Mantrack

One-Night Standards

How choosy is a man who's looking for a onenight stand? If you're inclined to believe Douglas Kendrick, a psychologist at Arizona State University, men have hardly any standards at all. Kendrick asked both men and women what they look for in a long-term partner and found that they seek similar qualities, such as intelligence, stability and status. However, when Kendrick asked what men and women might want in a one-time sexual liaison that no one would ever know about, he discovered that "men's scores dropped through the floor." The same was not true for women. "They still wanted a partner with desirable traits," reports Kendrick--whether it was for a night or for a lifetime.

The Myth of the Dangerous Husband

It's hard to say anything nice about Lorena Bobbitt, but give her this: She was guilty of only one mutilation. You can't say the same for those who have exploited her case to further their own causes. They have twisted the statistics to suggest that Lorena's homelife--a tragedy of physical abuse--mirrors what happens to more than a million American women every year.

It just ain't so.

The Department of Justice's National Crime Survey is based on more than a half million interviews with women between 1979 and 1987. It estimates that about 2.5 million women and teenage girls (out of 106 million over the age of 12) are victims of violent crimes each year. The number overstates the incidence of intimate violence, though, because anyone who ever dated the victim is labeled a boyfriend. An assault on the second date is tallied as intimate violence, when it might be more reasonable to consider it an attack by an acquaintance.

Search deeper into the statistics and you find that husbands are responsible for 2.2 percent of all violent crimes against women. Altogether, abuse in male-female relationships--from blind dates to 40-year marriages--accounts for 18.5 percent of the violent crimes against women and girls. That's slightly more than 460,000 victims--or less than half of the 1 million figure that is frequently cited. And in more than 25 percent of the incidents, the violence was actually a threat of violence. This means that fewer than 345,000 women (out of 106 million) report that they are physically assaulted, robbed or raped by a husband, lover or date in any year.

Of course, 345,000 victims is not a small number. No level of violence--real or threatened--should be acceptable. But knowing the right numbers helps dispel the notion that male-female relationships are inherently dangerous for women. Violence by husbands and lovers is not the norm. It is freakish behavior by any definition. To claim otherwise is, well, a hatchet job.

Uplifting News

Like a suspension bridge, a bra is a miracle of engineering. And recently, when Kate Moss called Playtex Wonderbras "brilliant," women around the country felt their hearts swell. "Even I get cleavage with them," Moss said. Key word: cleavage. Last fall, you may have noticed that the boyish, flat-chested look was in--at least among women's fashion magazines. Then U.K. lingerie maker Gossard scooped Playtex in the U.S. with its rival push-up bra, the Super Uplift, a contraption that is made of 46 separate pieces of lace, straps and wires. Like the Wonderbra, which debuted shortly thereafter, the Super Uplift pushes breasts up and together with a creative use of padding. The result is firm curves and clefts that turn men's thoughts to spelunking. When Saks Fifth Avenue in New York announced the arrival of the Super Uplift, the retailer sold $18,000 worth of bras in two days. Men have greeted the innovations with wonder and worry. Humorist Dave Barry sees it like this: "(1) Breasts make men stupid. (2) The Wonderbra makes breasts even more noticeable. (3) The Wonderbra is coming here. This is very bad for the United States."

Hair-Raiser

The latest hair line: A New York physician, Dr. Adam Lewenberg, has developed a new therapy for baldness that apparently packs a wallop. According to an article in the medical journal Advances in Therapy, Dr. Lewenberg has been successful in growing hair on more than 80 percent of his patients using a mixture of Rogaine and an acid called tretinoin. It's believed the tretinoin allows the skin to absorb more Rogaine, also known as minoxidil. A spray, Lewenberg's tonic also works well on the front of the head, which has thick skin impervious to plain minoxidil. This new treatment often produces healthy new hair that will keep your pate from looking like a fuzzy navel.

The Black Woman in the Gray Flannel Suit

Who's making the most career progress? It's not white men, but the fastest-growing group in corporate America isn't white women, either. According to The Wall Street Journal, black professional women swelled their ranks by 125 percent between 1982 and 1992--an average gain of 8.4 percent per year. White women came in next, with an annual growth rate of 6.4 percent, followed by black men, with 4.2 percent. At the bottom of the list were white men, with a humble showing of two percent per year.

Debasement Tapes

Today's video junkies have a keen sense of the bizarre. How else can you explain the newest craze sweeping the avant-VCR crowd, particularly in San Francisco? Bored with bland Block buster fare, this group has turned to bootleg videos that make Mondo Cane look like Full House. Popular clips witnessed by our excitable, far-flung correspondents include: home porn, allegedly of a famous beauty queen accepting a fistful of love from her equally famous husband; John Lennon babbling in a heroin-like haze in the back of a limo; the 20-minute pilot for Planet of the Apes; William Shatner reciting Rocket Man at a science fiction awards ceremony; medical films--including ones that dwell on the consequences of digestion; Ted Knight narrating a documentary on the virtues of raw food; a press conference during which Pennsylvania politician Budd Dwyer puts a gun in his mouth and shoots; stop-animation porn done with dolls; Crispin Glover on Letterman, in the midst of an apparent paranoia attack; Herve Villechaize talking about being suicidal; the legendary Apocalypse Pooh, a short film of Winnie-the-Pooh animation edited to the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now; pit bulls fighting so viciously that it takes five men to pull them apart; and last, our favorite: footage of Jim Bakker and his grandiose Kevin's House for handicapped children, Kevin being the only disabled child who ever lived there. And that's the tame stuff. The truly bizarre footage is said to be in Amy Fisher's video camera.

Lip Service

"Men always want to please women, but these past 15 years, women have been hard to please. If you want to resist the feminist movement, the simple way to do it is to give them what they want and they'll defeat themselves. Today, there are women in their 20s and 30s who don't know if they want to be a mother, have lunch or be secretary of state."

--Jack Nicholson

"I now realize that it is in the eye of the beholder, and the woman is the beholder. Therefore, you must not do anything now that might be conceived by the recipient as offensive, or misconduct, or whatever. I don't know how you decide ahead of time what is going to be offensive. If you don't try, how do you know?"

--Senator Bob Packwood

"Somebody does a Mrs. Bobbitt and it causes shock and horror. But it is not the small parts of women that are found frequently by the roadside. It's their heads, their arms, their legs, the whole body."

--Author Margaret Atwood

"There is indeed a national hysteria over this new forceful feminism--but it's male hysteria. The real cultural fear is not that women are becoming too Victorian but that they're becoming too damn aggressive--in and out of bed."

--Susan Faludi

Electronic Highwaymen

Could it be that computers make men more articulate? Or that hard drives make them softer? Regardless, the men's movement is moving out of the woods and on-line through Mens Net, an electronic men's club offered by Delphi Internet Services. Started by Ron Mazur in 1989, Mens Net's 14,000 users bond in forums, ask for advice or just wire in raunchy messages and exit, never to return. With Mazur as moderator, Mens Net fosters interaction by isolating areas of interest in discussions and databases. Spike Lee and the myth of the black stud dominate the men-of-color forum, while social issues influence the gay chats. An ongoing poll takes the pulse of participants: Currently, twice as many straight men say they favor oral sex as prefer the first runner-up, vaginal intercourse. The men's movement is tracked through the oh-so-earnest Changing Men, an on-line magazine dedicated to ending such ills as "patriarchal oppression" and "heterosexism." However, like much of the men's movement, Mens Net seems most useful for guys who are either in trouble or merely troubled. "Lots of advice is offered on divorce, sexual dysfunction and the perils of wife-swapping, including legal tips, addresses for men's organizations and titles of pertinent books. The emotional support is crucial; for a man who can navigate the unfriendly Internet in the first place, finding an address or a book title probably seems like child's play.

Rent-A-Woman

Archaic as it may sound, taxi dancing is making a comeback. Of course, these are the Nineties, and inflation has long since altered the famed "dime-a-dance" standard of the World War Two era. Now the going rate to fraternize with the euphemistically titled hostess is as much as 35 cents a minute--$21 an hour--plus tip. Despite the relatively high cost (and its limited return on investment), this rent-a-woman approach is catching on, especially in Los Angeles, where hostess clubs, long catering to Asian and Hispanic immigrants, are beginning to attract a more upscale crowd. Men are rediscovering that the fear of rejection is decreased substantially when you're paying for a woman's attention, although having her punch a time card before she'll dance with you might spoil the mood.