by: Jerry A. Boggs
The Detroit News, 12/19/96
Editorials

In my single days when I was about to ask a woman out, terror often stuck its icy finger in my heart. What if she laughed, "You must be kidding!" Today, meeting women gives men sweaty palms less often because more women are approaching them.

Sociologist Ilsa Lottes of the University of Maryland studied more than 400 heterosexual college students and reported that, "Women are beginning to assume roles once thought only to be appropriate for men". Most of the women in her study had asked men out on dates. So, is an equal sharing of the initiating of male-female relationships on the horizon?

Not if the authors of the popular book, The Rules: Time Tested Secrets Of Capturing The Heart of Mr. Right, have their way. Women, they admonish, should never initiate anything with a man, they should play hard to get. "Men love a challenge", they explain. (SEE: Maybe I Mean Yes, by Francis Baumli, PhD, in our Reading Room when you are done reading this).

In truth most men prefer female assertiveness. Cosmopolitan Magazine asked men, "How do you feel about a woman calling you for a date?" Sixty-five percent said they liked it a lot. According to a study co-written by Charles Muehlenhard, a University of Kansas psychologist and respected sex researcher, "Both traditional and non-traditional men perceive women who ask for dates as kinder, warmer, more thoughtful and less selfish than women who do not ask for dates".

But men's feelings about it aside, What is wrong with women playing hard to get? Plenty!

First, how is a Rules woman who is busy ignoring Mr. Right suppose to get him to approach her instead of another woman? Wear makeup, the book says. Diet and exercise. Build a shapely body. Read Glamour.

In other words, become a beauty/sex object.

In a world of female passivity, seeing women as objects is what men, too, learn to do.

"After rejecting a man at one stage because he asks too much too soon," says Sociologist, Warren Farrell, author of the Myth Of Male Power, "a woman rarely volunteers to take the next step herself. Most women expect him to try again: to guess when she is ready and to risk rejection again. The consequences? The man builds up a deep fear of rejection or vulnerability; that, in turn, forms a defense mechanism whereby men turn women into sex objects. Men intuitively discover that it hurts less to be rejected by an object than by a full human being." (Emphasis Farrell's).

Vulnerability to female rejection affects men further. If women feel they must be "Superbeauty" to induce Mr. Right to approach them, men often feel they must be "Superman" to induce Ms. Right to accept them.

Instead of mentioning faults and foibles to be more dimensional, a man may feel pressured to play up his strengths. He may even lie about himself, just as she "fibs" about her looks with her makeup. Subtly or unsubtly, he may try to convince Ms. Right that nothing bothers him, that he can handle anything.

Usually only after "selling" himself as practically Superman does he risk asking her out.

If she says, OK, what if she does so only because of his &Supermanliness"? This may make him worry that if he ever comes across as not so super - if he reveals a flaw or weakness, voices a doubt about himself - she may reject his next initiative and end everything because of his "false advertising".

His constant concern about his next initiative being rejected tends to drive a man to go on hiding his real self, just as the fear that he won't take another initiative pushes the woman to go on hiding her real face and go on presenting a beauty image. Once he is accepted on the basis of how he "sold" himself, his fear of being rejected, or of disappointing her, may persist and pressure him to keep up the image, even throughout a marriage.

Finally, in a Rules world how does a man distinguish between a woman who is playing hard to get and one who is uninterested, since their behavior can be identical? Ignore her, "NO!" Persist. Find out afterwards if you are Mr. Right or a sexual harasser.

Besides promoting sexual harassment, Rules behavior will breed more guarded, impersonal men who are insecure about their mask of mightyness and more beauty-obsessed women who are insecure without their mask of makeup. And more relationships that are candles in the wind because these insecurities impede emotional connectedness.

But before finding a relationship, women who play hard to get may see a lot of Mr. Rights become easy to lose - to women who play fair.

___________________________
Jerry Boggs is the Michigan State Representative of the National Coalition of Free Men.

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