No Good Read Goes Unpublished

*For the fun of it, I've decided to periodically post a page from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. Hope you enjoy it.

I'm currently reading a book that I am thoroughly enjoying called Men: An Owner's Manual, by Stephanie Brush. This year marks the book's 20th anniversary. For anyone who's interested, you can easily find a copy at Half.com for well under $1, in your choice of hardcover or paperback.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

Men have always been with us in one form or another. The study of living with men (or higher-animal husbandry) is fairly new.

There have been civilizations that have consisted entirely of women. (The educational film Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons shows us that these civilizations were made up mostly of women who talked much like Zsa Zsa Gabor; who had primitive fascimiles of push-up bras; and who said things like, "My wanton heart is a flower panting to be pluck'd." According to this and other films, Greco-Roman Amazon civilization could not have survived without extremely embarrassing poetry, and push-up bras.)

Men were common in the Middle Ages: doing things with lances, sitting at round tables, rehearsing plainsongs in very high voices, and other activities. But men have been at their most attractive, throughout the ages, when they were not around. During World War II, women learned to "love a man in uniform" because he was a man who was going places -- such as Omaha Beach, Iwo Jima, and Midway.

In the fifties, there were no men at all: They were either working at their advertising agencies, driving in their Chryslers, listening to Four Freshmen records, or locked in the bathroom discovering embarrassing body odor. No one ever had sex.

And then a great social revolution ocurred, and men ventured back into the public eye, because everyone was having sex (due to space-age contraceptives), and men wanted to be part of the action.

These were dynamic, fast-and-loose times: Women no longer spoke to men of outmoded issues like "morality." Men gorged themselves on an all-you-can-eat buffet of sensual opportunities -- they were being invited to live (together, in the same house) with women, and no one felt the need to invest in color-coordinated hand towels. No one invested in much of anything: Men could say, "Listen honey, I'm going out tonight. For about a year, okay?" And women did not like this much.

Men drastically lost their popularity; women lost their popularity to a large degree, too; and everyone became completely confused.