Single, with complexes

Morton describes about 300 dates, almost all of which begin with an unattractive suitor and end with either gross rudeness or an untoward proposition -- often of the "hey baby, wanna get busy" variety, but not infrequently involving some kind of odd (shocking!) fetish or sex practice. There are so many of these, one after the next, that it appears Morton must have been sneakily doing her job as a journalist and author, helping the conversations along in order to draw her subjects out of their shells. She makes a fair bit of hay over the fact that many of her suitors are married, which adds the stain of dishonesty to their crimes. ("Appalling," she calls it.)

But, as she points out repeatedly, Morton herself was only pretending to be interested in these men and was practicing a sort of date fraud. There's a small section at the end of the book devoted to good dates, with good men, and Morton claims that only one of these was upset when she unmasked herself as an undercover book author. The rest thought it was all a great laugh. And then most of them paid for the date.

And fair enough. But an obvious, yet somewhat difficult conclusion that you have to make from all this is that in order to do what Morton did, running around with 1,000 men over the course of a year, rejecting nearly all of them as not up to standards and casually humiliating a fair number -- whether or not they deserved it, which doubtless many did -- you have to have a lot of something that Ryan Bigge doesn't have any of. You have to have a lot of power, and the confidence with which to use it.

And you have to be able to use that power arbitrarily, and even unfairly, if you feel like it. Which brings us back to Bigge's rudimentary but impassioned attack on "postmodernism" and his tentative espousal of the '50s. What Bigge is struggling, under his prejudices, to say, and what Morton is saying without trying to, is that the power balance is askew, datingwise. Females have laxer restrictions upon them now and have gained a lot in the way of traditional male perquisites. Males haven't gained much slack, or many feminine perquisites, in return. Men -- well, "guys," rather -- haven't gained the feminine perk of commanding sympathy and protection: Bigge, nice and sweet, not bad-looking, can't get a date because he's sad and harmless. Chicks squish him. Ha!

Morton, on the other hand, is protected from the traditional masculine sanction of looking like an arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerk. He rumbles across the landscape like a Panzer division, crushing "losers" under his treads. What an asshole, that Richard Morton -- swaggering like a tin-pot potentate. One thousand dates, and he tars almost every woman he met as a creep, a pervert or a loser. One must admit, it all looks less charming with the gender reversed. Misogynist that way; misandrist this way. Leaves a bad taste either way.

OK toilet reading, though, both tomes. And they really do make you want to stay home and play canasta, rather than mixing it up with the Bigges and the Mortons of the world. Or to make that "choice" the Republicans are so wackily insistent about and adopt the gay lifestyle -- if only the recruiting center were ever open. Either way, though, what I really want to get at here is just three words:

Rodney Allen Rippey.

Ow! Ow! Not in the face! Aah! Ow! Oh, my ribs. Hey -- wait! Come back!

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