In this book, you will learn all about such good things as empirical determinism, sociobiology, environmental psychology, semantics, cultural materialism, the philosophies of Hume and Spinoza, and Napoleonic strategy and tactics.

But wait! Isn’t this book supposed to be about such juicier topics as love, sex, and all that? Of course it is, but you can’t go about talking of such things without a philosophical standard which shapes how you go about talking about it. Whether we are aware of it or not, everything we profess to think about is shaped around some basic principle. Whether it be the notion of good and evil, God or the devil, reason or instinct, we are usually pretty glib about reducing the causes of our behavior to some simple and simplistic causes. That is, of course, until we’re caught in a situation where we’re forced to think beyond simple truisms to get at the ‘real ‘ reasons for out behavior. No topic stimulates this need to deeply philosophize and psychologize more than the social and sexual relationships of men and women. This is because nature has made us instinctively drawn to one another, and has endowed each sex with very different psychological characteristics and agendas.

In short, mother nature has screwed us up. Men can’t figure out women, and vice versa, because men and women just aren’t alike. Its easy for members of one sex to understand each other, you just project out what you would do in a particular situation, an use that as a pretty reliable norm. Not so with members of the opposite sex. They just won’t fit the norm; and what’s worse, you just can’t throw up your hands and walk away, you’re just too attracted to them to do so. Mother nature’s big joke on human beings was to instill in each of us a biologically rooted need to please the opposite sex, yet she hasn’t given us any easy clues as to how to do it. So, men and women are stuck having to think it all through, and thinking unfortunately come foreign to many of us. Our aversion may be due in part to much popular writing on the topic of sex and human relationships., which often seems quite foreign to anything that remotely resembles clear thinking. Lost in the avalanche of books that needlessly complexify and mystify this topic is the simple notion that humans are essentially very practical folk, and that almost all of their behavior can be construed to represent practical responses to varying social situations. This is a conclusion that is far more radical that it seems, since pragmatism appears at first to be a wholly uninspired solution to our confusion.

Nonetheless, this book celebrates the virtues of practicality, and turns on the premise that all of our contemporary confusion and frustration regarding our social lives really stems from social institutions that were designed to fulfill economic rather than psychological needs. Because our institutions act to keep people apart rather than uniting them in healthy social discourses, this isolation breeds ignorance, then confusion, and between the sexes, much mutual recrimination and misunderstanding. If we don’t learn from one another, falling back on the ‘expert’ guidance any number of self appointed advisers won’t begin to approach the sounder lessons of experience.

By drawing on a wide variety of outlandish and eccentric analogies to common experience and to widely accepted theoretical positions in general psychology, we hope to sharpen our perspective with humor, and show ultimately that understanding transcends even sexual gamesmanship, and is a product of socializing mediums that we ourselves can very easily create.