A Women’s Liberation Guide to Men by Sam Fryman (the cover illustration is Nightmare by Henry Fuseli ) © Sam Fryman 2005, all rights reserved A Women’s Liberation Guide to Men 2 Contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1 - Love Factually – the true meaning of love 8 Chapter 2 - Modern Man - the sex beast with ten fingers 23 Chapter 3 - The Psychology of Sex 37 Chapter 4 - Male Psychology – the hand that rocks the cradle 49 Chapter 5 - Raising the Male Child – setting Truman free 58 Chapter 6 - Evading the Beast - how not to get raped 71 Chapter 7 - Choosing a Mate – finding your man 83 Chapter 8 - Keeping Mr Wonderful – how to live with your man 96 Chapter 9 - The Princess Diana syndrome – the rejection of true love 106 Chapter 10 - Feminism – Wicked witch or best friend? 115 Chapter 11 - Women and Business – dealing with Mr Scrooge 125 Chapter 12 - Meeting Dr Frankenstein – saving women’s body and soul 145 Chapter 13 - Defeating the Evil Weed – women and smoking 162 Chapter 14 - Women and The Teacher – don’t stand so close to me 173 Chapter 15 - The Ultimate Women’s Liberation – liberating your mind 180 Chapter 16 - The Lady and the Guru - a rational take on religion and spirituality 182 Chapter 17 - Lies are a Feminine Issue – overcoming the killer answer 192 Chapter 18 - Desperately Seeking Ally McBeal - women and the law 208 Appendix - A Meditation Technique to Help us Gain Control Over Our Mind 218 A Women’s Liberation Guide to Men 3 Introduction In the genuinely funny 1993 comedy, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a cynical TV news presenter and weatherman who is forced to go on an assignment he finds degrading with his new producer, Andie MacDowell, to cover the Punxsutawney Groundhog Festival, which is not incidentally itself a fiction, but a real life event carried out annually on the second of February in this small US town in Pennsylvania. The movie however is a fantasy, though a very clever one, and after drearily carrying out his assignment once again the character Murray plays, Phil Connors, attempts to escape just as fast as he possibly can back to the city, where he evidently finds the comforts which please him that this – as he sees it – backward little town full of “hick” or yokel types clearly lacks. For example he jokes at the expense of the genial but dizzy lady housekeeper he is lodging with, Mrs Lancaster, that not only does she not have espresso coffee, but she likely does not even know how to spell it. On his way to the Groundhog Festival he meets a series of characters who mostly want money from him, whom he cynically evades, and describes the apparently old school friend he has been accosted by, who is now a high-pressure insurance salesman, as a giant leech. Likewise he turns down the offer of a dinner invitation from his producer, Rita, played by Andie McDowell, and their mocking and devious camera man, Larry, on the grounds that Larry eats with the bad manners of some kind of pig. Larry’s conclusion, expressed to Andie McDowell’s producer part is that - there are a lot of things wrong with Phil and calls him repeatedly an egotistical prima donna. Phil’s life goes through a dramatic change however, when in horror he discovers as he wakes up early next morning that he is repeating the same day over, but nobody realises but him, and each new day he wakes up is the same one over and over again. This is a very clever idea and concept, because this really is man’s life and arguably also women’s. For we each one of us go through the same old routine most of the time, day after day, unless we lead a very dramatic life like a big businessman or a movie star, and even then life can become samey as one exotic city or filming location begins to look just like another, and we have a feeling that once we have seen one sleepy little Mexican village we have seen them all. A Women’s Liberation Guide to Men 4 But Bill Murray as Phil Connors has this lifestyle enforced on him taken to an extreme, in which he is confronted by the same experiences and people he has seen day after day behaving in almost exactly the same way and saying almost exactly the same things. Eventually Phil learns to turn this situation to his advantage, and uses the knowledge he wheedles out of a pretty local girl he learns one day to seduce her on the next, by pretending he was an old classmate at her school who was always in love with her. As he canoodles with her on the settee he promises to marry her, so that she will agree to let him stay and give him the sex that is his goal, knowing that he will never have to keep that promise and that she will have forgotten about him entirely by the next day, which for her is always the first. And as young men especially, a great many males do the very same. They make a promise to a girl under the duress of passion in order to get their “wicked way”, which they may not even remotely ever intend to keep. The truth currently is that in our “liberated society” the average man would, like Phil Connors, do or say virtually anything he thinks necessary to get a woman into bed, and now that women too have been liberated by the contraceptive pill and other techniques, nowadays that promise may not have to be so great. For women are now in a dream of romance and sex in which they think sex is love, and maybe love is sometimes sex, for they are confused about the meaning of the term just as are the fictional ladies in Sex and the City. For surely a man who wants to go to bed with a woman obviously loves her, doesn’t he? As ridiculous as that question is to any truly experience woman, it is sadly alas, what too many women still believe, especially if the man concerned is – if she is honest with herself – “out of her league”, which strategy of “plumbing the lower divisions” many men well know is the way to get easy sex from women whom they never intend to have a serious or long lasting relationship with. But then we see that few women, perhaps Katie Holmes excepted, any longer seem to care anyway whether they stay virgins or not until they do meet a man they really want to be partner with or marry and can get. Rather most girls are intent upon losing this once priceless quality of virginity at the very first opportunity, and thereby going to a permanently devalued status in the eyes of millions of men. For does any woman really think a man is happy that he is not the first and only one? He is happy only to the degree that if she is not “unused”, then when he finally leaves or dumps her for another, he won’t feel too guilty in that process, for he can hardly be blamed for “ruining her” as would have been the judgment on him in former days, can he? A Women’s Liberation Guide to Men 5 But any girl or woman who imagines any man does not still think that a girl or woman who is a virgin is the most prized and desirable female on the planet is living under a very large delusion and deceit. For example we have heard of a good number of men who have slept with maybe twenty different women, but who then go on to marry or settle down with a virgin, so he is for her the only one. And then of course, there is a more powerful reason than ever for seeking this virginity in women now, which is the fear of sexually transmitted diseases. It is suggested to you, that the time is not far off when no man or women will ever get into bed with a member of the opposite – or even same – sex without some kind of certificate or guarantee that they are disease free, and laughably, this may eventually even force upon men and women in general a state of pre-marital inexperience and virginity which they are currently doing everything in their power to destroy. But we seem to have forgotten about Phil Connors, and what he has done with his “eternal life” in Groundhog Day. And on one of many repeated days, Andie McDowell as Rita, when she finally believes his story, asks him that very thing, and learns that he has been wasting his “eternity” having chosen to flick cards several hours a day until he can effortless toss them into a hat. But the main story of the movie is that Phil Connors can in one day learn and do anything he wants, he can rob banks, he can tear up the town, or even drive himself and the groundhog into a pit and get blown to smithereens, yet each new day wake up without a scratch and everything OK. But what he cannot do is win Rita’s love. Each day he tries all the tricks he has learned, with all the facts he has sneakily collected from her about her likes and dislikes, but when it gets to the bedroom scene, she insists that tomorrow (which for him never happens, you see) would be a far better day to continue their new relationship, and in desperation at her failure to understand, he tries to persuade her to stay and everyday gets slapped over and over.