Anne Kingston has been on a roll lately. There are so many quote-worthy sections of this article on a book by a man giving women advice on how to get married that, instead of making you read the whole thing, I'll quote them here. It's The National Post's own fault for not archving their articles longer than 2 weeks. (You are now free to point to this entry whenever I complain about people violating someone's copyright. I freely admit to hypocrisy in pretty much every aspect of my life.)

The first paragraph quoted makes (or at least will make) me feel a lot more attractive to women of marrying age.

It is chock-a-block with information that should be obvious to any thinking person. First, women who want to marry must target only "the marrying kind." That means seeking out men in the optimum "commitment" age zone. High-school graduates become amenable to marriage around age 23; for college graduates it's later, 28 to 33; professionals with post-graduate education are inclined to pop the question between 30 and 36. After age 38, the odds of a man marrying for the first time declines. If he's over 43, you've got a challenge on your hands. You also want a guy whose background matches yours and whose parents have been happily married. If his friends and siblings are married, that bodes well.

At this writing, I am a college graduate who is 25 years old. That means there are at least 3 years before I will become of prime marrying age. A friend (who gets his third shout out in as many weeks), the very one who turned me on to Danielle Crittenden will have confirmed something he told me. (To remind him, and to pretty much give it away, it has to do with empowerment.) Now, there are some intervening steps needed to be accomplished here (the most significant of which would be actually getting a girlfriend), but turns out I can, as a friend suggested, "have some fun"—she was referring to getting laid, which is pretty much like saying "hey, do something you've been wholly unable to do while you can!"—before getting married.

Oh, not that I feel the need to talk about my family, but at least one couple within it is happily married, and I can count two good friends as being married, and they are the two people in whom I'd place money in their remaining married for the rest of their lives. According to the above, except for not being quite old enough and not having found a girl whose background I share—well, let's not go that far—I'm in pretty good shape.

This is a woman who dresses conservatively, who acts supportively and who makes a great first impression, which means no Jägermeister shots or table dancing on the first date. "Men size a woman up very early," Molloy says. "Sometimes they change their mind, but very seldom. If you're seen as a slut, you can't dig your way out with a crane."

Let's repeat that last sentence just so that it gets nice and emphasized: “If you're seen as a slut, you can't dig your way out with a crane.”

But even after you've attracted a "marrying kind" of man, women still have to seal the deal. And that involves the classic "If you really love me, you'll marry me ultimatum," with the threat that you'll walk if he won't.

Even though I have no clue how they do it, since it's only happened to me once, I'm interested in how girls express their interest in a guy, or at least force them into a position in which they need to make a move. The only time I can remember this happening—there may have been others, and if so, my brain decided I'm on a need-to-know basis—is when watching a movie with a girl back in high school, and, sitting next to each other on the couch, she made it almost physically impossible for me to put her arm around me. Devious, but I gotta give credit where credit is due.

"I thought men and women had changed so much. But men haven't changed at all. Oh, they recognize women have careers, but that's about it." Even women who dress for success and who are assertive in their work life, he says, expect men to take the lead in romance -- to make the first call, to pick them up, to treat them like princesses.

Wait! Let me get this straight: even after almost a half-century of feminism and sexual revolution, women still want men to take the lead in romance? Taking it further, then, à la Crittenden, that must mean that men are still willing to trade commitment in order to get sex. That also tends to go against what Bill Maher has said about prostitution, i.e. that women essentially trade sex for the ability to buy new shoes. I wonder when—or even if—at some point women decided to switch from prioritizing commitment to prioritizing a new pair of shoes in exchange for sex.

Its on this ground that I'm shakiest, and may require a rereading of Crittenden. This also gives me the opportunity to say that I freely admit to being on shaky grounds as regards the history and significance of the sexual revoltion. (Remember, inverse relationship...) It is refreshing, however, to see an article in which the word "slut" retains its original pejoritive sense rather than being embraced or re-appropriated to serve a political (or sexual) agenda.

John T. Molloy, the subject of the above-quoted article, has a few articles available too, none of which I will pretend to have read. Yet.