Method continued
9) Play the extremes. Either melt here, overwhelm her with a wistful tenderness that would thaw the arctic, or go 100% bestial. It is often effective to switch from one extreme to the other, but requires practice. The happy medium is not worth a damn.
Raw Material.
By this Stout is referring to the type of ladies to search out and where to find them.
‘ I appreciate that many of you will be limited by the available supply, but in cities of over 100,0000 population a wide range offers itself, and even in smaller communities it is surprisingly what can be uncovered by a roving intelligence and an active spirit. The main thing is good leads. It is of course unethical to get them by display ads in the newspapers or by using sandwich men or throwaways, but it is also unnecessary. A little ingenuity and persistence will keep you going. Some hints: In New York, work the better bars, and when you see a good one spill a sidecar on her dress and insist on paying for it. In Chicago, haunt the railroad stations, for all the best material reaches instinctively for a time-table upon arriving at the age of consent.
Some practitioners, when working up raw material and testing a lead, give very little consideration to any other element than the Receptivity Quotient. Such a man is not, properly speaking, an amorist at all; he is merely a careerist. Sooner or later he will find his sensibilities blunted, his ability to synchronize permanently lessened, and his heart going back on him. In the long run, year in and year out, you will find that in appraising raw material it will produce the deepest satisfaction and the highest type of success to adhere rigidly to the AAA standards:
Attractiveness below the neck…………………………………………..36%
Receptivity Quotient…………………………………………………….19%
Age………………………………………………………………………11%
Attractiveness above the neck………………………………………… 10%
Energy of movement …………………………………………………….9%
Risk of complications…………………………………………………… 8%
Novelty………………………………………………………………… 6%
Intelligence……………………………………………………………….1%
As your experience increases and you field is broadened, imperceptibly you will tighten your demands, but you should never let yourself become finicky. Caviar is pleasant to the palate, but a decent ham sandwich is by no means to be scorned; besides, that would be un-American. At the beginning you will do well to make us of any opportunity offering itself which grades 50 or better; late on you may save you talents fort subjects ranking above 70, or even 80, if you can get away with it. Eventually, of course, you wills tart sliding back again, until at around seventy years of age it will be found expedient to ignore the question of quality altogether.
One word in conclusion about keeping score. Naturally you know your AAA card by heart; a chorus girl gives you 3 points, a widow 2, a duchess 9, a stenographer 1 ½ , a college graduate 1, a housewife 3 , and so on. The question has been ranging for years, which conveys the greater distinction, 3 chorus girls or one duchess? In either case you score 9 points. Dozens of duels are fought in Central Park every month over this silly argument. I say silly, because I feel that such problems do not concern us; they should be left to the proper authorities, the officers of our association who are responsible for the rules. For us the joy of achievement should be enough. Ah me! The delight of the open door, the knee under table, the flashing indignant eye, the soft sigh of surrender, the light turned off, even the remorseful tear! Away with your twiddle-twaddle about points—all I ask is to go singing down Fifth Avenue surrounded by the finest raw material in the world, my hat safely at home, three cocktails under my belt, my applewood stick swinging expertly to trip up competitors, and my shining dingus dangling on its natty pigskin strap—a gift from Number 11,377! ( Number 11,377 was a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, 14 points.)
That’s the spirit that gets results.
This ‘advice’ to male amorists shocks us in 2022—after the feminist movement and all that followed, notably the ‘METoo’ campaign against male entitlement. But was Rex Stout being ironical ? Did he truly advocate the beating up of women ? Did he really place ‘ intelligence ‘ at the bottom of the scale of feminine attractiveness ? Or was he being ‘ humorous’ and satirical? We hope he was, but Americans are not known for their grasp of irony. Some would argue that they don’t really understand it. We suspect that a magazine like Private Eye would not sell well in the USA.
But if we look at the entry on Stout in Wikipedia we find that the specialist in detective fiction was a humorist of sorts—that he and P. G. Wodehouse were long-standing friends, that they admired each other’s writing and that there are parallels between their characters and technique. Apparently, Wodehouse mentions Stout in several of his Jeeves books. Aunt Dahlia was a fan, it seems.
Politically, Stout was ‘ pro-Labor, pro New Deal, pro Roosevelt, left liberal’. He even founded the Marxist magazine the New Masses but left when he discovered that it intended to remain wedded to Communism, which he disliked intensely. He also founded the American Civil Liberties Union and later promoted World Federalism. As a leftist it doesn’t follow, of course, that he was at heart a male chauvinist when it came to women.
- M. Healey