ACT
LIKE A
GENTLEMAN,
THINK
LIKE A
WOMAN
a Woman’s Response to Steve Harvey’s
Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
Maria Bustillos
Accidental Books
Los Angeles
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By the Same Author: Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork
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Copyright © 2009 by Maria Bustillos
All rights reserved.
Please visit the website at www.actlikeagentleman.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-615-30523-3
Smashwords Edition
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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For Oliver
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CONTENTS
Preface
Misinformation
Laid
Tough Eggs
How-To
The Expense
Your Virility in Danger
The L-Word
The Handsome Prince
A Little Strange
Complicated
Why Women Cheat
Of Cats and Dogs
Sex Slavery for Patsies
Sex and the Single Man
Unto the Breach
Acknowledgements/Photo credits
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Audire est operae pretium, procedere recte
qui moechos non vultis, ut omni parte laborent;
utque illis multo corrupta dolore voluptas,
atque haec rara cadat dura inter saepe pericla.
HORACE, Satires.
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PREFACE.
The book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man is a very popular how-to guide for helping women “get” and “keep” a Man. Its author, Steve Harvey, is convinced that single women are going about securing a man the wrong way, and he has come along to guide them, so that they can Get That Man, finally. It has chapters called “How to Get the Ring,” and “Why Men Cheat,” and the final section of his book is called “The Playbook: How to Win the Game.”
Mr. Harvey has got a friendly, aw-shucks image it is impossible to dislike, even if you don’t quite go along with the idea that what all women want is to Get a Man. I’m sure, too, that there must be a lot of single women in the position he describes: lacking in confidence, or lonely, and letting their menfolk call all the shots out of sheer desperation. But as I read this book, I couldn’t help but think that what is equally, not to say blindingly, evident is the fact that there are quite a lot of lonely, frustrated guys out there, too. At least as many, surely. After all, who has to pay to get into the nightclubs? Who is being spammed to kingdom come with offers of genital enlargement? Who is shopping for picture brides? Who is eating all this Viagra?
Not women!
To hear Mr. Harvey tell it, men are just a bunch of naughty tomcats who need to be brought into line by their tough-lovin’ women, and then everybody is going to be happy. This theory is very hard to buy. For starters, I can’t believe that men are so brainless as to need a list of demands from women (what Mr. Harvey calls “standards” regarding fidelity and so on) in order to act in a principled way. And then, there are so many unhappy men out there whose women are already bossing them around; there’s a horrible name for that. Hasn’t Mr. Harvey got the wrong end of the whip, I thought? By the time I’d finished his book, I was sure that he had indeed. At least half the real story was not being told, and fair play demanded a response.
I have long felt the same kind of pity and distress on behalf of lonely, misguided men as Mr. Harvey appears to feel on behalf of frustrated women. He claims to be aiding women by telling them all about the secrets of men, so that they can get what they want (“the Ring,” etc.) from them. Surely it is only fair that a sympathetic woman should do men the same favor, and divulge all our secrets to them: and I am that woman.
The sort of advice commonly given by men, to men on the subject of courting women is nothing short of catastrophic. One angry-looking “expert” can, at the time of this writing, be found on YouTube giving men who want to “attract younger women” such pointers as “Nice Guy Must Die” (he means stop acting like one, apparently,) “be confident,” and wear a red tie, because “it’s a phallic symbol.” Not content with fleecing these lonely guys, this man is also sending them headlong in the wrong direction. It’s too heartbreaking.
So this book was written by a woman, for men, in answer to Mr. Harvey’s book. It reveals all our secrets, so that men, too, can get what they want from women—which, as I understand it, is to get them into bed.
Klaus Fuchs ID badge from Los Alamos, via Wikimedia Commons