I met my future bride in South Africa. She had immmigrated there from Austria when she was eighteen years old.

ALONE.

I like gutsy women. I like smart women.

Which was a mistake. She was smart, so after some years she divorced me.

SIDE NOTE:

The problem is that if you marry somebody you have to LIVE with them. Even I have had opportunities for living with enormously sexy women who had the IQ of a turtle. In fact, such women tend to fall in love with intelligent men. I couldn’t do it.

Back to our story. My wife was a legal secretary in Jo’burg, so when we went to DC we cound that legal secretaries there got salaries we couldn’t refuse, so she took the job again. It had been some time since she had been on that job in South Africa, so she had to buy all her clothes and cosmetics from scratch.

The bill, back in 1972, was two THOUSAND dollars. That’s at least ten thousand now. To start in my job I had to buy Brooks Brothers suits, but that was a pittance compared ot outfitting HER. And not one penny she, a right fisted German, spent was for ego or show. It was all essential to a legal secretary in a major legal firm in DC, and it paid off handsomely.

But it taught me something. Every time I go into a store and walk by the cosmetics section, I am dazzled. We men are all impressed when we walk into a hardware store or a golfing shop and see all the tools we do not understand.

Compared to a cosmetics section, that is amateur stuff. Row on row on row of things no man (outside of San Francisco or Paris) has any concept of. I have heard the term “eye liner” all my life, but it occurs to me I don’t really know what it is, much less how a woman uses it.

We men are all deeply impressed when a carpenter comes into a tool shop and assesses things that are a mystery to us.

Meanwhile, every twelve-year-old girl knows everything in a hundred-foot-long cosmetics display. Her oly problem is that her Mommy won’t let her USE them.

When a woman agrees to date you, she may be wearing the Modern Uniform of long pants that is designed to make her look as much like a boy as possible. But she has spent a long time on details you don’t notice, because she is artful enough to make it a part of the general picture we take for granted. She has spent a lifetime learning how to use all that stuff.

When she appears, it is TAH-DAH! moment. For God’s sake, man, don’t tell her “You look nice.” LOOK at her. SEE why she looks so great. And SAY SO.

The Strong Silent type is great for cowboy movies.

But he ends up kissing his HORSE.

I just remembered the other thing I know about sex.

There was book by a disgusted woman back in the 1960s called “The Inept Seducer.” She explained at length how men goof it up. In the end, I was kind of proud to be male. It shows a certain perverse talent for us, living in a finite world, to find THAT MANY ways to turn a women off.

This was not a Women’s Lib book. She made it very clear that she longed for men to treat her like a woman. This led to the best part of the best part of the book. She was writing about the INept seducer. So at the end she wrote down ten points called, “How to be EPT.”

I tried them and my success rate rose dramatically. Granted I was starting from a pretty low base.

I don’t remember them all, and I can’t even quote them correctly. Let me repeat what I do remember. The lady gave us these pointers about what a man should do on a date, and they are inthe wrong order here:

1) “Make nice. Smile at us.”

In other words, do all the stuff A Real Man won’t do. As a British girl once told me very charmingly:

“I’m SUPPOSED to be a sissy. I’m a GIRL.”

After a lifetime of conditioning to impress everything about how Tough you are, a man tends to forget that little point on a date.

2) ” WORRY about us. ”

When the food comes inthe restaurant, don’t just dig in. Wait for her to try hers and asks how it is and if she wants you to call the waiter. That’s your job, not hers.

3) “Give us things.”

Always show up with a little something. Not something big enough to look like a seducation bribe. Something that shows you were thinking about her before the date.

4) “Touch us.”

Guide her into the car. Go open her door. Focus on HER. Put your hand on her back lightly. Use any excuse to put your hand under her arm to guide her along.

5) “Appreciate other women, but never ogle.”

A woman, she says, likes men who LIKE women. So if a good-looking woman comes by, you don’t try to make like a stuffed duck and look rigidly in front of you. You gie a quick up-and-down, an appraisal, and then turn back to your date.

All of us men are mystified by how little women OGLE men. Some do, but generally a woman can take a look at a man and they apparently have some special memory function that makes that all they need. We love to STARE, especially when ceretain parts of a woman’s body are especially prominent.

Assess, appreciate, don’t stare.

Women do not know how HARD this can be for us.

I don’t remember the rest. But the few I remembered even worked for ME.

Every now and then the subject known euphemistically as “the birds and the bees” comes up. Everybody but me seems to know all about it.

SIDE NOTE:

I always puzzled over that phrase, “The birds and the bees.” I even tried putting a bird and a bee in the same cage. The result was not the least bit erotic.

Anyway, back to our story. When the topic of sex comes up, I reply, “I don’t know anything about sex. I was married.”

So it gives me distinct pleasure to be able to make a comment on this subject.

As we have all been reminded ad nauseum since September 11, the Moslem Paradise includes a huge number of houris for each man. A houri is a renewable virgin. After the guy has sex with one, she reverts to being a virgin again.

I would NOT want a renewable virgin. I have had my quota of virgins, one. After all, one female got to remove MY virginity. If he has any empathy at all, the LAST thing a decent male would want to do is force women he cares about to have sex for the first time, over and over, throughout eternity. It is PAINFUL for her.

Maybe houris are in their Hell.

But empathy is not exactly an Islamic trait, apparently. No one ever wonders wonders whether a Moslem WOMAN gets a lot of handsome MEN when she gets to Paradise.