The Esquire Handbook for Hosts has a list of questions you can ask yourself for self-diagnosis, followed by tips on how to modify your behavior, if necessary. Let us enter the world of delightfully antediluvian heteronormativity!
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Ha ha! Look at the illustration of the unattractive woman! Her hair is stringy! Her teeth are buck! She has a big nose and bushy eyebrows! She wears GLASSES! The horror.
#3 — If you are asked to get another girl for a foursome, do you pick one obviously less attractive than you are? You are unwise to do so. Get the most glamorous girl you know, and both men will be pleased.
Ladies! All you are is arm candy. But also! Sixty years later, women are given a different sort of advice all together: that if you want to appear more attractive, hang out with people less attractive than you are. Studies have shown that this works! Science!
So what’s interesting here is the assumption on Esquire’s part that women in general would not want to invite their better-looking friends out on a double date, and encouraging them here and in the next question to be more generous to their female friends, less jealous and prone to acting out scenes from The Women. It’s condescending at best, wholly insulting, and yet — not bad advice, in a stripped-of-context general rule sort of way. Hos before bros.
For obvious reasons, my favorite is #5:
Do men marvel at your capacity for holding liquor?
Yes! They do! I think! I’m usually too tipsy to worry about it!
A great mistake: it gives you a fast reputation and runs into money — the man’s money — besides.
Oh, well, shit.
#8 was read aloud in the company of Stephanie and Kim (who was visiting from Vancouver, and it was so awesome that we had a gorgeous spring day to hang out and have fun):
Do you make things easier for a man by suggesting that he climb into a car first, if he’s driving, or by asking him not to stand up when you come into a room? This is an error — men know that they are supposed to show these signs of consideration to a girl and they respect her more if she takes them as a matter of course.
We all gave Esquire a pass on this one, with not a little bit of grumbling about how feminism should have little to nothing to do with the question of whether opening doors, pulling out chairs, or walking on the outside was acceptable and that focusing the debates on whether this was oppressive patriarchy crap shifted attention away from stuff like equal pay and domestic violence and race/class/sexuality-based inequities and this is all anyone who had even one decent Women’s Studies course already knows.
The walking on the outside part, though, that’s always been my favorite. My grandfather did it. We’d be walking somewhere and I’d notice that he’d switch which side of me he was on when we crossed streets or turned corners, and I finally asked him what he was doing, and he explained. And I thought that it was the sweetest thing ever, that my grandfather was being all chivalrous with me. It made me happy to see it referenced in an episode of Flight of the Conchords (the first one, right? I think).
All other things aside, I have to give Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts credit for adhering to the idea that a man should always strive to be a gentleman. There is a section of this book dedicated to the question of asking a woman up to your place “to look at your etchings.” (That is an actual quote. They actually say that. I think they’re being tongue-in-cheek.) Manners above all, appears to be Esquire’s main point. And different women require different approaches and other rules of conduct. To be sure, this whole section reeks of sexism, classism, elitism, entitlement, throwing down a number of eyebrow-raising assumptions about the breadth of sexual experience a “modern-day business woman” might have. It’s very Mad Men Season 1-ish.
It is intended as no reflection upon the business woman that she may be treated somewhat less conventionally than, say, a sub-debutante; rather it is a compliment. No modern woman in her right mind and past the age of consent wishes to preserve the ancient fiction of her fragility in the face of a practical world.
Let’s get this out of the way, since most of you are going to focus immediately on this:
10 — Do you knit when you are having a cozy, fireside evening with a man? For some reason, men hate to see a woman doing anything with her hands when talking to her. Undivided attention is best.
Ha ha ha! But here’s something: I’ve only just started knitting while watching a movie with Dan, and I remember asking if it would bother him first. Because yeah, I don’t want him to think that I’m not valuing our time together. Manners are important for the ladies, too.
Finally:
16–Do you save yourself wear and tear by not troubling to entertain men bores? A grave mistake. Bores have their uses since a clever girl can practice her conversation on them, with nothing much to lose. Besides, they often have attractive friends.
Men! The worst thing you can be is boring! But ladies won’t let on that they think so because they need you for practice. And for your cute friends. Esquire does not care about the men bores of the world — they get what they deserve for being so godawful boring. And apparently Esquire believes that even the bores of the male species are superior to the “clever” girls, when I would say that a clever anyone would be able to talk circles around a bore and thus not get much value out of her practice. But maybe I’m reading that wrong. (BTW, I think we should bring back the term “men bores.”)
Don’t miss the con at the bottom of the page. There are several of these throughout the book, all ways to trick rubes into paying for your drinks. This book. So useful.
Thursday: How Attractive are You to Women? (The answers may surprise you!)
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