Speed Dating Events

Much simpler is the line with which delicious dirty Dick scores in The Group, Mary McCarthy’s scintillating expose of how girls lose their innocence. And the most innocent of them all was the well-bred Bostonian, Dottie:

The group would never believe, never in a million years, that Dottie Renfrew would come here, to this attic room that smelled of cooking fat, with a man she hardly knew, who made no secret of his intentions, who had been drinking heavily, and who was evidently not in love with her.

So what’s the secret? The secret is that Dick, though so dreadful, had ‘fastened his deep, shadowed eyes on her’, and by this simple act has produced ‘a sudden harsh thump of excitement, right in there’, which Dottie simply has to follow up, to allay the wild sexual curiosity he’s evoked. So all he has to say is:

Do you want to come home with me?

And the rest is one of the funniest, most touching and honest accounts of what happens to a girl like Dottie in the whole of modern fiction.

One-line propositions, as this shows, need not be ugly just because they’re functional. Think of Elvis Presley helping an entire generation of men to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, and put some beef into their own approaches with the passionate urgency of It’s now or never!’

Please hold me tight, Kiss me, my darling, Be mine, tonight!

`How do you like your eggs done for breakfast?’ has done good service for a charming Australian producer living on a houseboat in Little Venice. And a contemporary of John (Reds) Reed recalled him getting a girl into bed with the taunting question:

Aren’t you PAGAN enough?

And who could ever forget the one and only Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, narrowing his eyes at the heroine and saying simply:

Show me!

Clint Eastwood, unsurprisingly, both gives and gets heaps of propositions in the course of his screen capers. Often he doesn’t have to say even that much — he’s so magnetic that it just drops right into his lap! As he invariably plays a man who has been subjected to a severe word rationing, his propositions are not of the flowery and verbose sort. But he always avoids terrible old friends like `your place or mine?’ And he never descends to the nasties that, as every female

Knows, are part of the local patois on every street corner in the land.

For some men specialize in what can only be called anti- propositions, the toe-curling one-liners that come like a sock in the solar plexus. Unless a woman has spent her life researching an Eskimo tribe, down an abandoned mine or up a pole on a remote hillside, she will have had any number of variants on:

C2 How about a bit of how’s your father?
C2 Got time for a quick one?

C2 If we get a move on, you can just fit me in.

I haven’t got any time to waste, do you screw?

You get the feeling that the scum of the earth is leaving its ring around your bathtub.

New York spies report Dustin Hoffman’s beautiful leggy ballet-dancer ex-wife being accosted in a lift by an ambitious homunculus with ideas above his station. `Hi, honey?’ he began,

What would you say to a little fuck? To which, with magnificent disdain she replied:

Hello, little fuck.

That’s the way to tell ‘em. If it hasn’t happened to you, get ready. You’re overdue for your run-in with the nasty, brutish and short. Prepare some excoriating response that will blast the blister who dares to say to you, in the fragrant phraseology of one of Trevor Griffith’s Comedians:

There’s no chance of a quick shag, is there?

I ask you, who could refuse? And how would he like his eggs for breakfast? As a serving suggestion, straight over his head, plate and all! Go to it!

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