Sleeping with the Enemy

Learn this recipe to trick her into thinking that you know how to cook.

Feature article in a men’s magazine.

I have a confession to make. I’m not a movie producer. I don’t drive a Ferrari. My 85 foot yacht is not in dry dock for the winter. In fact, I don’t have a boat; not even a canoe. I don’t know how to spell ‘yacht,’ I had to look it up—both times I used it in this paragraph. To be completely honest, absolutely everything that I told you at the bar last night was bullshit and now that we’ve had sex I feel slightly guilty about how I presented myself. You have to admit, it was a pretty good story. I’m sure that if I were a young, impressionable girl like you I would have done me last night.

I guess that I shouldn’t be too proud of my effort. It’s not like I adlibbed that whole persona. I’ve been working on a version of that story most of my adult life. If I had put 1/100 of the effort into actually improving myself instead of creating the phony me you met last night I’d probably be a remotely interesting person. Trust me; I’m not a remotely interesting person.

If I’m going to trick a woman into thinking something about me that isn’t true, it’s going to be something more impressive than chicken cacciatore. Like the time I killed a guard and escaped from a Guatemalan gulag while being held as a political prisoner. Women are really impressed when you tell them about the time you landed a jumbo jet after the pilot had a heart attack—especially if you are exceedingly nonchalant about the affair. You were just doing what anyone else would have done.

I actually feel sorry for guys who have shot their way out of a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan because I have used that story so often that any real war heroes run the risk of boring the shit out of their girlfriends with their painful stories. I went so far as to inquire about tattoos that look like bullet holes. I heard that they are painful so the only injury I incurred during the ambush is a scar on my lip I got from hitting my head on the monkey bars when I was seven.

From a casual glance at the major men’s magazines, you have to wonder if the men who read these rags even care about women. Most of their stories are geared towards personal grooming:

How do I blow dry my Hair?

Hair product nightmare

To chest wax or not?

Take on your 500 biggest fashion dilemmas

Don’t be afraid to wear silk

With these headlines the biggest trick you’ll have to pull off with women is convincing them that you’re heterosexual. These magazines skate around the fact that their readers aren’t interested in women nearly as much as they are concerned about whether or not their double-breasted suits makes them look chubby. For the readers who absolutely insist that they are not gay, there are plenty of articles that treat relationships like some sort of competition against an enemy: Think of Al Qaeda with a vagina.

There is a how-to manual that lays out the right time to get laid. The authors have narrowed down the exact times that you need to move in for the kill. I suppose that they feel that talking to women at any other time in the day is a waste of your time, time you could spend shopping for cute new low-cut jeans.

Magazines for women are worse, if that is somehow possible. I can’t even begin to understand the psychology behind their editorial content. As far as I can tell they seem to think that male/female relations boil down to some sort of quid quo pro arrangement and the women’s magazines claim to make you a better negotiator. They map out elaborate strategies that are similar to the features in Field & Stream. The articles in all of these magazines are remarkably similar. Field & Stream’s 100 Best Hunting Tips could easily translate into a Cosmopolitan expose on landing a stock broker, or a Details’ primer on how to bang a cocktail waitress. The ideas are all the same, they just use different vocabulary. Learning to cook a single dish so that you can “trick” a woman (Men’s mags call them “hotties”) into thinking that you are sensitive is no different than wearing a camouflaged hat so that you can blow a deer’s brains out.

Happy Hunting!