Posts Tagged ‘advice’

Steve Harvey wishes you weren’t such a slut

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

So I was browsing through Oprah.com yesterday, for, uh, RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY, and I came across O’s interview with one of the original Kings of Comedy, Steve Harvey. Being someone who occasionally likes to “laugh” at “jokes,” I thought the Harvey piece would be right up my alley.

Oh, my.

Turns out our friend Steve fancies himself as something of a social commentator. And you know his favorite thing to offer commentary on? Women. Specifically, Steve was on Oprah to share with us his pearls of wisdom regarding how ladies ought to behave.

Harvey’s first book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” currently tops the New York Times best seller list in the advice category, and Oprah, apparently, is lapping it up. According to Harvey, whenever a man approaches a woman, he knows what he wants from her and is trying to determine what it’s going to cost him—a premise that’s hardly revolutionary. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve heard it somewhere before.

 

What a dick!

The problem, Harvey says, is that modern women “have stopped setting the bar high.” You sluts are basically giving it away for free. And because, according to Harvey, a gal’s vagina is pretty much all she brings to the table, by giving it up, you’re giving away all your power. Steve is just looking out for you, see.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, though, Harvey isn’t comfortable calling sex sex. Instead, he calls it a “cookie”: “We’ve got to have a cookie. Everybody likes cookies. That’s the thing about a cookie. I like oatmeal raisin…but if you’ve got vanilla cream, I’ll eat that too.”

Honestly, I don’t even know what that means.

And how long does Harvey think a lady should wait before giving up her “cookie”? Three months. Months. Look, I’m all for taking things slow if that’s what you feel like you want to do. Fine. Good. But 90 days? I’m a lady, Steve, not a saint.

Of course, Harvey says, you can put out the cookie platter before then, but only at the risk of looking “desperate.” “You all keep changing the rules,” Harvey writes. “And men are aware of the fact that you are changing the rules. We’re aware of the fact that you act desperate. We’re aware of the fact that you think there’s a good shortage of good men out there.”

The flaws, insults and outright misogynies in Harvey’s argument are both too numerous and too obvious to outline here. But it all goes back to the idea that sex—I mean, the “cookie”—is the only thing a woman has to offer that a man could possibly be interested in. Which, when you think about it, is degrading to men maybe most of all.