Loe raamatut: «The Man Diet»

How I Came to Write this Book

Here’s a little story …

I’m with this gorgeous guy, we’re two-thirds of the way through a free bottle of champagne that I’d arranged through PR contacts and I’m calculating the likelihood of a kiss or maybe more when we’re finished. Just as I’m picturing his bedroom, and what a triumph it would be to see it, his iPhone rings. It appears that another girl needs him – an on-off friend ‘with issues’ – and so off he goes. Not, however, before I wrest a smooch off him as he unlocks his motorbike.

But when I get home, instead of feeling jubilant about kissing a text-book hottie that had entered my life as a very professional masseur at a spa in central London, I lie on the bed and feel … down. Rejected. Crap. Tired. Like I’ve sold myself short, but I’m not quite sure why. What had I been hoping to gain? A romp with a man – albeit a muscular one – who I’d had to lure out on a date with the promise of free alcohol?

Here’s another story: My friends Kim and Kate are watching Uruguay play Holland in the World Cup semifinal and end up snogging a couple of happy Dutch fans. However, expecting their snogees to be eagerly in touch afterwards, both Kim and Kate are dismayed when they hear nothing. Kim follows up with an email only to receive a downright rude reply. It would have been comical – if it hadn’t made her feel crap and empty and induce a week-long funk of low self-esteem in which she threw the baby out with the bathwater (job bad; career trajectory stalled; life going nowhere). And for what? A randomer! Meanwhile, Kate’s lad does respond and agrees to meet her for a drink. He isn’t free for a week, during which time Kate gets moderately excited. When they meet, it’s at a grotty pub of his choosing, and afterwards he seems to expect her to accompany him home. She allows him a snog and then – three days later when she still hasn’t heard from him – she sends him a drunken text. He doesn’t reply and she too enters a few days of self-loathing and anger.

We’re meant to be having the times of our lives but, as the above stories suggest, being single and content in the 21st century is far from straightforward. Ruth, 29, puts it well: ‘Being single is a job. But it’s a secret job.’ We’re constantly juggling our private anxiety about being single with a free ’n’ easy public persona. So while being single sounds like a barrel of laughs for the well-waxed, sexually liberated, financially solvent young woman, it is far from being a walk in the park.

What made me want to write this book is the fact that the Western single woman has never had it so good. She’s got more opportunity than ever before – professionally, socially and sexually. She puts up with less harassment and fewer superiority complexes from men than ever before. She earns more, shags more and drinks more than ever. She can do what she wants. But somehow – when it comes to society’s ultimate flash point, sex and love – she can’t get no satisfaction. Or not enough.

The Man Diet expresses my belief that it doesn’t need to be that way. I want to help the single woman cut through the biggest obstacle to her happiness today: junk-food love. I want to help lift the sense of doom and even worthlessness many of us feel if we are sporting neither a rock nor a man on our arm so that we can get on with the business of being – and feeling – awesome.

‘Being single is a job. But it’s a secret job.’

Easy highs, easy lows:

welcome to a world of junk-food love

Badoo is a mobile hook-up site for the straight market with 120 million users and 300,000 more added per day at the time of writing. Floxx, which originated as FitFinder, is a microblogging site where users describe hot people nearby in salacious terms (a perving portal, in other words), while tube.net allows users (female only, interestingly) to post pictures of hotties photographed surreptitiously on the Underground. Flirtomatic allows users to send electronic flirts – the homepage is a surge of photos that come forward then recede ever so slightly sickeningly. There are dozens more like this being conceived every day. I’m going to sound hideously prim here, but I see these sites as a natural by-product of a dating environment that’s becoming increasingly high in poorly made fast food and low in slow-cooked, well-sourced nourishment. There, I’ve said it.

Back at the beginning of 2010, when I became single again, I was all about the fast-food style of love, and warmly embraced the ‘many fish in the sea’ idea. I was a bit manic, going after men and saying yes to them as if it was my job to do so now that I was single, and – as I said above – supposedly ‘loving it’.

It was psychologist and relationships expert Dr Cecilia d’Felice who first recommended that I go on a ‘Man Diet’ after I told her about my experience of being single.

‘With each failed encounter – a man that doesn’t ask for a follow-up date, a guy that is rude, or a date you didn’t enjoy – there is the potential to lose self-esteem. Too many negative experiences will chip away at your self-worth leaving you feeling low and anxious about your date-ability.’

Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist and relationships expert, author of Dare to Be You

So, I hear you all ask, what is a Man Diet? Well, pure and simple, it’s a diet, in which you take a break from chowing down on men – literally and otherwise. You let them go. Forget about them. Instead, you focus on building up your sense of self-worth, your interests, your personhood. Your ‘you’. You relax, and give yourself a time out on dating, romantic timelines and so on.

I thought more about this brave idea. Could I do it? And ultimately, did I want to do it? I had to admit it sounded tempting and challenging in equal measure. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but equally, I sensed I’d benefit massively if I did. The Man Diet smacked of a path to somewhere good, not without its tiring uphills but generally pleasant and with interesting scenery along the way. It seemed like the kind of ride whose uphills would leave you with excellent, enviable glutes and thighs at the end of it.

I started not only to pay close attention to where I was going wrong, but to quietly observe my single friends’ behaviour, rather than just urging them to keep going in order to erase the bad taste of one unsatisfying encounter with another one. Of course we were all roughly going wrong in the same ways: giving ourselves away too much and to too many people, for no particularly good reason. Great men – potential life partners – don’t grow on trees these days (did they ever?) and you know them when you see them. We weren’t seeing them, so instead we channelled a Samantha from Sex and the City-style quantity-over-quality approach, and guess what: it wasn’t making us happy. Nor did it appear to be increasing the chances of meeting someone worthwhile – the types of guys we were attracting never really improved or changed.

And if we weren’t getting action – if we were in a ‘drought’ – we talked about that, using up our emotional energy. Follow-up dates with guys we didn’t particularly like spending time with – whether we met them online or elsewhere – bruised and eroded our self-esteem, too. With men or without them, we seemed to be defining ourselves in relation to men.

Who fancies you, how many hook-ups, shags, suggestive texts, Facebook come-ons or intrigues you can run up seem to be the single girl’s bread and butter (or rather, her high-carb fix). I began to see that, in reality, they’re our poison. Not because they are bad in themselves, but because they so easily become like drugs: without them, we feel crap, and when we have them we can only think of our next fix. Are we ever left feeling satisfied? Of course not.

Identity and the single woman: am I hot enough?

Hotness, like gold (only not nearly as solid), has become society’s most sought-after social and sexual currency.

In Female Chauvinist Pigs, a brilliant book, Ariel Levy states in no uncertain terms that the image-generated, ‘overheated thumping of sexuality’ in the West is far more about consumption than real human connection. Indeed, people spend a large amount of cash acquiring this glossy form of hotness.

As Maria, 31, puts it: ‘Everything comes down to: “Do you think I’m good looking or not?”’

Somewhere, nestled deep inside our brains, is the childhood idea that good things come to pretty girls. Namely: knights in shining armour; doting attention; popularity. So, lacking her knight as well as a range of good options, the single woman feels she has to prove to herself and others that she’s not single because she isn’t attractive. While being considered hot is a huge motivator for women of every romantic status, I think it’s an even more emotional concern for the single woman. We feel a bit like this: ‘Show me I am pretty enough so that I know I really am. Otherwise I’m afraid that people – myself included – will see my singleness as a function of subpar hotness. And that will crush me.’

The false promise of shagging like a man

We want to show we’re hot, and sex is one way we do it. But it has to be easy, breezy casual sex because we’re independent women and are led to believe that a good way to show independence is to shag a lot or outrageously.

Getting notches on the bedpost has become a widespread symbol of empowerment, but in my view a false one, because the quantity over quality equation doesn’t add up to happiness for most women. This conviction is based partly on my experience as a single person – numerous generous offerings of my body with little repayment of the friendly, caring or (God forbid) emotional variety. (Random Italian men with sub-zero IQs in hasty encounters in borrowed flats and drunken German cheaters in broom closets at parties may sound like rollicking fun but they lose their appeal very quickly.) It is also based on a whole host of research, some convincing, some not. After all, the last thing you need is male researchers saying that science shows women should be chaste while men should continue to enjoy rampaging the field because it’s in their DNA. And authors such as Natasha Walter in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender are excellently enraged on the topic of biological determinism and will convince any thinking woman to take prescriptive biological arguments with a rigorous pinch of salt. But there are grains of useful, fair evidence about women and sexual profligacy that can help substantiate what I have learned from experience and observation, of which more later.

The idea of ‘throttling up on power … and having sex like a man’ seduced a whole generation of young women through the delicious portal of Sex and the City. We thirsted to see Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and, of course, Samantha, the show’s proudest sexual figurehead, hilariously and frankly discussing, then actually having ‘sex like a man’ (their stated goal in the first episode). There was a kind of competitiveness to it, and many of us watching this and numerous other episodes in which the girls indulge in purely utilitarian sex (the norm for Samantha) felt an urge to chant ‘yeah!’ and fist pump the air. After all, it looked an awful lot like feminism – indeed, the casual and experimental sexual ideal presented in SATC helped define the kind of feminism known as ‘third wave’. US magazine Bust co-founder Debbie Stoller has said that in their quest for sexual fulfillment , the ‘lusty feminists of the third wave’ are leaving no stone unturned. Toys, techniques: we’re trying them all.

However, I think a friend of mine called Kristen, 32, presents a picture that’s closer to reality than the powerful one of clacking Manolos and perfectly coiffed just-had-sex hair in SATC:

‘There’s this expectation that we’re supposed to be having casual sex, that it doesn’t touch us – but it does. We see casual sex as empowerment. But when I was having “casual” sex with my flatmate, I would lie there sobbing in my room while he had sex next door with someone else. It didn’t feel all that empowered.’

Several of the young women interviewed in Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs explain frighteningly well how they and their friends are using a gung-ho, blokeish approach to sex to show they’re not ‘girly’.

Boatloads of casual sex does not signify actual empowerment (though it’s not necessarily contrary to it). Empowerment isn’t feeling like shit when a guy has used you as a masturbatory aid, or pretending you don’t care. Empowerment isn’t insisting: ‘I can do what I want and if I want to get hurt and misused and undervalued and feel corroded and lower my self-esteem, I can!’ And it’s not about performing empowerment through sex. You are empowered if you pay close attention to what really builds your sense of wellbeing, and to knowing and understanding the difference between fun and crap treatment masquerading as fun.

Social discomfort and the single woman

As if the cake needed any more topping – single women today still feel an anxiety about their non-manned status that ranges from the manageable to the debilitating. Women are no longer defined by their childbearing and house-cleaning skills. But that doesn’t seem to diminish society’s obsession with female romantic and sexual status. In the US, successful professional women are known to take two years (TWO YEARS) off work to plan weddings.

‘There is this societal pressure whereby if you’re a single woman in your 30s, you’re seen as mad, desperate or somehow lacking. It’s like Stanford in Sex and the City says: “you’re nobody until someone loves you”. But I don’t want to reach 50 and be really successful and live in a nice flat and all anyone can see is I’m single. I don’t like being reduced to that – a failure because you haven’t got someone to shag you long term.’

Ronnie Blue, 30, journalist

Reality shows about weddings and man-finding are cultishly popular and spawning like rabbits: Bridezillas, The Bachelorette, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and dozens of others. In the UK, the hen party has become a kind of adulation akin to goddess worship and money is not meant to be an object to the full homage the bride-to-be deserves. ‘Marriage has become a cult,’ says Ronnie. ‘The hen-dos have become insane as if getting married is the biggest achievement a woman can have. If you’re single, it makes you feel like you’re a total failure. But if there wasn’t that pressure, that view, you wouldn’t become so anxious about finding someone, and that anxiety affects the way you are with men. It makes you less attractive.’

The waning glory of the single woman: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I to Bridget Jones

It’s worth remembering our proud origins. The most terrible epithets were thrown at non-widowed single women – they were, at the bare minimum, assumed to be either shameless whores or hideous spinster frigid virgins. But many of our predecessors, from Joan of Arc to Florence Nightingale, saw their singleness as essential to the pursuit of the kind of work they wanted to achieve. Cleopatra spoke nine languages fluently as ruler of Egypt and could barely tolerate lover (not husband) Antony’s idiocy. Elizabeth I remained a virgin, ‘wedded to her people’. Catherine the Great of Russia had numerous lovers who she paid off generously when they no longer satisfied her – meanwhile changing the course of European history.

Such stateswomen were, of course, rare among rare exceptions to the rule of ‘to be a single woman is to be pitied and kept down’, and the obstacles facing them were enormous (men mainly, and the laws written by men). Now that we’re free to get on with doing whatever we want with or without a man, with as kinky or polygamous a sex life as we want, we should be racing ahead, full of the joys of freedom.

Yet instead of seeking to emulate Catherine the Great’s astonishing approach to lovers and imperial policy, it’s Helen Fielding’s hilarious but terrifying model of early-mid-life singleness, Bridget Jones, that exerts real influence. We adore that chaotic jumble of career ineptitude, vulnerability, embarrassment and frustration in part because it seems to say, ‘this is you, too’.

On the page, in that nice font, it’s all charming and fine and ends in a fairy tale marriage. Reality is different, though, and we can do better. The more I observed and considered, the more it became blazingly clear that Dr d’Felice was onto something – we’re filling our lives with too much junk-food love and instead of making us stronger, it just bloats us with dead emotional weight. So I decided to give the Man Diet a go.

The Man Diet explained: what’s it for?

The Man Diet explains and explores ten rules designed to wean you off junk-food love, namely:

• negative man-related experiences

• corrosive man-obsessing thoughts

• damaging man-related actions

It is designed to tweak your behaviour – mental and social – in such a way as to strengthen your core sense of self. In doing so, it should make your singledom healthy, creative and, yes, happy. Many books either add to the stigma of being unattached, by trying to show you how to snare a man, or aggressively trumpet the message that you can be happy even though you’re single. This one shows you how to treat yourself well – emotionally and intellectually – while you’re single.

Diets are hard. Is this one?

Not hugely, but it’s not a breeze either. Though definitely less painful than following a food diet (though not necessarily less challenging), the Man Diet does require significant effort. It does involve a cutting down of widely available, habitually consumed junk-food love. JFL is everywhere – it’s in our Facebook newsfeeds, our availability online, our multiple inboxes, our short attention spans. It’s in the belief that emotional attachment is bad and that it certainly doesn’t go with sex; that some guy is better than no guy; that the easiest and best way to pass the time is to think and talk about men. It’s in the guys themselves: men fed on a culture of porn and anything goes, in which chivalry is dead and – miraculously – sex grows on trees.

Remember, good love is around, too. That’s why this diet is ultimately positive. In cutting down on bad love, it opens up space for good love. Good love can involve good men, or good things with men you like, or it can mean you feeling good without a man. The Man Diet is a method of discerning the wheat from the chaff: emotionally, sexually and romantically. Whether you’re enjoying dating and having fun, you’re long-term single and feeling desperate for a shag, or serious about finding a life partner, cutting down the junk-food love is a major bonus.

Can I date when I’m reading this book?

Yes! But in the healthy, Man Diet/No Junk-Food Love way. You can snog men and even shag them on the ‘diet’ – but only if you’re doing it in the right way, from the right place and, to put it bluntly, with a nice man. It’s about cutting down on junk. In other words, the Man Diet is about setting emotional, not physical, boundaries.

Who is the diet for?

The diet is not just for people that are having their doors banged down by voracious men: man droughts are just as common for the attractive single lady as unhealthy man binges. No, it’s for anyone that thinks too much and unconstructively about men, or whose lives are being adversely affected by their presence – or absence.

Your goal is to feel whole, and enjoy your wholeness, entirely separately from men and the validation their attention gives us. The purpose of this book is to inspire you to embrace self-respect and to pursue your interests single-mindedly. As you. Not as a person who desperately wants to be chosen, and who thrives only on male attention and the validation it brings.

The key to satisfaction, as the Man Diet will show, is not sleeping with another fittie or having a little affair with the married guy at work, or trying to lure that beautiful man from the gym on a date. Rather, it is entering a robust and respectful relationship with yourself. Yes, I know, ‘love yourself’ is the oldest and least well-explained piece of advice in the book. But if you’re a single woman or a woman with a dodgy relationship with menkind, the Man Diet will show you how to do it. Or, for those with a slight issue with the word ‘love’ in relation to themselves (my hand’s up), it’ll put you on a track to happiness as you, your own woman. The rest – finding Mr Right and all that – should follow naturally, though being your own woman is the primary goal here, and a brilliant end in itself. The Man Diet is for anyone who wants to feel her best – particularly if she’s finding it hard as a single woman.

The ‘Mix and Match’ Diet Plan

If you’re a perfectionist and someone who likes drastic measures, you can do all of the rules at once, cold-turkey style, but you’re likely to get frustrated or feel bored – much as with a food diet.

I prefer a more flexible approach – one of the reasons I like the Man Diet is that it’s perfect for mixing and matching rules, as well as the intensity with which you do them. I recommend picking anywhere from three to seven to do simultaneously at any given time.

How do I follow the rules?

The first part of each chapter explains the social context of the rule and why women may need it. At the end of each chapter there is a ‘how to’ that ranges from the general to the very specific.

How do I know which ones to pick?

At the beginning of each chapter is a guide to who will benefit most from the rule, along with which other rules they complement/work well with. When I started, Do Not Pursue (rule seven) was the one that felt most urgent. You will have a gut feeling about your biggest problem area, too. Some of the rules have to be done in their entirety right away – and Do Not Pursue is one of them. Others can be done to greater or lesser degrees, like No Talking About Men.

Once I began relaxing my constant lookout for potentials, sending follow-up texts and so on, I followed my nose about the next rules to follow. I was doing well not pursuing men most of the time, but at night, after a few glasses, I’d feel my fingers twitch towards the phone. Equally, when I got home I’d head straight for Facebook. So next up: curb your drinking (rule two – and something I’d long wanted to do anyway) and No Facebook Stalking (rule three).

The rest followed soon after, but you can’t expect to do them all hard-core at once. Start with your most pressing rule and roll them out. Do Not Pursue and No Facebook Stalking go together, for example, and Do Something Lofty with No Talking About Men.

How long will it take to work?

You can go on the Man Diet for two weeks, a month or a year (or forever). Its benefits kick in anywhere from within a day to a month of starting – long enough for lifestyle tweaks to really have an impact. And once you’ve felt its benefits, going back to the old attitudes and ways will probably be a bit less appealing.

Doing something asexual/lofty (from reading a good book to doing a good deed) makes me feel like a stronger, more complete woman immediately. That’s because it’s an active rule. By contrast, something like cutting down on talking about men (rule four) can take a little longer because there’s more of a weaning period involved, for both you and your friends. But after a week or two – depending on how much you get to practise – you should notice a genuine rewiring of your brain and emotions for the better. For best results, employ as many rules as possible at once (though not all – as I said, you don’t want to get frustrated) and keep them going for a month to start with. The benefits will go deeper than that surface pleasure at having, say, picked up a difficult book or fought an impulse to stalk a guy on Facebook.

Followed with some degree of discipline and passion (but also patience with yourself), you should manage to enhance your self-esteem in the long term, as well as sharpen up your act – as a woman and a person – overall. Other benefits of the Man Diet include flourishing at work, finding new outlets for creativity, and exploring new territory with friends.

Do I have to do it forever?

Not in the strict sense. You can do it for a week, or month or two months and feel the benefits. When you return to your pre-Man Diet ways, you’ll be more aware of what you’re doing, and how it affects you.

Ideally, the Man Diet will give you a useful outlook, of which a part may become second nature after a while. You may choose to stick to certain rules as a matter of course – having tasted the freedom afforded by No Facebook Stalking, you may never open Facebook again. Other rules you may let slide. But the thoughts, feelings and ideas you’ll have while doing the Man Diet for however long will stand you in good stead.

Will it drive me crazy?

No. Quite the opposite – it’ll make you happier. Plus, the rules are a fun, not a gruelling challenge. I promise.

I’ve been single for ages! The last thing I need is a Man Diet!

Ask yourself the following questions and be really honest with yourself: Does the absence of men in your life get you down? Have you been rejected – perhaps more than once – in ways that make you sad or that lower your self-esteem? Are you spending a lot of energy plotting new ways to meet a decent guy to go out with? Does it annoy you that your friends constantly feel the need to discuss your romantic prospects with you? If you answered yes to any of these then you can benefit from the Man Diet. Because it is about emotional, not physical boundaries.

What are the first signs I’m benefiting from the diet?

Well, within a few weeks of Man Dieting, I lost a whole load of empty emotional weight. It was like an end to water retention and wheat-related bloating. I felt better psychologically and focused better on real things like work and books and good conversations, as opposed to the ever-changing shape of romantic possibility. The same will happen to you.

The other thing that you will notice with wonderment is that with the men you do meet you will have better conversations because they won’t be so loaded with expectation. Whether they get in touch or not will cause you little wasted mental energy. For me, simply not conniving to get in touch (rule one) freed up a good bit. The saying tends to be: ‘No pain, no gain.’ Well, I found that on the Man Diet, it was more ‘Less pain, more gain’.

Which would have been immoral, really, to have kept to myself.