Reality Check: Celebrity Dating Advice

By Scott Buckner

I am a major fan of Esquire magazine.I even have an actual subscription to it. But Esquire and Yahoo Personals have seen fit to publish "Dating Tips: 12 Things You Don't Know About Women," and I have to object.

Because, well, despite the best efforts of Brad Paisley, Esquire and Yahoo seem to think we men are still dragging our knuckles on the ground and have no clue when it comes to dating plain ordinary, non-famous women.

Articles like this are always popular because it seems half of us men wouldn't know how to find our way to a woman's brain even if it was MapQuested for us, and the other half wouldn't know what to do once we got there. As it happens, Yahoo! and Esquire solicited the advice of some of the world's most distractingly attractive female celebrities who would probably just sit there on a date with us wishing we'd stop staring at their tits and eat our salad already.

Let's take a look.

Celebrity: Christina Applegate
Advice: "Call us back right away. That 'three day' business does not apply. We're getting older, and we don't have time to screw around. Wait too long and we'll lose interest. Trust me on this one."

Comment: This is true. Three days is far too long to call her back in the hope that she'll put out, even when you both wind up somewhere drunk out of your minds.

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Celebrity: Courteney Cox
Advice: "We pay closer attention to your hands than you think. It's bad enough if you don't have manly hands, but if your nails are longer than ours, forget it."

Comment: Or maybe it just means he inhales - and can afford to - a whole lot of coke, which tends to attract a whole lot of women who don't pay a whole lot of attention to a lot of other things. Otherwise, the rest of us shouldn't get too worried about it. The day women start posting ads on Craisglist putting a premium on manly hands over whatever manly business you have between your legs is the day I believe David Arquette even has manly business between his legs.

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Celebrity: Padma Lakshmi
Advice: "Some of us prefer boxing to yoga. None of us actually likes Pilates."

Comment: This is probably the only reasonable advice I've heard. Men who are able to hold their own in an Ultimate Fighting cage will always get dates. And in most barrooms, so will any man who can stab someone in the face with a broken beer bottle or bust someone's skull wide open with a pool cue.

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Celebrity: Alyssa Milano
Advice: "Women are innately self-conscious. This is not a choice; it's a genderwide condition. On a bad day, I look in the mirror and see my ten-pound-heavier alter ego. Her name is Bertha. On a really bad day, Bertha sees her two-hundred-pound-heavier alter ego. Her name is Brian Dennehy."

Comment: On a really bad day, we men look in the mirror in see a 200-pound heavier alter ego. His name is Oprah Winfrey.

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Celebrity: Poppy Montgomery
Advice: "When considering whether or not to ask out the girl you're afraid to talk to, keep this in mind: No matter who you are or what you look like, it's always flattering when you hit on us. Always."

Comment: The day Poppy Montgomery allows any member of the general public or the paparazzi to see her driving off in a Yugo with Ken Jennings or Jessica Alba gets hot for Dwight Schrute and his beet farm is the day Nostradamus says "Fuck it."

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Celebrity: Tea Leoni
Advice: "Supersecret: Unless we're blind or have no night-light in the bathroom, the whole toilet-seat thing is exaggerated and meant to control you."

Comment: Supersecret: We men don't give a shit.

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Celebrity: Mariska Hargitay #1
Advice: "We love the fact that it takes you only twelve minutes to get ready for anything, be it a black tie [event] or a basketball game. When it takes longer than that . . . what are you doing in there?"

Comment: Thank you Mariska, for giving us menfolk the the only support of our entire existence in the whole article. True: if we're in any room alone longer than 12 minutes, you should be wondering whether we're in there redecorating or something. Unless we're in the bathroom, where it's not unheard of for us to blow through an entire copy of the Calvin and Hobbes collection in one sitting.

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Celebrity: Mariska Hargitay #2
Advice: "We are all about our necks. Feel free to spend as much time there as you wish."

Comment: We'd love to, but then we'd have to listen to you bitch about how you had to explain to the National Enquirer why you have still have a week-old that big-ass hickey on your neck.

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Celebrity: Emily Deschanel
Advice: "Even if we've only been dating a few weeks, don't introduce us as your 'lady friend' - or that's exactly what we'll become."

Comment: "Lady friend?" Maybe if this was 1905. You should be more worried about anyone introducing you in the 1970s/Barry White parlance of "This is my lady."

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Celebrity: Jenna Fischer
Advice: "If we run into your ex-girlfriend in public, the first thing you should do is put your arm around us. And if we have to introduce ourselves, you are in big trouble."

Comment: On the other hand, if you ever ran into one of our ex-girlfriends (or ex-wives) in public, we'd hope you'd poke her eye out for being the insensitive bitch she was to let a winner like us ever get away. Even if you didn't mean it, we men love a woman who can put up a good, strong territorial display by poking another one's eye out - because, well, if we're not good enough for you to poke someone's eye out over, why are you wasting your time with us?

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Celebrity: Julie Delpy
Advice: "We need you to be reachable at all times, but we don't always pick up our phones when you call. We realize this seems like a double standard; if you'd like to discuss it further, just leave a message."

Comment: Of course we'll leave a message: it will usually be "Fuck you." And then we'll have to deal with the 123,945 messages from you because we don't always pick up our phone at the same time you've decided that now is a good time to discuss it further.

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Celebrity: Maria Bello
Advice: "We're afraid of commitment, too. You may think we spend our time scheming ways to trap you into marriage, but many of us are quite happy being independent and autonomous. Besides, we're not in any rush to quit lusting after young Calvin Klein models."

Comment: Marriage? We're just trying to trap you into a single night of carnal bliss. Still, be independent and autonomous as you'd like. In fact, we don't need you to quit lusting after young Calvin Klein models if it makes your night. We're easy. We'll even let you bring along that young Calvin Klein model you have you eye on, as long as we don't have to, you know, touch his dick or anything.

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Celebrity: Kyra Sedgwick
Advice: "Our friends are not your enemies, and our enemies better not be your friends."

Comment: When you're hooked up with someone - especially if that someone is marvelously attractive or a celebrity - enemies abound, even among friends. So I prefer the more realistic observation of Kyra's husband, actor Kevin Bacon: "Any idiot can get laid when they're famous. That's easy. It's getting laid when you're not famous - that takes some talent."

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