TV Quote of the Day (‘One Day at a Time,’ As Schneider Confesses to a Rare Failure With Women)

Dwayne F. Schneider [played by Pat Harrington]: “You wanna hear unfair? How do you think a guy feels when he asks a girl out, and she tells him to get lost?”

Julie Cooper [played by Mackenzie Phillips]: “Oh, are you telling me that the great Schneider got kicked out on his...”

Schneider [interrupting] “Just once. Once. This gorgeous, young divorcée—whouh!—beautiful eyes... I asked her out, y'know. She told me to go peddle my papers. So, I got back on my bike and delivered the rest of my papers. I saw her a few years later, but by then I was a box-boy, and the spark was gone.”—One Day at a Time, Season 4, Episode 7, “The Dating Game,” original air date Nov. 13, 1978, teleplay by Gladys Christman, directed by Alan Rafkin

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Addams Family,’ As Uncle Fester Offers To Teach Lurch About Women)

[The family decides to make over Lurch.]

Uncle Fester [played by Jackie Coogan]: “And after a couple hours with me, why, he'll know all there is to know about women.”

Gomez Addams [played by John Astin]: “What do YOU know about women, Fester?”

Uncle Fester [a little affronted]: “Well, I had a mother, didn't I?”— The Addams Family, Season 2, Episode 29, “Lurch's Grand Romance,” original air date Apr. 1, 1966, teleplay by Gene Thompson and Arthur Weingarten, directed by Sidney Lanfield

Quote of the Day (Andi Zeisler, on ‘The Dangerous Friend’)

“When you’re young, the dangerous friend urges you to shoplift, strands you in the bad part of town when you have an argument, dog-ears the good parts of Forever and leaves it in your room where your mom is sure to spy it. She may be the person who first gets you drunk or engineers the loss of your virginity to some guy she knows. But the dangerous friend isn’t dangerous because she’s daring, or precocious, or even reckless. She’s dangerous because she makes you trust her against all logical judgment, makes you want to please her even if your own happiness is compromised, and imprints herself on your mind with disconcerting speed and force." — Writer, editor, and cultural critic Andi Zeisler, “Breaking Up with Smitty,” originally from the anthology Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women’s Friendships (2004), edited by Karen Eng, reprinted in The Utne Reader, July-August 2005

Ms. Zeisler is talking about a particular kind of “dangerous friend”—the dangerous female friend (DFF), to be exact. There’s some overlap with the dangerous male friend—the sort who not only gets you drunk, but gets behind the wheel of a car repeatedly, drunk and/or high, simultaneously risking your life and his.

Guys can probably list counterparts to Ms. Zeisler’s list based on male friends of their acquaintance. With my pronounced aversion to risk, my experience with the sort is extremely limited. I’d have to point to Rob Lowe in Bad Influence or something like him on the masculine side of the line.

Many women, I suspect, have come across the type of DFF that Ms. Zeisler is referencing. To use the more common labels she cites, “drama queen,” “pain in the ass,” “narcissistically disordered personality,” “high maintenance.”

Then, on different ends of the evolutionary and endearment scales, there are the “hot mess” (a term only starting to gain wide currency around the time of this article) and “psychotic friend.” An example of the second kind can be found in the image accompanying this post, from the 1992 thriller Single White Female, with Bridget Fonda as the innocent and Jennifer Jason Leigh as said psycho.

I wonder how the DFF is faring psychologically these days in the COVID-19 era? On second thought, I thought. Her fate is surely both pitiful and terrifying for those in her orbit to experience.

Quote of the Day (William Hazlitt, on Why Women Often Have More Good Sense Than Men)

“Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends (not for the booksellers), is better than that of most authors.”—English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830), “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” in Table-Talk: or, Original Essays, Vol. 2 (1822)

Naturally, women reading the above would argue with the point that women “do not reason at all.” But, in the context of the true subject of Hazlitt’s piece—theory, classical education and these realms' distance from actual practice (“the most learned man…knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility”)—they are far more likely to nod in agreement with everything else in that paragraph. 

(Well, with one other exception: they might substitute "usually" for "often" in that first sentence.)

What better illustration of what Mr. Hazlitt is talking about concerning men without sense and women with it than the picture next to this post?

Well, maybe there is one—this bit of dialogue from The Honeymooners:

Ralph: “What's the matter? Aren't you up on current events? Don't you read the papers? Don't you read comic books? That's the trouble with you; you don't know the latest developments.”

Alice: “I don't know the latest developments? Who is it that lets your pants out every other day?”

This demonstrates why, on more than one occasion, Ralph shows that he has a "BIG mouth"—big enough to put his foot in it.

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on How Women Can ‘Run Rings Around the Cleverest Man’)

“Yes, all these stern precautions are inhuman.
Are we in Turkey, where they lock up women?
 It's said that females there are slaves or worse,
And that's why Turks are under Heaven's curse.
Our honor, sir, is truly very frail
If we, to keep it, must be kept in jail.
But do you think that such severities
Bar us, in fact, from doing what we please,
Or that, when we're dead set upon some plan,
We can't run rings around the cleverest man?
All these constraints are vain and ludicrous:
The best course, always, is to trust in us.
It's dangerous, Sir, to underrate our gender.
Our honor likes to be its own defender.
It almost gives us a desire to sin
When men mount guard on us and lock us in,
And if my husband were so prone to doubt me,
I just might justify his fears about me.”—French playwright and satirist Moliere (1622-1673), The School for Husbands (1661), translated by Richard Wilbur (1992)

Joke of the Day (Brad Pitt, on His Recent Award-Show Dilemma)

"I wanted to bring my mom, but I couldn't, because anyone I stand next to they say I'm dating. It'd just be awkward."—Brad Pitt, in his acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes Award, quoted in Emily Yahr, “A Love Affair With Brad Pitt,” The Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2020

This particular post—and especially the image accompanying it—is being offered as a public service for female readers of this blog, who for the past dozen years have had to make do with no examples of male eye candy. 

Today, your luck has finally changed.

You’re welcome.

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on How Women ‘Always Know Where Things Are’)

“I hate women because they always know where things are. At first blush, you might think that a perverse and merely churlish reason for hating women, but it is not. Naturally, every man enjoys having a woman around the house who knows where his shirt-studs and his brief-case are, and things like that, but he detests having a woman around who knows where everything is, even things that are of no importance at all, such as, say, the snapshots her husband took three years ago at Elbow Beach. The husband has never known where these snapshots were since the day they were developed and printed; he hopes, in a vague way, if he thinks about them at all, that after three years they have been thrown out. But his wife knows where they are, and so do his mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, his daughter, and the maid. They could put their fingers on them in a moment, with that quiet air of superior knowledge which makes a man feel that he is out of touch with all the things that count in life.”—American humorist, cartoonist, and playwright James Thurber (1894-1961), “The Case Against Women,” in Let Your Mind Alone and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces (1937)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ on George’s Unique Way of Falling for a Woman)

George Costanza [played by Jason Alexander]: “This woman hates me so much, I'm starting to like her!”

Jerry [played by Jerry Seinfeld]: “What????”

George: “She just dislikes me so much... It's irresistible.”— Seinfeld, Season 5, Episode 9, “The Masseuse,” original air date  Nov. 18, 1993, teleplay by Peter Mehlman, directed by Tom Cherones

Quote of the Day (Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, on Bands and Girls)

“I hadn’t figured out that bands and girls went together. I went to a boys school, and I didn’t realize that most guys join bands because they wanted to get girls.”—English musician-composer Thom Yorke of Radiohead, speaking to Daniel Craig in “Music:Thom Yorke,” Interview Magazine, July 15, 2013

(Photo of Thom Yorke in Japan, taken Nov. 22, 2013, by Yasuko Otani.)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on a Common Failing of Young Men)

“Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.” — Munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, in Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Major Barbara (1907)