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"No!" Kevin said, predictably enough. "I mean, no, thanks. It's like ... well, whatever. Maybe she's got a boyfriend." "Sure," I said. "But wouldn't you like to know her version?" "What do you mean, 'version'? I told you everything. There isn't any version to be had. It was a date, not an Oliver Stone movie." He sounded embarrassed. "Besides, it's not worth it. Harriet won't have heard anything, anyway." "OK," I said. I wondered how, at this point, men couldn't know that women talk about everything, everything with their girlfriends. "What do you think happened?" Harriet asked me later, when I called. "I think I know. It's the Contemporary Guy Cripple, isn't it?" "Of course," Harriet said, sounding irritated. "I ran into Jennifer on the street yesterday, and asked her how her date went. 'Horrible!' she said. Right off the bat. She said she'd bumped into him at the computer center, and they chatted away. On and on -- it was clear he was attracted to her. After an hour or so of this, he finally said, 'So, do you want to go out sometime?' She said sure, and he said 'Great!' They talked some more, and he asked what was good for her. She said Friday. On Friday, she gets into his car and asks, 'So where are we going?' And he does that, 'Oh, where do you want to go?' thing. She says, 'I don't care. Where do you want to go?' He replies, 'I don't care. Where do you want to go?' Back and forth for 15 minutes. Finally, she picks someplace where she knows he's comfortable. He says, 'Sure! I just went there yesterday but that's fine.' And at the restaurant, same thing. 'What movie do you want to see?' On and on, back and forth. At that point she decided to go home and wash her hair. "The funny thing," she went on, "is that Kevin is not actually a wimp. He's not one of those rollover kind of guys -- in fact, he's gotten in hot water with some people at work for being overly aggressive and tactless. But every time he goes on a date, he pulls this Hamlet routine." "Oh, Lord. Why do guys do this?" "My mother says it's feminism." We groaned in unison. "They don't know what to do, so they do nothing. They're scared of making the wrong decision -- like, 'will she think I'm a jerk if I take her to a biker bar? Do I look too pretentious by suggesting French food? What if she hates Kevin Kline and is too polite to say so?' When actually the very fact that they can't even make a decision whether to eat Thai or Japanese makes us think less of them. And who wants to sleep with some indecisive guy? It is definitely not sexy. If there's one thing I hear from my girlfriends, time and time again, it's that passive guys are the ultimate turnoff." "Yeah. And then when we say 'I want a man to be a man,' they call us hypocrites, as if we're saying 'pull me around by the hair and cry at the same time.' So instead they let us take control and come off as congenital weaklings." "I asked Kevin about this one time," Harriet said. "He said, 'You know, the truth of the matter is, I just don't care about where we eat or what movie we see. And you girls seem to really care about those things. So I just make it easier and let you decide.' Anyway, Jennifer said she'll never go out with him again. And she even said she realized that he wasn't really wimpy. But it didn't matter." "And of course Kevin has no idea why." Harriet's voice turned instructive. "No more Contemporary Guy Cripple for her, she says. From now on, it's one thing and one thing only: A Man With a Plan." SALON | Oct. 1, 1997 Join the ongoing discussion of Unzipped in the Private Life section of Table Talk.

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