Swimming With Dolphins Does Not Make You Prettier

In my first novel, THE ESTRANGEMENT OF THE RAIN GOD, 2nd. Edition, I said this: “Love is the only truly precious thing we humans have.” Love is an essential aspect of the human spirit and a fundamental component of the human condition. Much of human culture and history has been occasioned by the pursuit, satisfaction, dissolution or conflict of questers for love.

Despite the obvious gravitas of love, the pursuit of it in our time has been hampered by the yen for status and approval. Because of electronic communication, social desirability has infected the blood quest for romance.

In the rigid days of yore, the stratification of society would not have allowed a poor stable boy to pursue romance with the beautiful daughter of a man of means. The conditions of his labor and the functions of her station would have never given them the chance to meet in order to assess physical desirability.

Social strata were crumbled beneath the weight of democratic forces that began with the Renaissance and people from different walks of life were able to mingle more easily. Modernity accelerated this trend with improved transportation and mass communication. Still, acquaintanceship required the proximate physical appearance of both parties.

Now, with a few computer keystrokes, a fireman in Cincinnati can attempt to woo a masseuse in Sheboygan by simply forwarding to her some text and photographs. Verbiage and images are surrogates for actual presence until the two move past electronic engagement to a physical encounter of some sort. The potential romantic couple will only conquer time and distance to meet face-to-face if the electronic titillation is sufficiently seductive.

Since words and images are allowed to be extremely explicit, you would think that women would use the textual portion of their electronic foreplay to highlight their mental capacities and the imaging component of the networked flirtation to emphasize their physical attributes in the best light.

You would be wrong. The majority of women using online dating sites generate prosaic text so trivial that it hides their natural lights under a bushel basket. They seem to forget that the eyes are not the mirrors of the soul, words are the reflectors of your noodle. They seem to ignore the fact that they are trying to get the attention of a man.

They say they like the beach. Who doesn’t? They say they like to watch sunsets. Who doesn’t? They say they like to cuddle. Who doesn’t? They say they are caring. Who isn’t. My personal favorite: they say they are open-minded. Really? Wow! What if I said your most sacred belief was crap. Are you open to that? Can you wrap your mind around that? As long as there is truth in this world, nobody—and I mean nobody—can claim, without shame, to be open-minded.

Women waste their textual space on banality because their desire for social acceptability when exposed to the public is great. They don’t even realize that the only thing their vanilla words communicate to a man is that they are willing to use them in pursuit of a lover. If these behaving women said they would enjoy setting fire to a basket of puppies, that would actually tell a man something about them.

Such women similarly squander their imaging capacity. Instead of focusing on their physical attributes, they try to incorporate social desirability into their photos. To placate their feminist cronies, some women try to make it appear that they are not actually not trying to attract a man. Photos of them are taken at great distances, they stand in shadow, they disguise their physique with baggy, frumpy clothes or they are diminutive against an enormous background.

To appease their sense of insecurity, these women show themselves in art galleries, seemingly assessing a piece of sculpture, sitting a horse, swinging a golf club, opening the door of a Mustang convertible or swimming with dolphins.

Ladies, swimming with dolphins does not make you prettier.