Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick.
Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem upset when they get the heave-ho, but a big bit of me actually thinks they’re putting it on. This is usually for one of three reasons:
a) Secretly they’re lesbians but don’t want to be, and laying on the my-man-done-left-me-woe-is-me shtick with a trowel strikes them as a cunning way to seem extra-hetero, even as they’re really hugging themselves with glee that they don’t have to do the dirty, dreary deed anymore.
b) As a way to bond with other women. You’d be amazed the lengths modern broads will go to in order to do this, though search me why; bonding’s for glue, not girls. See obvious beauties such as Michelle Pfeiffer saying, ‘I’m not pretty — I look like a duck.’ Similarly, to be seen suffering at the hands of a man is another way of what anthropologists call ‘stepping down in the dominance hierarchy’ — though what sort of cretin would ever want to do that?
c) To bring some drama to lives which, quite understandably, they find flat and boring, the cream of the joke being that if this sort of broad put a third of the energy into her work that she puts into her weeping, she’d be living the life of Reilly in no time.
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