I'm glad to see that these "dating" books are recognized for what they are: manuals on how to compete for the attention of a tiny number of perfect men.

It's ironic that books like "The Rules" suggest modern "liberated" women adopt models of behavior very much like those expected of women in the 1950s and 1960s. It's humorous that others like "The Art of War for Lovers" encourage women to use assertiveness and role-playing to recruit men to fulfill women's needs, while ignoring the real needs of the men they manipulate into caring about them.

As a father of teenage girls, I find this gender-confused age especially disturbing. Traditionally masculine aggressiveness and appreciation of women by men are behaviors regarded as crass and socially unacceptable; traditionally feminine behaviors are "employed" as a means to capture males targeted for their fiscal and physical attractiveness.

I only hope that in this era of traditional-paradigm destruction we can erect a few new sexual paradigms that don't require human beings to use Sun Tzu as a guide toward romantic compatibility.

-- Scott Douglas
New York

I really appreciated this article. This industry of self-help and dating books boggles my mind. I don't want to look for love the way I look for a job. The two are so completely different.

I'm glad to hear there are more people out there who feel the same way. Because of the saturation of these books in the media and so many people trying to whip us women into a frenzy, it's sometimes easy to forget that love is like nature, not math.

-- Erin Hennicke

Garbage of higher education
BY GILLIAN ANDREWS
(06/23/99)

The whole "outsider vibe" of Gillian Andrews' essay is a joke. Her woeful tone of pilfering the privilege of Smith and Mount Holyoke is bizarre, considering the cost of a Hampshire education. I went to school in the Happy Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, home to four private, prized academic gems (including Hampshire) and one festering public university. I went to the public one. I used to go to the Hampshire campus (aka "Camp Hamp") to watch all the tie-dyed and Manic Panic-ed "freaks," inhale the clove-patchouli scent of the campus and read their course offerings (The Rise of Artificial Intelligence, Literature and the Post-Apocalypse, Modern Compost Strategies). While Hampshire may be alternative, in the real world of obscene tuition and privileged students, Anderson comes off like a poseur. To think, "Even Hampshire" students get rid of useful wares? Why not poke through the garbage at U. Mass.? I think Anderson already knows that a public school can't offer very much.

-- Melissa Weinberger

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