Women, Misogny, Men Friends

The most controversial topic on which I write is the topic of who makes better friends for women, men or women. And my blogging rule is that when emotions are high, the best thing to do is to write about the controversy again. Amusingly, I notice that women who prefer the company of men (perhaps because "women take things too personally"?) take what I write about prefering-the-company-of-men very personally, and then make personal remarks. I ask everyone to remember that my goal is not to insult anybody, but to make Single people feel better about being Single. When I said "Have some dignity," I meant only "Don't run after men" for any personal reason including friendship. I didn't mean it was undignified to have platonic friendships with men.

I asked my husband yesterday what would happen if a man told a group of men that frankly he preferred the company of women to the company of men. He thought about it a bit, and predicted that the men would accuse him of using this as a cover to get sex. And then if he said, "No, no, I just really like hanging out with women better", they would think that he was very weird or perhaps gay. It might not be the fact that he preferred hanging out with women they found irksome, but that he felt a need to inform them of his preference.

In general, I am not feminism's biggest fan. Nor is feminism my biggest fan: I was once picked up and carried out of a Woman's Day parade by two large abortion rights activists with buzzcuts. However, you can't be a woman--even in an enlightened country like Canada--without noticing that "men's stuff" is valued more than "women's stuff", even by women. Careers traditionally held by men are valued more than careers traditionally held by women. I know women who would never, ever be a nun (or are ex-nuns) who long, long, long to be priests, and even join the WomenPriests or the Anglican Church in their attempts to fulfill their dream. Unfortunately, too, women dream of being "First Woman To--." Why is being "First Woman To" so darned important? Why this need to be unlike, ahead of, better than, other women?

I have also noticed that sisterhood is not so powerful in the kind of workplace where women scramble to show that they are "just as good as" men. In my ministry training, I watched with horror as two of my female "mentors" literally almost killed themselves with overwork: one in a ghastly car crash, and one with heart disease. And I noticed that they were impatient that I was not willing to go the same distance. However, I felt no need to kill myself to prove I was just as good as a man. I know I am just as good as many men, worse than some and better than others.

Meanwhile, I've noticed middle-aged female managers giving preference to handsome young subordinates while ripping strips off younger female subordinates. I had a boyfriend, a work colleague, who reported that he had overheard the female manager to whom we had been seconded saying over the phone, "He's six-foot-four, he's got blue eyes, and I wish we had three of him." He found it funny; I found it disgusting.

And that is why I get very testy when women say to other women, "I prefer the company of men." Except in wartime, women have it harder than men (we bleed profusely for a week every month for up to 40 years, for example--a messy and uncomfortable business), and it is very annoying when other women make us feel worse about being women.

If you do make men friends easily, and it does not in any way cause you grief or loss, then I think that is marvellous. I don't think it is better than making woman friends easily, but I think the important thing, for Single people, is that you not suffer acute loneliness, and/or get involved with dodgy people who try to exploit you. The freedom women have in the West to have men friends is not universal, and so the next time you are laughing over drinks with platonic men friends, offer a prayer for those women who are jailed for being found alone with men to whom they are neither related nor married.

I do not mean to spit on anyone's personal friendships. What I hope to do is to get women to take a good, objective look at their lives and to see them as they are, and not as how they hope they are. The key to lasting happiness, I firmly believe, is to live firmly rooted in reality. And although some women do have great male friends who are sincerely their friends, other women are exploited by their male so-called friends. I get letters in which this is quite obvious to me, if not yet to the letter-writer. And goodness knows how many men and woman are miserable because members of the opposite sex constantly "think of them as friends."

Also, I want to stress what a comfort female friendship can be to women, not only when you are Single, but when you are married, and widowed, and in the nursing home. Because of our physical realities, women share an awful lot in common. And the fact is that men are not always there and that they do not always understand what we are going through or have gone through because they have not gone through it themselves. They are very often not the skilled listeners women very often are. And they usually die before we do. If you are a woman who dislikes women, then I am sorry, and I wonder if a few sessions with a psychotherapist won't help with this. Learning to get along well with women will almost certainly improve a woman's life.

Hmm. This post is much more convoluted than the usual. Anyway, as ever I throw this out not as the Last Word on male-female and female-female relationships, but as food for thought. I am not a bishop; I have no teaching authority.

All comments will be moderated for the next little while. I may be stricter about which comments I let through, too. Although my tone is often bracing, I want this blog to be a comfortable place to visit. I don't single out individual readers for insult; please don't single out me--or a reader--for insult.

Live in South Bend, It's Seraphic!

Goodness, what a spike in my stats! And it is thanks to Father Z, who sent everyone to The Crescat, who had a very flattering link to me. So thank you Father Z and The Crescat. This gives me another opportunity to flog my book Seraphic Singles (in the USA, The Closet's All Mine), which is the whole raison d'etre for this particular blog. If you are wondering what I was like and said about Single Life two years before I met my handsome and talented husband, read my book.

The more books I sell, the more books I'll be invited to write, so it is win-win for everyone, especially the booksellers--they get most of the money. If you can, get it from a lovely Catholic bookshop run by nuns. Me, I write for love and dreams of future fame, money, nice suits for B.A., a cottage in the Highlands....

Now, if you don't know this, I have been invited to the University of Notre Dame to speak at the Edith Stein Project on Saturday, February 12. I am very excited and scared because this means I have to fly over the ocean again! Also, I have to write a 20 page paper, which I haven't done since 2007, and what if Alistair McIntyre is in the room? Eeee! I would love to just read 45 minutes worth of blog posts, but this is Notre Dame here: I must make an effort to be brainy. Alice von Hildebrand spoke at Notre Dame recently, for heaven's sake. I may SWOON.

This year's theme is "Irreplaceable You: Vocation, Identity, and the Pursuit of Happiness." It sounds fascinating to me. It's open to the public, so if you feel like going to a great conference in mid-February, Notre Dame is the place to be.

Auntie Seraphic & Friends With Men

Sometimes I get an email that releases my inner cynic and I have to remind myself afterwards that (A) men are the caffeine in the cappuccino of life and (B) lots of women have dear, platonic friends who are men. Even I have a few, collected gradually over 20 years.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

Hello!

I just found your blog the other day and have been reading through it almost obsessively. Thank you for doing what you do. Already it's helped me!

Perhaps you have already answered this kind of question, and in that case feel free to refer me to where ever you did, or copy and paste; I won't be offended.

I am a social person, and actually am moving in a few weeks from [big city on the west coast of the USA] to Virginia, so I will be needing to make friends, both male and female. I am wondering how to properly make friends with men without losing the feminine touch of 'receptivity' as it were.

I have on SO many occasions honestly tried to make platonic friends with males strictly, honestly, and completely for the sake of having another friend (see, I like having guy friends because then I can hang out with ppl who are much more laid back than the average girl, and so I have someone to watch football with and who will kill spiders. What woman doesn't?) However, the potential-platonic-male-friend reads my pursual of friendship as a manipulative desire to have his babies and wash his dentures when we're older. And then he runs.

Completely - from ever talking to me again if he can help it, when he doesn't even know if my APPARENT attention might be welcome, before he gets to know me, before he knows that I just want basic friendship....and [once was] is even rude enough to walk away mid conversation.

There is about a milisecond when I think I might have accidentally flirted with the potential-platonic-male-friend, but I certainly am NOT a flirt, actually, I'm terribly cautious about not flirting - touching thier arm, giggling, too much smiley eye contact are things I just don't do unless I really like a (already my friend for a while) guy, and even then I have to consciously muster the strength and creativity to do so. My already platonic guy friends (whom I have asked) ardently say that I'm not a Flirt. So why do these new men think I am?

Is there a proper amount of "sitting back" for women to do in strictly platonic relationships? I really want to be pursued in a romantic relationship one day, and I really don't want to be the chaser - but for heavens sake do I have to do that when the friendship is just starting out? When I'm not even interested in them romantically because I don't know them? How could they possibly think that I want to marry them when we met five seconds ago, or a month ago, even? How am I supposed to maintain known platonic friendships with guys without making them feel that I yearn for them desperately? Is pursual in itself flirting?

I realize too that this is something men deal with often, and even in my own experience I have thought that a "just wanna be friends" guy is actually trying to have MY babies:) However, I'm still nice to him and don't drive him away, and then we end up being the platonic friends that he wanted in the first place.

Men are so cryptic. Please help me!

Thanks so much,
Friends with Men

Dear Friends with Men,

I just got your message, and I will ponder it at length. But my first response is that men don't really know how to do the female friendship thing. In general, men are not interested in making platonic woman friends once they leave college. Occasionally they make friends with women colleagues, but that is because they are thrown together every day and at work men are forced to interact with women as if they were guys.

It is a million times easier to make friends with women, and even that is hard after college, unless you can find women who have very recently moved town, too.

Hopefully more later in the morning after I have slept on it. But I am afraid the heart of the matter is that post-college American men in general aren't that interested in platonic women friends, and they will almost always take friendly overtures as sexual interest. Yes, that is certainly depressing.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

I am sorry to say that, after pondering the issue at length, I completely forgot about this email. And the only advice I have to add to it is that my reader might want to consider a controlled environment in which men will be more-or-less forced to speak to her. Her workplace should provide this, but if that proves inadequate, there is night school. I taught writing classes for three years, and it was always awesome to see when a classroom of random strangers turned into a group. Community gelled.

When you have an authority figure like a teacher calling the shots, men simply cannot assume you are talking to them because you want them. I bet Little Theatre would work too, as there would be a director and a stage manager. (My ex-thespian husband, whose platonic female friends are mostly over 50, adds that it really helps if there's an age gap, though.)

I cannot adequately underscore how different life is after high school or undergraduate university. My guess is that women who have many platonic men friends collected them before they graduated, or share or shared the same workplace, or met them through AA or other Twelve Step groups. In many, many cases, the question of whether they were ever going to be a couple was settled so long ago, the women have forgotten there ever was one.

Meanwhile, I beg you girls--I beg you on my knees--to stop thinking that men are just like women. Unless they are priests or monks and/or have "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," young women are to them first and foremost potential mates. This is completely natural, and nothing to cry about. Once you are married, or pregnant, or over 37 or so, you will not find this as much of a problem, if problem you think it.

My guess is that it is much, much easier to be platonic friends with twenty-something guys when you are my age, e.g. too old (or almost too old) to be sexually interesting to twenty-something guys. Again: age gap. And since Nature, like Auntie Seraphic, has a double standard, the best age gap for platonic friendship is when the woman is way older than the man. Many a sixty year old man has gone googly for a twenty-something girl. Only very rarely does a twenty-something boy go googly for a grandma.

Finally, women-who-prefer-the-company-of-men, I wish that you would stop thinking that men are so much better than women. Yes, I realize that women can be absolute bitches. I know that. But the simple fact of the matter--and it is a great tragedy, and probably a result of the Fall--is that women want to hang out with men more than men want to hang out with women. Have some dignity.

P.S. Lots of women watch football, even American football.

The Trid Social Scene

And today something a little different. Does everybody know by now that B.A. and I go to Traditional Latin Mass on Sundays? If you read my other blog, you probably do. If you read my column in the Prairie Messenger, you definitely do, because Traditional Latin Mass stuff is all I write about in the Prairie Messenger.

"It's like a party," I said to B.A., who may have had a minor heart attack, because "Mass as party" is an idea TLM lovers don't like very much. However, what can I say? I love the Traditional Latin Mass, and I try to get to every Missa Cantata going, and I love to see who else is there. It's like a party.

Okay, now to get to the letter. Yes, there's a letter. I found it in my combox this morning. (My internet was down all yesterday; I almost died when I found a troll's comment had sneaked in.)

Hi, Seraphic. Great post, as usual.

I have a question: I've started to attend a TLM parish and, like you already stated, most of its members are twenty-something men. Nothing against that, au contraire!

But I don't know how to behave amongst these young, conservative NCB. All my life I went to a charismatic parish and it's a whole different world.

I would like to make friends with them and, well, I've never had male friends - I'm a girl's girl and, honestly, I'm not very experienced. They are so nice, giving me flyers and explaining the liturgy, but I barely know them and I would not like to send any mixed signals. It's a very small parish and I don't want to be "the flirt".

This girl's girl was totally anonymous, which is just wrong, so I've given her a name which is New Trid Girl.

So much to say. First, the Traditional Latin Mass attracts men (not mostly twenty-something men in my parish, though) because it is serious. It is entirely lacking in the "Jesus is My Boyfriend" music and sentiments of charismatic worship. It holds linguistic challenges, and as it underscores the serious and special nature of the priesthood, it also underscores the serious and special nature of masculinity. (Masculinity is indeed serious and special to men, and only traditional religious rituals these days seems willing to acknowledge that fact in healthy ways.) It certainly underscores the serious and special nature of the Blessed Sacrament. Nobody touches the Blessed Sacrament with unconsecrated hands, and you can bet that any TLM priest takes his duties towards the Blessed Sacrament very seriously indeed.

If you ask me, men are just less likely to 'get' all the nuances of banquet/community gathering/sacrifice/community sing-song involved in the Novus Ordo as it is said today. The TLM, in contrast, is quite obviously a sacrifice. The Holy Eucharist is unequivocally Christ's body, blood, soul and divinity. The congregation falls to its knees. There is none of this o-but-everyone-stood-in-the-first-century nonsense that completely ignores Scripture references to Christ Himself and St. Paul praying on their knees.

Traditional worship gives men something firm to hang onto, and not only is it worship worthy of God, insofar as the human person is able to make something worthy of God (and the theological discussions here regarding priest-as-alter-Christus could be endless), it is worship worthy of men's own little selves to perform. Women are endlessly tolerant. Men, not so much. Not Trid Men, anyway. As you will discover.

Now, as yet there are not a lot of people who can get to the Traditional Latin Mass, and there are not as yet a lot of Traditional Latin Masses to go to. And this means that Traditional Latin Mass communities are small, tightly knit and delighted when new people come along, as long as the new people don't try to change anything or get up everyone's nose. The great thing about this is that you don't have to do anything but show up, take the handouts, pray, and hang around afterwards hoping someone nice will talk to you. They will. If in doubt, ask someone in the tea-and-coffee queue a question about the liturgy.

When you are gone, other parishioners will discuss you and wonder where you are from and watch to see if you come back the next week. They will probably be delighted to see you again. And, in the natural span of time, people will befriend you. Just keep showing up and look friendly and approachable. Don't worry about mixed signals. Just say "yes" to those invitations that you welcome, and "no" to those invitations that you don't.

I haven't the least idea where you are from. If you are in Britain, than you know better than I do the social rules for Britain of 1962, which is more or less what I think I am obeying these days. Sending thank-you notes or making thank-you phone calls to hostesses is big. I imagine that most Trids (or, as people are more likely to call us, Trads) in Canada and the USA also put a lot of stock in old-fashioned good manners.

As a woman, you are in luck, for TLM people are nothing if not traditional, and traditionally women do not try to make friends with men. Men try to make friends with you. Meanwhile, a girl's girl who hasn't dated much and goes to the TLM is, I suspect, many a Trid man's idea of the perfect woman, so congratulations.* Just make sure you keep up with your girlfriends. Don't get too bedazzled by all the twenty-something Trid men.

The great thing about being a girl's girl is that you don't take men too seriously or fall into masculine patterns of speech and behaviour to be "one of the boys", which personally I think is romantic death. So wear a fashionable but modest dress or skirt to Mass, nice shoes and your lovely new white mantilla. Smile at everyone in the community after Mass, and be particularly attentive to the elderly. Don't just tag along to after-Mass events, but keep your ear sharp and attentive for personal or general invitations.

Incidentally, I hope you and the priest have already exchanged introductions. If not, introduce yourself and tell him that you are new to the Old Rite. Don't be put off if he seems shy. Many TLM priests (and indeed parishioners) have suffered a lot because of their love for the TLM, and some need to get to know a new person a lot better before they risk sharing their opinions and friendship.

As far as I know, no young woman in my community has ever been labelled "the flirt" or anything unpleasant. But at least some of us always notice what young women and newcomers wear. As people often disapprovingly point out, we care a lot about "externals." And, as we might counter, "externals" certainly do influence "internals", which is why we love the TLM so much in the first place.

*Update: I just remembered that that last woman who married a bachelor of my TLM community was divorced-and-annulled little me. Many a Trid man's perfect woman could be a mysterious rich widow or a world-weary German aristocrat in a black leather jacket. You can never tell with men. In the meantime, girl's girl who hasn't dated much is a perennial favourite of men all over, bless their little hearts.

The Most Pelagian Day of the Year

Happy New Year all my little Singles and sympathetic non-Singles! I am back from Mass, and well primed with champagne. Time to harangue you and generally get up your nose and say things your mother is too nice or too afraid to say.

The first thing I want you girls to do is to cross "Get a boyfriend/husband" off your resolution list. Shame on you for trying to pre-determine the fate of other people. Shame shame shame. Why not just cook up a love potion, shove it in a box of chocolates and randomly hand the box around? It's the extreme of what you are plotting on your little list. Getting a boyfriend/spouse is not something that you do but something that happens. You can lose (or try to lose) ten pounds, or increase your earnings, or quit smoking, or learn French, but you cannot make a man fall in love with you. You can only be pleased or distressed when one does.

And because, like Nature, I unashamedly have a double-standard, I am hoping that men-not-called-to-Single life have themselves made a resolution to get to know more girls with an eye to perhaps future courtship. However, I will remind that you too can not make people fall in love with you, although women are often impressed and flattered by a real effort.

There is a limit, though. If a girl says, "Just friends," drop her flat and try someone else. Don't waste your time on piddly little friendships with girls who want to be "just friends." Let the sudden drying up of your attentions teach them what happens when they say "Just friends" to perfectly eligible bachelors like yourself.

Pelagius, in case you haven't yet supplemented the sub-standard religious education common to most Catholic schools, was the great theological rival of St. Augustine and therefore a superstar among heretics. Pelagius, who was British, thought you could become good without prevenient Grace; in short he thought everyone should just pull himself up by his own moral bootstraps. He did not think you needed God's help to do this. And like all super-duper heresies, this attitude has never gone away. You cannot be good without God's help, and you cannot get married without His help, either.

As I like to say, the primary reason why Searching Singles are not yet married is that God has not willed it. Therefore, when wondering why you are still Single, the person to talk to is God, because He is primarily responsible. He has not yet brought the handsome or pretty stranger into your life, and why not, eh? Only He knows, but it must be for a good reason. Possibly your future spouse (if you have one) isn't ready for you yet. Goodness knows, my own spouse wasn't ready for me until two or three days after I met him in person, which is when he was received into the Church.

So if you have made a resolution to get engaged this year to someone you haven't even met yet or, worse, someone who isn't at all in love with you, then cross it off your list and write "Meet more friendly people." That you can do. Try to meet people of all ages. Grown-ups don't hang out only with people born the same year as themselves, and they often know other people your age, e.g. their lovely daughters, handsome sons, witty grandchildren.

Under that write "Be happier and more confident." That, too, is up to you. Pray for the grace to accept what life throws at you more cheerfully and for confidence. Happiness and confidence make you more attractive than any cosmetic surgery known to man.

Under that write "Try to be more pleasant in public." Letting it all hang out is not, actually, the cardinal virtue opposed to the sin of hypocrisy. It is sloppiness, and generally a bad idea except among your very best friends of the same (THE SAME) sex. Even married people should do their best to keep up appearances before their poor old spouses, who cannot escape. Personally, I have resolved to stop using bad words in front of dear B.A. Women should endeavour not to use bad words before men, and I would have eighteen thousand fits if BA used bad words before me.

So although women cannot in fact "Get a boyfriend/spouse" and men usually cannot make the Queen Bee of their set want to snog them and them alone, there are things that you can do to make yourself more attractive to other Searching Singles. Just remember that you can't control other people, and that God is the boss.

Parallel Universe?

I passed a betting shop this afternoon and noticed that there weren't any women in it. And my sister, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, perhaps not, upbraided me for having dropped in for tea with two bachelor flatmates.

"I was with you," I said crossly. "Anyway, I'm a respectable early-middle-aged married woman."

The year that ends tonight is 2010. It seemed very odd, in 2010, to be walking home with my shopping, declaring myself to be a respectable early-middle-aged married woman who therefore can drop in on bachelors for innocent cups of tea. I have led communion services, for heaven's sake. I once gave the reflection at a college reconciliation service. I earned the first diploma in Lonergan Studies ever awarded by my college. I have frightened lefty priests into fits. I was the first woman boxer at my boxing gym. I was a pioneer---or so one of the only women on the theological faculty told me, little realizing how much the idea of being a pioneer repelled me by then. Do I have to obsess over the fine shades of propriety like a Georgette Heyer heroine?

I pondered the sea, and the past week, a week of church (mostly men, as Trid congregations seem to be mostly men), pub (mostly men), football (mostly men) and last's night Hogmanay fiddle concert in Edinburgh, of which B.A. said during the intermission, "It could be 1956." The comedian's jokes were of an ancient, gentle order, not so much family-friendly as old-fashioned-lady-friendly. When we got home, B.A. did imitations of the Edinburgh ladies the jokes were chosen for.

Sometimes I wonder if I haven't fallen into a parallel universe where people in 1960 took a look at the future and firmly said, "No, thank you." Obviously history still went on, but in a different way from everywhere else.

But surely this cannot be geographical. Although the male/female divide is sometimes astonishing, Edinburgh is not Brigadoon, and it is a world capital. It must be as post-modern and post-Christian as any other city in Europe (excluding, of course, those of Poland and Slovakia). So why is it that I seem to live in a society where the women do these things and not those, and the men go here but not there, and my old theology school, where we took Elizabeth Johnson and Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza seriously, seems a million miles away?

And, believe me, I know I am myself a willing participant in something that strikes me as decidedly old-fashioned. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis's distinction between Albion and Britain, or Tolkien's Faerie alongside the ordinary world, or Aelfheim beyond Midgard, or J.K. Rowling's Wizard community hidden in what its natives call "the U.K."

We've been hearing a lot about "parallel societies" in Europe, although usually these parallel societies are not Christian, but Muslim to some degree or another. The epitomic figure of a parallel society is the rural Turkish or Pakistani woman who lives in Berlin or London and cannot speak a word of German or English. However, I imagine only a tiny number of Muslim women live this way. Surely the rest drift from society to society, group to group, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, creating their own hybrid, slightly solipsistic, Berlin or London.

And I wonder today if this is not what is happening to Catholics--by whom I mean Catholics who actually think about being in a state of grace and therefore don't miss Sunday Mass--these days. Mainstream society and Catholicism seem to have parted ways forever and Catholics, always considered slightly odd by the majority in English-speaking countries, now find themselves more out of step than ever with cultural mores.

Society believes in women swallowing pills to make ourselves infertile 24/7. Catholics don't. Society believes that women should be able to kill their children for any reason whatsoever--even for just being a twin or female--as long as they haven't been born yet. Catholics don't. Society believes that choosing not to have any children is moral and virtuous. Catholics think it is rather sad. Society believes certain kinds of sexual partnership are equivalent to marriage. Catholics do not. And in all those respects we are like most people of our countries in 1960.

"In the world but not of the world"--I was taught as a child that this is the place of the Christian. Our true home is heaven. But what is our place in society, then? There used to be something called Christendom. Have we relinquished it, or is it just underground?

Feel free to chime in in the combox. Perhaps living in a parallel society is the ultimate form of post-modernism. At any rate, there are some among us with apocalypic ideas that we'll have to go underground one day. But my question is, are we already halfway there?

A Weighty Matter

First of all, I am not a doctor. And second, I am not so super-pleased with the photos my brother has taken of our Christmas revels this year. Married couples often gain ten pounds after the wedding. I think I have gained more than that. Curse you, British eating habits!

One of the most painful, poignant questions that comes my way--so painful that it is usually only alluded to and never phrased in a direct question--is "Am I Single because I am overweight?"

My answer to this is a quick "I am not a doctor" although my first question (much more delicately phrased) is "How overweight?"

There are many gorgeous fat women. They are not usually called fat, though, which has become a mortal insult. They are called curvy. They include Queen Latifa, Jessica Simpson, Kelly LeBrock, Carnie Wilson, Elisha Cuthbert and any plus-sized model. Kelly Osbourne was until very recently pleasantly plump, and my guess is that she will become so again. And these are just the celebrities. The world is full of beautiful, plump, curvy women. Plumpness was itself a hallmark of beauty until the 20th century.

That said, obesity is on the rise, and because fatty food is so plentiful and so comforting, many women--including me--are tempted to munch away our sorrows instead of eating healthily. And only since I saw my brother's photos of me in my married state have I realized what being overweight makes you look like: it makes you look married.

Now this could be complete nonsense, so feel free to chastize me in the combox. I am not advocating dumb diets and reckless exercising or self-blame or all those other things otherwise intelligent women embrace. Apparently the average adult woman of childbearing age should be eating 1500 calorie a day, so if your doctor says you should eat 1500 calories a day, eat 1500 calories a day. I am just throwing out there the only original thought about weight that I am ever likely to have: that too much weight makes you look married already. Everything else possible has been said.

For example, it is quite clear (and repeated by me over and over again) that men are not attracted just to model-thin women. In fact, many men think model-thin women are TOO thin when they see them in real life. This is not great news for model-thin women. However, I must say that when I was a boxer, and was 117 pounds of muscle, I got hit on a lot more than I got hit on when I was 140 pounds of squish.

Of course, the most memorable person who hit on me was a woman. She thought I looked like a Greek goddess and said so and followed me around a bit. But I do remember more men than before or since hitting on me at the gym and in the clubs, and my telling a male friend that the great secret of becoming attractive was weighing no more than 119 lbs when one is only 5'2". I don't believe that now, however. I was squishy when I met B.A.

Men like who they like, and although fashion designers and other tastemakers have done their damnedest, they can't get all straight men to love only those women who look like teenage boys. Keira Knightley looked so much like a teenage boy in Bend it Like Beckham that is it no mystery to me that the hot Irish football coach fell for pretty Jesminder instead.

Jesminder, of course, was also rather slim, being both a teenager and a brilliant footballer. But she was slim in a very feminine way, and I have noticed that Indian women I have met have the most feminine, graceful hand gestures I have ever seen outside of ballet. And traditional clothes for Indian women are so beautiful, it is little wonder that many choose to wear them outside South Asia.

I wonder if the secret to being attractive while being very slim or being rather plump isn't the ability to make it seem very feminine. Certainly, being obese isn't very feminine--or, in men, very masculine either. It is unhealthy, and healthy people are attracted, not only to happy people, but to healthy people.

If any reader is wondering whether they have crossed the line between deliciously squish and bad-for-their-health, then I encourage her (or him) to toddle off to her (or his) doctor to ask.