Tom, did you ever see the black & white movie of Topper, Cary Grant is perfection as George Kirby, I think I saw that website you are talking about, Thorne Smiths books are out of copyright protection now, I wonder why no screenwriter has produced a screenplay of The Stray Lamb or Turn and Turn and turnabout. I should do it myself. I used to know a very good screenwriter – mind you he despised his job, he still dreamed of winning a Pullitzer, I think he shot himself in Mexico about five years ago. He wrote a script called The Glass Cage and his agent sold it to Playboy who made it into a porn movie, it was probably his best pay day ever but it was the final insult for a man who regarded himself as a serious writer.

Toni, I started on Nightlife of the Gods when I was a young teenager, drawn, I’m sure, to the cutely sexy pictures of Herberrt Roese. Some years later I discovered at my parent’s winter place the trilogy book that has Topper Takes a Trip, Nightlife of the Gods and The Bishop’s Jaegers. My favorite is still Topper Takes a Trip, and I think I re-read it once a year. I’ve got a decent collection of them, most given to me from an uncle who was amazed that I knew of them at all. Somewhere on the net I even found a number of them in e-book format, which I converted to read on my Palm.

What amazes me is that even though many of the situations and dialogue are dated, there is so much that is just as fresh and … naughty almost a century after the books were written.

I’d be a Thorne Smith fangirl if I were a girl. He’s like, um, a 1920’s Douglas Adams, but a bit more risque.

Tom, I can’t believe you are a Thorne Smith fan. I started reading his books when I was 11, my first was Rain In The Doorway and then, inevitably, Topper. I still reread them constantly but lately I am most drawn to The Stray Lamb and Skin and Bones. What is your favourite? No one writes the way Mr.Smith did, I have a collection of beaten up first editions and when I open up Nightlife of the Gods, I am transported to the decadent 20’s.

[Y]ou are clearly very smart, (although I doubt you are anywhere near as clever as you think you are) and the depth of your sexual experiences relayed through your blog suggests that you have little trouble in attracting partners. Despite knowing little, (or caring little), about womens feelings and emotional needs I have had no trouble in attracting females throughout my life

Thanks, though the fact of the matter is I do have significant trouble attracting partners. I don’t really have that much trouble attracting certain kinds of women (or some types of men), but there is a difference between a woman and a partner and (contrary to popular male belief) it is not always just about their genitals. Perhaps if you cared more about other people, as I do, you might see things differently.

I make no excuses for my misogynistic viewpoint. […] I suppose, because of the way you identify yourself, that you look forward to the blurring of the gender roles, but to be honest I am glad they still exist. If I had my way the differences would be even more defined, although it is clear that the sterotypical male role is being increasingly marginalised.

Of course, seeing things differently is precisely what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? The trouble I have with your viewpoint is not that it exists, but that I am expected to give up my own and use yours instead, simply because, since I am a man, I have been told to do so. It is not blurring of gender roles I am trying to accomplish, it is freedom to choose one’s gender role. I enjoy some aspects of the masculine gender role and I would not want to give those up, but I do not enjoy others and I do not see why I should live by your rules or use your viewpoint when mine suits me better. Yet the kind of man I want to be is a second-class citizen in this culture, and I suffer for that, as do the millions of other men who, like me, do not see things your way.

The difference between you and I, Toni, is that you would rather not see me as a man, whereas I would rather not see a man as one homogeneous thing. That is why where you see the stereotypical male role being marginalized, I simply see the male role being given more expressive options.

I can almost guarantee that if [maymay] spends any time in Asia he will rediscover the joy of being a man

All that would do is show me what your joys of being a man are like, and frankly I am not that interested in learning too much about you, though your continued presence on this blog circuit is admittedly quite the interesting puzzle.

what role intelligence should play in this framework[? …] All that occurs to me is that, from an evolutionary perspective, men could be wary of more intelligent women, fearful that such women may be able to successfully cuckold them without the men realizing, thus wasting the men’s time or resources, and in extreme cases leaving him no offspring at all.

While this is certainly plausible, it returns once again to my point, which is that we need to better understand men and their motivations before we can confidently say we truly and fully understand the reasons behind their demonstrable behaviors. In this case, that behavior is fear once again and again I refer to my post above where I ask: “why are men so afraid of their own shortcomings?”

I should have tried to pull Calico into an e-mail correspondence chess game, not you. I’m not sure I’m wired properly to physically appreciate you as you deserve, except to say you were real fun to wrestle that one time, and showed a ridiculous amount of potential.

As for the chess game I never got back to you about, you’re right, you should have tried to pull Calico into that. As you discovered when we wrestled (which really was a ton of fun!) it’s surprisingly hard to pull me into anything. ;)

Rona:

Did you see the article that came out about a month or so ago that, actually, also linked waist/hip ratio to female intelligence and intelligence of offspring?

No, I didn’t! But I would like to! Link? Also, I am looking forward to your less-sleepy comments should you feel you want to share them with me, here or via email or however. :)

SJ:

If you’re ‘man’ enough, you can like lace doilies, and if you’re ‘woman’ enough you can dig trucks or be a brain – and it’s OK. As long as you do your ‘job’ and know your place and nobody has to think about what you actually are – as long as you’re close enough to the slot in their mind where they think you should fit, so they don’t have to think about you at all.

Actually, if you’re man enough, you can get away with liking lace doilies, only up to a point. The common reasoning for this is simply because liking lace doilies is not something men do, so that makes you “less manly,” which is only counterbalanced by the fact that you also have your shotgun and deer’s head proudly displayed in your living room and you have thirty women hanging off your arm at any given moment. God help you if you ever stop being manly “enough,” and therein lies the problem: you’ve not defined masculinity or manliness, you’re living by someone else’s rules.

That’s hardly what I’d call a self-fulfilling lifestyle.

I think there are some hardware-level things going on here. I think there’s limited computational resources, and we’re evolved to be lazy evaluators. Yet another argument for becoming post-human.

I can’t say I disagree with the notion that some people are simply not as capable in certain ways as other people, but I also can’t say I believe that this is as simple as the binary of “smart” and “dumb.” Intelligence is made up of many, many differing components in much the same way as sexuality; different “amounts” of the different kinds of intelligence evident in different people cause their smarts to be displayed more in some ways and not others (see, for instance, the brilliant (and hilarious) talk by Sir Ken Robinson on TED Talks, or Daniel Goleman’s work on Emotional Intelligence). Clearly, there is more to it than that.

It shapes a lot of things.

It seems to me that as long as one fits a stereotypical role well enough, one is allowed more ‘quirks’ and ‘eccentricities’. The wealthy and the beautiful have their leeway, and the ragged, the lost, and the mad have their own expected measures of ‘bizarre’. If you’re ‘man’ enough, you can like lace doilies, and if you’re ‘woman’ enough you can dig trucks or be a brain – and it’s OK. As long as you do your ‘job’ and know your place and nobody has to think about what you actually are – as long as you’re close enough to the slot in their mind where they think you should fit, so they don’t have to think about you at all.

I think there are some hardware-level things going on here. I think there’s limited computational resources, and we’re evolved to be lazy evaluators. Yet another argument for becoming post-human.

Toni, I’d never have expected that. Hell, I’m surprised that anybody even knows who he is!