(Authors note: For the interpretively challenged, this is the disclaimer: This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek column that also contains very serious advice. If you are a woman and the opinions expressed here don’t apply to you, then you have no reason, or right, to be offended by them. If you are offended “on behalf of all women,” then stick around. I can do wonders with grandiosity.)
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]ear Ladies, I thought it best to start my column off here with a personal introduction, and to give you a general overview of how and why grabbing you by the collar and holding a mirror up to your face will lead you to a happier life.
I am Dr. Paul. And I am to self help what Dr. House is to diagnostic medicine. That is to say, I’m a complete jerk, but the jerk you want to call when you’re in real trouble. And if you are a woman in western culture, you are most likely in trouble.
You should know up front that your feelings are about as important to me as your opinions, which is to say that they aren’t important at all. In fact, your feelings and opinions are the problem. By fixing them we can fix you, and everyone goes home happy.
You see, I already know how so many of you feel and where you are in life. I know about your struggles with men, how disappointed and disenchanted you have become. I know you are tired of guys that look great in the beginning but end up hurting and disappointing you.
[quote float=”right”]They would tolerate any amount of your smugness and indifference just for a chance to be near you. And with this, they continued to enable you; reinforcing your delusions of speshulness.[/quote] That’s why you have been watching Oprah and Dr. Phil, and why you read magazines like COSMO for advice on relationships. You’re yearning for answers, and in fact you have probably spent a fair amount of yours or your man’s money chasing after them. Your bookshelves are filled with everything from John Gray to Gloria Steinem and it hasn’t done anything but leave you wondering if there are any good men left in the world at all. You are on an unending quest for an elusive solution, and you don’t see anything promising in sight.
It’s not entirely your fault. From the time you were born, and I am going to put this in bold italics because it is very, very important, the whole world has been lying to you . And when all you hear is lies, you can only get the net result of where you are right now: Fucked up and clueless as to what to do about it. The only thing you are sure of is that none of your problems are of your own making.
You see, all these lies have convoluted your expectations.
Your sense of self-importance has been inflated to the point of psychic mutilation; your sense of responsibility proportionally reduced. It starts in childhood with unicorns and Prince Charming, Daddy’s little princess and sugar and spice. Yes, you are what little girls are made of. And while that as all sweet and gooey, it pretty much screws the pooch when it comes to creating a tenable relationship with a grown man.
Being a princess is a cozy role for a child, but a piss poor ambition for a grown woman. And while the people in your world pinched your cheek and cooed at you in your youth, they should have told you at some point in your life to take the tiara off and grow up. But the people in your world did just the opposite, didn’t they?
[box]By the time you were a teenager, hormonal boys were telling you whatever they thought you wanted to hear just to get in your pants, or at least cop a feel of your tits.[/box]
They would tolerate any amount of your smugness and indifference just for a chance to be near you. And with this, they continued to enable you; reinforcing your delusions of speshulness. It made you feel powerful, important. Obsequious comment by obsequious comment, they helped you perfect the expectation that life would never demand from you humility or fairness. They taught you what your fathers did, that respect was not to be earned, but handed to you, by a man, regardless of your true nature.
And for years you lived with this as a constant, as there was always at least a few guys hanging around trying grovel their way into giving you the high hard one. You could have a man and toss him away any time you wanted and you knew it. As a result you only gave attention to men who told you what you wanted to hear, and performed for you as expected. And even when you did follow your primal instincts into riding bitch on a Harley with a guy who didn’t spoon feed you bullshit, you made it your mission to mold him, too, into treating you like a princess. Often you succeeded.
And you ate it up like a beggar at a buffet.
Then you got a little older and feminism picked up where fathers and suitors left off. You learned that you were not only a princess with all the entitlements that come with that, but that you were also a victim of history; that all this entitlement that had been lavished on you was really oppression, and that you were owed even more.
And what’s more, you were able to quickly deduce that you could hang on to all those “oppressive” entitlements and take advantage of all the new doors being opened at the same time. All while you were more and more deeply entrenching yourself in the idea that you were not getting everything you deserved; that some man was responsible for it; that some man should fix it.
No wonder you’re so fucked up! Who wouldn’t be? All that molding that the world performed on you; the stuff that made you feel so very good about yourself was bound to come crashing down at some point. Probably about the same time you figured out that no man with an ounce of self respect would put up with you for near as long as you would hope.
The world set out to produce an entire generation of personality disordered females and that is exactly what we got. Exceptions notwithstanding.
And so that leaves scores of you now here, in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and disillusion. Many of you are downing anti-depressants like popcorn at a matinee, spending half your time ripping men, the other half looking for one that will fulfill your insanely unrealistic expectations of what he should be. And then wondering why it isn’t happening.
All the while, your relationship shelf life is ticking away. Your looks are fading and your options are narrowing. But you can’t seem to grasp the notion that it has anything to do with you. That is in part because all the mainstream self help options to which you have availed yourself have only made things worse, fueling the fires of your entitlement and aiding your projective denial. Your gurus and therapists and talk show hosts have only fed you more of the same that ultimately led you back to where you started, minus whatever portion of your earnings you gave up to them.
They are in business counting on the fact that everything I am saying here is true; counting on the fact that you won’t buy anything unless it is what you want to hear. You have been a good customer, which means you have been screwed. And since you can’t blame them or yourself, you just add it to your list of reasons to blame men.
It is a trap you can’t get out of because you have been taught to shun accountability like an AIG executive and point the finger of blame like a snitch in a drug bust.
It is time to grow up. And unless you do, you will never get out of that ditch, whether you know you are in one or not.
It won’t be easy. Growing up at 30 is a bitch; at 40 a nightmare; at 50 a lost cause but for a precious few.
Your ace in the hole is right here, though. I will help whip your mind into shape. It’s a hard job because right now your cranium is just a bucket for a glob of disoriented, infantile mush. The only cure for it is very high doses of the truth on a regular basis.
You won’t like it because I won’t mince words; because I won’t feed you the same poison that has ruined your life. If you want sugar coated, go get a doughnut. COSMO has one on every page, but Dr. Paul doesn’t do junk food.
Most of you will come back here again and again hoping for another column. Why? Well, for different reasons. Some of you will just come back to hate me some more. You are addicted to that sort of thing with men, and those of you the most far gone will only seethe and seethe more at my words.
[quote float=”right”]They are in business counting on the fact that everything I am saying here is true; counting on the fact that you won’t buy anything unless it is what you want to hear. You have been a good customer, which means you have been screwed. [/quote] But others, though you will curse me even in your sleep, will come back to visit me at The Spearhead because I am the first human being in your life to ever shoot totally straight with you. And you will come back because you are, though in terrible shape now, capable of understanding that getting the truth for free is much better than paying money for a pack of lies. And let’s face it, you do free pretty good.
We are on a rebuilding project here, ladies. And relearning. Through this column I will give you the reeducation you so desperately need. We will cover communications, intimacy, trust, and friendship. You will learn new concepts, like your man has feelings and desires of his own; new, radical ideas like making your man your emotional pincushion is actually a bad thing. I will teach you that you are not the center of the universe, that you never were; that you were never supposed to be.
You will grow from a child-woman into a paragon of mature partnership material. And it will bring you the happiness that only a grown up can know. And all you have to do is understand that humility is better for you than hubris; that abandoning any notion that you are royalty will free you from a depraved trap. I know you will thank me later.
[box type=”download” icon=”none”]And remember, ladies, I am not a real doctor, but I play one on the internet.[/box]
