Zoe Strimpel - The Man Diet - One woman’s quest to end bad romance

ZOE STRIMPEL

The Man Diet

Join one woman on her quest

to end bad romance

Copyright Copyright Dedication How I Came to Write this Book Rule Number 1 - Refuse to Have No Strings Attached Sex Rule Number 2 - Cut Down on the Booze Rule Number 3 - No Facebook Stalking Rule Number 4 - No Talking About Men Rule Number 5 - Do Something Lofty Rule Number 6 - Take a Break from the Games Rule Number 7 - Do Not Pursue Rule Number 8 - Take a Break from Internet Dating Rule Number 9 - Dwell on Your Sense of Self Rule Number 10 - Know Your Obstacles To Wrap Up… About the Author Feminism and Further Reading Bibliography Acknowledgements About the Publisher

AVON

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

© Zoe Strimpel 2011

Zoe Strimpel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Where necessary, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for material reproduced within the text. If the copyright holder comes forward, HarperCollins will be pleased to credit them in all future editions and reprints.

Extract from The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge by Michel Foucault and Robert Hurley © 1998, reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Group UK.

Extract from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver © 1992, published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Extract from The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer © 2006, reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Extract from The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider © 1997, reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Extract from Living Dolls by Natasha Walter © 2010, published by Virago Books. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown Book Group.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9781847563057

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9781847563064

Version: 2014-07-23

Dedication Dedication How I Came to Write this Book Rule Number 1 - Refuse to Have No Strings Attached Sex Rule Number 2 - Cut Down on the Booze Rule Number 3 - No Facebook Stalking Rule Number 4 - No Talking About Men Rule Number 5 - Do Something Lofty Rule Number 6 - Take a Break from the Games Rule Number 7 - Do Not Pursue Rule Number 8 - Take a Break from Internet Dating Rule Number 9 - Dwell on Your Sense of Self Rule Number 10 - Know Your Obstacles To Wrap Up… About the Author Feminism and Further Reading Bibliography Acknowledgements About the Publisher

To my old, dear friend Eleanor Halgren.

And, of course, to all the single ladies.

Contents

Cover

Title Page ZOE STRIMPEL The Man Diet Join one woman on her quest to end bad romance

Copyright

Dedication

How I Came to Write this Book

Rule Number 1 - Refuse to Have No Strings Attached Sex

Rule Number 2 - Cut Down on the Booze

Rule Number 3 - No Facebook Stalking

Rule Number 4 - No Talking About Men

Rule Number 5 - Do Something Lofty

Rule Number 6 - Take a Break from the Games

Rule Number 7 - Do Not Pursue

Rule Number 8 - Take a Break from Internet Dating

Rule Number 9 - Dwell on Your Sense of Self

Rule Number 10 - Know Your Obstacles

To Wrap Up…

About the Author

Feminism and Further Reading

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

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.