Sex With You is Really a Kafka-Esque Experience—I Mean That as a Compliment

The password is…“sexually dimorphic genitalia:”

“It’s not possible to have a completely gender neutral date,” writes therapist Andrew Smiler in a head-clutchingly asinine essay for the Good Men Project, a repository of painfully navel-gazing male-feminist apologetics that describes itself as “not so much a magazine as a social movement.” While acknowledging the impossibility of his daunting task, Mr. Smiler goes on to offer a great many helpful tips in his “Guy’s Guide to the Gender-Minimized First Date.” But not before making a full and frank apology in advance: “I’m trying to write this guide to apply across all genders, masculine, feminine, trans*, etc. If I’ve missed or something is very wrong, I have faith someone will let me know in the comments. I’m also writing based on my own American background and referring primarily to gender roles as they currently exist in the U.S. Depending on where you’re from, you may have grown up with this approach or you may find it completely foreign.” An asterisk on that asterisk: “Trans*” I am reliably informed, is the new, more inclusive way of referring in writing to the phenomenon of transsexualism, or as the ever-helpful FAQ at “Ask a Trans Woman” explains: “Trans, sans asterisk, has a tendency to mean gender-binary folk (trans men and trans women, often by the DSM-IV, GID definition of the words.) Trans* is more inclusive.” It is getting difficult to keep up.

Mr. Smiler’s advice, almost all of which is catastrophically bad, consists in the main of pre-cooking evasive strategies for such potentially fraught issues as deciding who pays for dinner or whether to split the check in the name of sexual egalitarianism. His guidance: The party proffering the invitation pays for the party accepting it. This is the sole area in which Mr. Smiler, otherwise a celebrant of sexual fluidity, concedes that expectations may be fixed by circumstance. “You can maintain one roll [sic] . . . or you can switch around,” except when the bill comes, which is to say you can pass the rolls but not the check. Not my own style, though fair enough. (But who says you get to make the rules, Mr. Man?)

It should go without saying, here at what one hopes against hope is at long last the nadir of Western sexual dysfunction, that Mr. Smiler’s gender roles have nothing to do with anything so quotidian as the actual sex of the person with which they are associated: “Your genitalia — and your partner’s genitalia — are only relevant if you prefer some types of genitalia over others,” he writes. Possibly relevant maxims here include “De gustibus non disputandum est,” or, perhaps more apropos, Richard Fariña’s “Mea most maxima culpa, baby, ’cause this is my week for chicks.” It is emblematic of our current attitudes toward sex, which are fundamentally consumerist, that this question is approached as though it were a choice between the gluten-free lasagna and the full-on farina di grano tenero.

Not surprisingly, Twitter users are having lots of fun with Mr. Smiler’s Opus. Though I’m wondering, how exactly did we get from “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it,” to someone describing a first date as being the equivalent of the men in the white North American Rockwell jumpsuits prepping for a Close Encounter with an alien species?

Perhaps Stephen Kruiser has one clue…

Pajama Boy as gateway drug: RT @JonahNRO: So this is a thing. Good luck with that. The gender-minimized first date. http://t.co/zSWQ3inf8U

— SFK (@stephenkruiser) January 14, 2014

…Though James Taranto has the best response to the “Good Man Project,” which alas has nothing to do with the Alan Parsons Project, except that you hope that Dr. Evil and many sharks armed with frickin’ lasers put a stop to such nonsense permanently:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! http://t.co/TlBuvtHnPu

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) January 12, 2014

(Headline via Alvy Singer.)