[644] in Humor
HUMOR: Gender relations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (clineja@MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 3 12:44:04 1995
From: clineja@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 95 12:40:44 -0500
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: kvaeth@MIT.EDU
------- Forwarded Message
The Female Animal
by
Cynthia Heimel
Men! Want to know if a woman is interested in you? Here is the
most important rule:
All you really need to know you learned in high school.
Even if you are 84, it always is and always will be high school.
It's true that people grow older, more sophisticated, but nobody
ever matures past age 18. The same feelings persist. The way we
acted then is the way we act now, even though our braces no longer
lock when we kiss.
Okay, so what does a teenaged girl do when she's crazy for a guy?
She ignores him, and talks about him, incessantly to her friends.
She only looks at him when she's positive he's not looking at her.
She fidgets, she stammers, she's tongue tied and stumbles over
nothing when he's around. She draws curly hearts with his initials
in it on her desk. She memorizes his phone number, calls him
frequently, and hangs up when he answers.
She acts as if she couldn't care whether he lived or died, yet
she's always around. Somehow she's wandering mindlessly through
the gym during basketball practice. She's suddenly secretary of
the Debate Club. She's tooling her bike, no hands, down his
street. She's dropped her books all over his corner.
We're still the same. Ever wonder why Helen in Accounting always
needs a drink of water when you do? Why every night she's in the
same elevator when you go home? Helen wants you.
So why won't Helen flirt with you? She can't. A woman can start
out all giggly and flirty, but at some point consciousness sets in:
"Oh my god, I like this guy. This could be the guy for me."
And crowding the heels of consciousness is self-consciousness.
"Oh my god, what if this guy knows I like him? He'd just laugh
and laugh. He must have noticed that I'm a geek and that this
dress I'm wearing is just hideous. I can't smile. If I smile he
will see my teeth. I probably have spinach in my horrible ugly
teeth. I know I have half-moons of mascara under my eyes."
That's why the girl you thought you were doing great with runs
away. And won't come back. She'll go to the other side of the
room and not look at you at all, and you're supposed to know she
wants you to come after her.
Unfortunately, this is also the way a woman acts when she really
isn't interested. So you're screwed. The only way to get around
this Other-Side-Of-The-Room business is to go halfway across the
room, as if you're on your way out but didn't quite make it. This
will drive her insane.
Now is the best time to ask her to dinner. Don't just ask for
her phone number. If you ask for her phone number, she will
immediately and automatically envision herself sitting on her
sofa, bleary-eyed and twitching, waiting for you to call. And
right then and there, she will hate you. She will never want to
see you again.
All of us, even 14-year-olds, have wasted a large percentage of
our lives waiting by the telephone. (By recent calculation, I,
myself, have spent 4 years, 3 months and 12 days biting my nails
and staring. Now, instead, I ask the guy for his number-- which
doesn't help at all, since it takes me approximately 5 hours to
work up the nerve to call, but which time it's invariably 3:00am.)
So ask her out to dinner. If she accepts, she is interested.
And this is major: If, when you go out to dinner, she doesn't
look really dressed up or anything but somehow she looks THINNER,
she is madly in love with you.
When women are excited about a date, they immediately go on a
diet, because all women know they are screamingly obese. Even if
the diet doesn't work, even if she only loses 4 ounces, she will
relentlessly try on everything in her wardrobe to find the outfit
which turns her most strandlike. Then she will go shopping and
repeat the process. But she won't get all gussied up because she
thinks if she did you'll know she cares and you'll drop her flat.
If she touches you a lot for no reason, she's interested. If
you move closer to her and she doesn't move away, she's interested.
If every time you look at her she quickly looks away, she's
interested. If you suddenly see her grocery shopping in your
neighborhood, she's interested.
If she sleeps with you on the 1st date, she's foolish-- but
interested. If she doesn't sleep with you after the 5th date,
she's either actually still in high school, born again, or not
interested, no matter what she says.
And that brings me to the painful part. Sometimes women
really aren't interested. And many guys, caught up with their
own enthusiasm, refuse to notice. So they pursue and persist,
and then they get furious and use the word "bitch" way too
often in a sentence.
Sometimes women are not as sensitive as they should be. Some
times they're too sensitive, they make the mistake of leading
you on so they won't disappoint you.
Please, for the sake of your own mental health, look for
these early warning signs:
1) If she flirts with you incessantly and seems supremely
self-confident, but is never available for dates, leave
her alone she is only kidding.
2) If you both leave somewhere at the same time and she
says, "See ya!", waves, and disappears, you bore her.
3) If you ask her out twice and she can't go, don't ask again.
4) If she promises she is going to call you and you wait and
wait and wait and wait, JOIN THE CLUB.
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