The New War Between Men and Women
Stein, Benjamin J.
Benjamin J. Stein THE NEW WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN Today's battles would make Keats and Byron blush. My old pal Michael Shamberg, who used to be a hippie and now makes money in the picture...
...There is another thing about the momentum of America today which makes men feel like victimizing women, and also makes them feel victimized...
...Great," I said...
...aren't 'girlish.' They aren't sweet or giggly or light...
...That doesn't give you much time to get to know each girl, does it...
...I don't understand...
...I'm too busy to screw her...
...A wonderful way to go through life...
...Why don't you just stay home if you don't want to get picked up...
...Ben, you fool, there are no third dates," Bobby Boxer said and smiled...
...Are you kidding...
...She is Staci's roommate...
...That's the whole point of it," Lois chimes in...
...What's the matter?' "And I go, 'Well, I'm sorry, but I just checked out your size, and I don't really think it's worth my time.' "The guys get so crazy, they usually just put on their clothes and walk out of the room and don't say a word," Lois says proudly...
...What about the third date...
...They want to hurt someone...
...We do want to get picked up," Staci says...
...here does this mania come from...
...You must be out of your mind," I answer...
...See that guy who's waiting at the door, near the grille...
...Where does the notion come from that men and women are supposed only to take from each other...
...That's just not real...
...Roche-Bobois says they're completely out of the table and chairs I ordered for the pool...
...Now I have just had lunch with the woman head of an indie prod company, and I have just run into my pal Murray, who also has a rich indie prod deal on the lot...
...I go inside and just stand at the bar...
...She does anything you tell her to do and doesn't talk back or ask you to do anything for her...
...What do you mean...
...I check out the girls with the really good figures, and then I notice if they have a nice car or an old car, only I don't really break my neck doing it, or I might just hear them on a break talking about how broke they are, and how they hate their roommates and wish they could move out and get their own place...
...They're tired of men in Porsches picking them up and taking them out for one glass of wine, telling the girls how great they are, then expecting the girls to have sex with them, and then they never call again unless they're drunk...
...talk to rich women all day long," says my shrink pal, P. "They've all been married a few times...
...Susannah has an eerie gleam in her eye...
...They're the only women who aren't looking for someone to cut up...
...So I tell her I have just been crucified at work, and she tells me she doesn't have time to hear about it...
...The women here in L.A...
...about six feet tall, with skin like the cocoa Mom used to make on snow days when I was home from school...
...There is something about the momentum of modern life that forces women to make themselves sexually vulnerable to men and then to hate the men for it...
...That's rich...
...Two agents from ICM at that table over near the bar...
...The guy who's putting together warehouse deals in Camarillo and picking up the new girl from Kansas and making her wish she were dead...
...Really gorgeous girls, and they get totally screwed over...
...I tell them I screwed their best friends...
...18 "Extremely good...
...That works out to about seventy-three girls...
...to use a factory, and I walk in the door at eleven at night so worried I can't see straight...
...I'm going to see how many years I can go without sleeping with her, until she begs me...
...Perhaps it has to do with a national philosophy or the irresponsible taking of pleasure...
...I go there every day for class in aerobics and three times a week for jazz...
...17 "You want to know why we make so many movies about hookers being nice...
...Then, we're just about to go for it, and he's really ready, and I look at him, you know, and I go, 'Oh, sorry, I don't think this is gonna work out.' "And the guy always goes, 'Why...
...Great," I say...
...Meanwhile, her friend Rochelle is divorcing her fourth husband, who never did anything but give her a new Mercedes convertible every year while she played tennis...
...I had to spend an hour on the phone with Jason's school psychiatrist because he's not reacting well to the plan for the semester in London, and Rochelle is getting divorced, and I had to spend an hour on the phone with her telling her how lucky she was to get rid of that creep Larry.' "In other words," says Murray, "she's had a full day spending my says...
...It's great...
...You think I kidnap them from St...
...But we want to get picked up so we can give some of the dirt back to them they've been giving us all our lives...
...Nearby, Linda Evans and Joan Collins were at competing round tables, flanked by their new best friends— Swifty Lazar for Joan and an unknown woman for Linda...
...They're tough...
...I'll tell you why," he says without a moment's hesitation...
...Then they stop talking to him...
...Then they come to me and they say they still feel cheated...
...The women of Los Angeles know taking, but not giving...
...On the other hand, you go over to a hooker's apartment...
...That producer from Warner over at the table near the window...
...I slept with both of them...
...Maybe it touches upon the frantic pace of life in get-rich-quick America...
...I think that if the men in Los Angeles ever realized that the idea of the nurturing woman is a complete myth in this town, they would all become homosexuals...
...This is the only place I feel comfortable...
...asks Stella Zena, my call girl friend on Queens Road in West Hollywood...
...But they usually don't call you again anyway," I answered...
...Why don't you try not sleeping with a guy until you know him and know if you really like him and if he respects you...
...My old pal Michael Shamberg, who used to be a hippie and now makes money in the picture business, tells me that in information theory the greatest value attaches to that piece of information which is the newest...
...Everything has to be negotiated, as if you were leasing a car...
...I'm in August, and I've got forty-two notches on my belt for the year, so I'm okay...
...Sometimes I go to a club like Sasch and I meet a good-looking guy and I talk to him for a while, and I let him take me home...
...So I tell her that I'll get to know her after we go to bed, if she'll just trust me and go to bed with me first...
...This is a bitter war, with casualties, fighting in the trenches, and real pain...
...This is what I like to do," she tells me over a chicken sandwich at the Hard Rock Cafe...
...The women in L.A...
...It takes away all our humanity, and they love that...
...It makes them crazy...
...If it's that terrible here," I ask, "why don't you leave town and move somewhere quiet where you can find a nice husband and settle down...
...No, I never forget," Susannah says...
...He is a handsome fellow from an Ivy League background in the east who has somehow wound up in Los Angeles...
...They never— absolutely never—are offended...
...To them, a woman is just a number, just a breathing love doll...
...The carpenter didn't show up until noon...
...Perhaps it is the role models of sexually available young women in movies...
...She is thirty and attractive and lives alone...
...People ask me all the time why there are so many homosexuals in Los Angeles, why there are a million of them cruising up and down Santa Monica Boulevard with their hands in each other's pockets...
...She's too busy to listen to my problems...
...If you don't sleep with a guy after two dates, he won't ever call you again...
...T A have another thing I like to do," Lois says...
...Staci is twenty-two, six months out of college, down at the bars and clubs night after night in the front lines of combat...
...Then on the second date, I get her drunk, and I tell her I really like her, but unfortunately, I am incredibly busy at work and I really don't have time to get to know her as well as I'd like to before we go to bed...
...They really get off if they can have sex with a different one every night...
...That's unbelievably mean...
...That's pretty good...
...The guys riding around in 3O8's with telephones are the ones who send me my girls...
...Why does Hollywood love hookers so much...
...Usually their husband is the closest man...
...That idea, which you can still see quaintly on display in a few houses outside the fast lane, is that men and women must spend time with each other's problems, that helping and giving are valuable in and of themselves, that taking is not enough, that time spent getting to know a man or a woman is time well spent, that what matters is not how many but how...
...Why...
...she said...
...A wonderful way to live...
...You can't just go to Kelly Girl...
...By the time they've been here for a year, they know that if they're going to get on their backs, they aren't gonna get anything out of it unless it's strictly business...
...So I say to him, 'Get to the bottom line.' And he always says to me, 'To make a long story short, how would you like to come home and have sex with me?' "And I like to look him in the eye and say, 'To make a long story even shorter, are you really, really good in bed?' And usually the guy does a double take and says, 'Well, I'm pretty good.' "And then I go, 'Well, sorry...
...Agnes' School...
...Like for 1985, I decided I would have sex with a different girl at least, on the average, every five days...
...So far, so good," Bobby said...
...I did him when he first moved to town...
...Well, let me put it on a more down to earth level," I said...
...They especially like it if they both have had the same woman...
...So, what I do, is that I act just like I'm a man...
...They want a man who'll give to them...
...The grass is green and there are neat paths because that's how Michael Eisner wanted it before he left to become Chairman of Disney: to look like a university campus...
...I get home after I've been getting my brains kicked in all day, and ten different people have called me up and told me they're going to kill me if the production budget goes up by another dime, and I'm getting calls from the Unit Production Manager in Ohio telling me he needs to pay another million money and talking on the phone, while the UPM in Dayton is telling me I'll have overbudget penalties bigger than my gross income last year...
...You should see the looks on their faces...
...I get back at her though," Murray " I think that if the men in Los Angeles ever realized that the idea of the nurturing woman is a complete myth in this town, they would all become homosexuals...
...Does it work...
...This is my home...
...And then, when I tell them what I do, and how I have all this money and three pieces of rental property, they're always interested...
...aren't 'girls.' That's too good for them...
...Susannah stares...
...How come the only nice women in movies like Thtding Places, Bachelor Party, Night Shift, Risky Business, Sessions, or on TV cop shows are hookers...
...What happened to the simple idea of getting to know a man or woman, learning about him or her, and then, little by little, sharing life until true feeling and trust develop...
...I asked those questions of Traci, a recent USC grad with a figure like Hugh Hefner's dreams before he had his stroke...
...You have to fight with them even about foreplay...
...They want to know how much money you have, what kind of a car you drive, where you can get a good table, if you have a plane, all that kind of stuff before they even look at you...
...A dazzling, sunshiny day in front of the executive commissary at Paramount...
...I get them at the Sports Connection on Santa Monica Boulevard, right near the Esprit store on La Cienega...
...You know what I think...
...You might have had me and forgotten...
...Herewith, a few dispatches from the front: Lunch with my former Valley Girl, Staci...
...It works about half the time," he said...
...So they stop having sex with him...
...All she asks for is a hundred or a hundred and fifty bucks, and that's like free...
...I have to be able to tell a guy at William Morris that I did his best friend right after we've been in bed, just so he knows he's just a guy waiting at the delicatessen counter...
...And then, first chance they get, they pick up on somebody who's got a better gig, richer overall deal, closer to true gross participation...
...None of them can even feel whether it's day or night, except they know that they've been cheated by men some time in their lives, or at least they feel like maybe some time in some past life they have been...
...I especially love to take them home, then kick them out in the middle of the night, and then never return their calls...
...Fine...
...Henry Winkler walks by and greets us effusively, and then Thorn Mount and Dawn Steele give us a wink...
...In that spirit, let me start right out by telling you that here in Los Angeles a war is raging: the war between men and women...
...By the same evil token, the idea has spread that women are owed an un-payably huge debt by men in general...
...They feel cheated...
...I treat them like numbers...
...I tell them I'd like to take on three of them at once...
...This is not your old comedy saw, the drawing room battle of the sexes...
...But this is the only way I can get back at her for never being there when I need her...
...She's a woman lawyer in the business, and a powerful figure in wheels and deals in the TV side...
...I haven't slept with her for two months...
...They feel angry...
...Susannah and I are sitting at a little deuce right next to the front door, eating pasta...
...Plenty," he said...
...How come there are so many movies with hookers in them, and the hookers always turn out so well...
...I don't mind...
...But whatever the cause, the concept has taken root that every man has the right to do whatever he can get away with towards women and they shouldn't hassle him over it...
...You want to change it, you talk to them...
...Susannah reels pasta onto her fork and smiles...
...Because they are nice compared with the women here...
...She is a ravishingly beautiful black girl Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer in Hollywood...
...It doesn't matter if they live in Bel-Air and have two maids and play tennis all morning and shop all afternoon...
...I hope you won't mind if I go home now and kill myself...
...This is the way I work it," says Bobby Boxer, a packager of TV shows at a studio near the Ventura Freeway...
...I asked...
...Are you on schedule...
...The husband goes to a one-room apartment in the Marina, flat broke, and the wife has all the money and the balls wrapped up in her Gucci pocketbook...
...They're the ones who keep the girls coming...
...I'm going to make a list to see if there's anyone in this room besides you I haven't had...
...And Sarah, my wife, is in bed reading Architectural Digest, and making notes on a little piece of Tiffany note paper about what she's going to buy in the way of antique wood paneling for our breakfast room, at two hundred dollars per square foot...
...Have you seen the kind of women we have to deal with in Los Angeles...
...It's great...
...Perhaps it is a vague residue of the women's rights movement...
...If a guy buys me a few drinks, I'll listen to his lies for a while, and then he'll ask me where I live...
...Maybe it has to do with the atomic bomb or with contraceptives or with no-fault divorce or mass prosperity...
...I know," Traci said, "and it really makes me hate 'em...
...Ben," Traci said with a mixture of sorrow and pity, "that world doesn't exist any longer...
...They're mean...
...I set myself a goal each year...
...They don't even know what giving is...
...I asked as we sat at a window table at Spago...
...Hey," Stella Zena says, "I didn't make the rules...
...Have you ever seen the women we have to deal with in this business...
...An executive at a major studio "in the Burbank area" is talking to me...
...Any means is allowed in collecting that debt, and the woman who collects the most the fastest is queen for a day...
...Look around this room," she says...
...No, but I do wonder where you get them," I answer...
...So, on the first date, I take a 'girl' out, to use your word, and I don't even touch her...
...In today's America, there is only time to take, and to get taken, and that is not time enough...
...The whole point is that I remember...
...We were at the Hard Rock, watching Ton Sur Ton meet 501...
...Because I'm doing to them exactly what they do to me...
...Then they kick him out, and demand ten thousand a month in separate maintenance...
...As those ideas spread, by a kind of wicked Gresham's Law of psychology, a simple idea was crowded out...
...And if they decide to try it, they always tell me that they're totally sick of going out with losers from acting class who take them home and ball them and make long distance calls on their phones...
...I know she's dying, and I am too...
...That's why I have to remember everything," Susannah says...
...inner at Morton's...
...You think you had a bad day,' she says...
...A woman in Los Angeles is a c----attached to a calculator...
...Where do I get new girls to work with me...
...Him, too...
...She's all made up and she smells of perfume...
...Besides, when you say 'girl,' it sounds like you're talking about Shirley Temple or your sister...
...I go to a really hot club like Voila, where it's all Ferraris and Rolls-Royces out front...
...I asked while I stared at my duck sausage pizza...
...She's got a drink waiting for you...
...That's not good enough,' and I walk away and talk to somebody else...
...Just like they make me feel...
...This is how it is at home," Murray says...
...We're not going to find anyone we really like anyway, so we might as well get some satisfaction out of it by making them feel terrible...
...Staci looks like the young Sophia Loren, only better, with shag hair and braces-perfect teeth...
...I treat them just as much as if they were machines as they treat me...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
