One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Women get it wrong when they complain about the media images of women. Men understand that not everyone had Bardot’s breasts, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ neck, or Cindy Crawford’s bottom, and we don’t mind at all. Obviously we’d take Kim Basinger over Phyllis Diller, just as women would take Keanu Reeves over Sergeant Bilko, but it’s not the body that’s important, it’s the level of abasement. We worked out very quickly that Bond girls were out of our league, but the realization that women won’t ever look at us the way Ursula Andress looked at Sean Connery, or even in the way that Doris day looked at Rock Hudson, was much slower to arrive, for most of us. In my case, I’m not at all sure that it ever did.
…It’s much harder to get used to the idea that my little-boy notion of romance, of negligees and candlelit dinners at home and long, smoldering glances, had no basis in reality at all. That’s what women ought to get all steamed up about; that’s why we can’t function properly in a relationship. It’s not the cellulite or the crow’s feet. It’s the…the… the disrespect.