hers.

Let's look at Sheila from the first of this series again. Here is what she values about her marriage:

He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that.

Well, how did poor Peter get to be that way?  He got to be that way by giving Sheila the things she said she wanted. She wanted him to be the father of her children and to be her pal so he became that. And she paid him back by losing interest in him sexually. And she did this years before she started having sex with another man. the actual affair, when it came, was merely the consummation of a betrayal that had actually taken place years before.

There is also evidence, by the way, that suggests that men who do a lot of the housework get less sex than men who don't. I hope you are beginning to see the pattern.If not, here is some more.

One theory holds that it’s a challenge for both sexes to maintain passion over the long-term because it’s threatening to desire the same person from whom we seek security and true understanding. It leaves us feeling too vulnerable. As Stephen A. Mitchell, one of the leaders of relational psychoanalysis, described it: “Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her.”

Remember all those feminist rants about men being afraid of commitment? What distinguishes those men is that they understand women better than women understand themselves.

Esther Perel, a couples therapist and author of “Mating in Captivity,” emphasizes a separateness at the heart of longstanding passion. “Many couples confuse love with merging,” she writes. “This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires distance.” 

Exactly. And which partner to marriage—the man or thge woman—do you think is most likely to make the mistake of confusing love with merging? More to come tomorrow ...

Cheating woman post of the day

I'm doing a lot of reading about women who cheat and the reasons they do it in order to create a sort of virtual affair in my imagination that I will use for some fiction I am creating so there will be a a lot of posts on the subject here.

I found this quote interesting:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum. Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.' 

Why is that interesting? It's the larger context that makes it interesting. All by itself it's just one of millions of examples of the sort of banal lies women and men tell themselves and others to excuse their desire for illicit sex. But now read the quote that opens the piece and think about it again.

One of the challenges Sheila hadn't expected was where to hide her sexy lingerie. 'I went out and spent a fortune at Myla on gorgeous transparent bras and G-strings – things I'd stopped wearing for my husband, Peter, even before we were married. 

'The problem was where to keep them and how to wash them? I could have worn them every day but after 13 years of greying M&S pants and flesh-coloured bras Peter would have been rightly suspicious. I ended up stuffing all my new buys inside the legs of a manky old tracksuit. I washed them by hand, locked in the bathroom, and dried them with a hairdryer as I didn't dare hang them up.'

The line that jumps right out at me is: "things I'd stopped wearing for my husband, Peter, even before we were married." Imagine Sheila and Peter very much in love with one another in the days before their marriage. She has sexy lingerie but has stopped wearing it for him. He asks why. She says she doesn't feel comfortable wearing it anymore (we know she said that that because that is what women always say when they don't want to wear lingerie for a man). Now flash forward and there she is standing in the lingerie store buying a sheer bra with matching G-string for her lover Micheal. Does anyone imagine that she looked at the G-string and thought, "That looks comfortable."

(I also love the line about how her husband Peter would have gotten suspicious if she'd worn her lingerie more regularly. The real problem, of course, is that he would have wanted to have sex when he saw her in lingerie and he would have wanted the kind of wild erotic abandonment that such lingerie suggests and she doesn't want to give that to him anymore, in fact she stopped wanting to give him that even before they got married. "Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone." The real crime is the thing she thinks of as something that "just happened by itself", that she stopped loving and started denying her husband; it's just collateral damage that another man ends up enjoying the thing she denies the man who should be getting her love.)

And do note her age! Sheila is in her mid forties at the time of the affair. Age is often given as a reason not to dress erotically anymore. A woman will say she could wear clothing when she was in her twenties  but now she feels ridiculous in it and she'll keep saying that right up to the day in her mid forties when she suddenly wants to feel sexy for her new lover and then it's bring on the G-string.

Myla only sells one G-string (famous because it was once featured on Sex and the City), by the way, so you can see for yourself what she bought and wore for her lover Michael. That's a key element in any affair. The sex has to feel really illicit and daring and what better way than to buy yourself something like that. It's a positive joy for Sheila to do this thing for herself, and Michael of course. It's understandable. Sin and betrayal is always understandable because we all sin and betray. One of the reasons to have an affair is to step out a bit and do things you wouldn't normally do. So you buy the sexy lingerie or get a lot more meticulous about your grooming, or wear nicer clothes, start reading poetry, follow more sophisticated culture like opera, ballet or poetry, or follow much less sophisticated culture like going to the track or the fights. All in all, you create a more interesting version of yourself. And you create this new you for yourself!

Think about Sheila washing her underwear by hand and drying it with the hair dryer and finally hiding it in an old track suit. That's an adventure! It's like being a spy. It's fun.The effort involved only increases the fun because she likes getting into it.

Yes, it was important for lover Michael to be thrilled when he saw her in the G-string but that is still a selfish desire because Sheila did it to support her secret vision of herself as a great and exotic lover. Most women are fantastic lovers when they put the effort into it, by the way. That's the easy part. The thing that needs explaining is why they think it's fair to stop doing so after the man has committed his life to them and sometimes then turn around and start doing for some other guy. And the answer is that the whole thing was purely selfish from the get-go. Sheila sought attachment and love when it suited her, and all of society sanctioned this desire of hers, but now that she no longer craves that she is having an affair.

But suppose she had not had the affair but everything else remained the same. That too would have been a betrayal. And if Peter were to complain about this, he would have been told to man up and deal with the fact that women change as they get older. But the only thing that has really changed is her feeling for him.

Which is why comfort isn't really the issue. If comfort really mattered to women, they would all wear their manky old track suits every day instead of hiding their lingerie in them. Note above that Sheila now favours her husband with Marks and Sparks utility knickers that she wears so long they are greying! Does anyone think that she does that for comfort? The real issue is effort. Women (and men) either do or do not make an effort to be attractive for others. That effort is the real problem and not discomfort.

The affair really gets unfair if we consider poor Peter who stopped getting the special treatment even before they got married! But she says she loves him:

'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that.'

Well, it's much easier to say things like that than face up to the fact that you're a selfish jerk.

On the other hand, why did she get away with it? I don't mean the affair that her husband, presumably, doesn't know about. No, the problem is that she started cheating him years before when she stopped making the effort she was willing to make early in their relationship. It was all bait and switch. She wore sexy lingerie when she was alone and wanted to attract a man. Once she had one, she said she didn't feel comfortable and confident in sexy clothes anymore so she stopped wearing them. But the point is that she let herself stop feeling comfortable and confident. Anyone want to bet that she didn't start exercising and being a bit more meticulous about her intimate grooming when she bought that G-string? Why is it okay for a woman to give a man that sort of extra effort when she is interested in having her self esteem propped up but deny it to him after she has vowed to love all the days of her life? For it's that kind of betrayal, which receives the full sanction of our culture, that makes the other kind possible.

I can easily imagine (because I've heard many women argue this) that it is unfair to expect a woman to feel the same spark that motivated her to make such efforts in the early days of a relationship later in marriage. I'm not sure why it's unfair. Is it because it would require effort and dedication?

 I stopped fancying Peter years ago. The girls were small and sex with him had long been just another chore, like loading the dishwasher. 

Think of how different that statement would be treated coming from a man talking about his wife. Do you think he'd get a sympathetic write up in the paper?

Final thought: the article suggests another motive for why more women are cheating on their husbands.

Thousands of women like Sheila are enjoying what they believe to be no-strings flings. Having witnessed the devastation divorce wreaked on their parents' generation, they have no desire to end their marriages. Instead they are searching for variety in an otherwise humdrum routine.

 How lovely, she's cheating in order to save her marriage.