When I first heard the premise of The Shape of Water, I immediately thought, “Mrs. Caliban!” Sharing this thought with others, I was forced into an explanation that got me nowhere.

When I read Mrs. Caliban in 1982, I had friends who were reading it as well, and I remember finishing it in one sitting, that’s how compelling it is. At 110 pages, it’s not like I’m bragging. I just don’t see how you could stop once you start.

The shared premise is a woman who falls in love with an amphibian.

I’m not saying that the movie drew from the novella, because there are so many other cinematic and literary instances of inter-species romance. But still. In both cases, the gigantic green creature is everything a woman could long for, especially a lonely woman in a dreary marriage or one who herself feels like a misfit.

I loved the creature in The Shape of Water, who also had an ET thing going for him. His weird gurgles were so poignant! Even though he’s so slimy and fishy, when he stands to his full height and wraps his whatever-they-are around his enthralled love object, he is Cary Grant, and then some.

Mrs. Caliban’s green lover, Larry, is also irresistible.

What is it we want, ladies, that resonates so effectively in the Green Stranger?

Is it the innocence, the purity of purpose, the gentleness? Is it the otherness itself? Or is it that he’s a good listener?

In the movie, he can’t speak. Think about it. No mansplaining. Ever. No criticism! No one to say, “Could you please remember to put the cheese back in the fridge and seal the bag properly?”

Is it the fact that he’s probably never had a woman before you, so you are the best fuck ever? I’m just throwing that out there as I explore this, okay? I already know I’m the best fuck ever, but some people might worry about that kind of thing.

Let’s get back to the listening. A Green Stranger who stares into your eyes and understands you, isn’t bored by you, isn’t checking a device or butting in with his devil’s advocate shit…how good is that?? He is a child, a lover, a protector, a best friend, and he’s able to love with his whole heart.

I am thrilled to report that Mrs. Caliban (by Rachel Ingalls) is now back in print, and a million online reviews are calling it a lost treasure. I didn’t know it was lost, but now it’s back and I think you should read it. After all these year, it remains in my memory like a haunting, glimmering dream. A bonus for completists is that her other books are good, too.

If you live in the US and watch TV, you have been bombarded with commercials touting drugs for low testosterone. Never mind that doctors agree only a small proportion of men – about 0.5% – need testosterone therapy.

The ads are funny at first, then it might occur to you that a lot of money is being made by pharmaceutical companies preying on mens insecurities. Not only that, but they are pathologizing the aging process.  But of course it gets worse.

High testosterone levels increase your risk of heart attack, stroke, and death by 30%. Averse effects of testosterone drugs are creating a whole new class of lawsuit. But those constant ads keep nagging that if you just feel kind of icky, kind of grumpy and apathetic, IT COULD BE LOW T!!!

So I went to the website Is it Low T and took the quiz. I had a strong feeling, no, really an absolute conviction that I would test positive for Low T. Here is my score, where I lied about my erections because I wasn’t sure how to answer.

As you can see, I’m in big trouble. I’m not even a man and I have fucking Low T!

When I was a weight-lifter, in another lifetime, many of the guys at my gym were huge pro bodybuilders. At certain points in their ‘training cycle,’ they would bulk up by taking steroids and pure testosterone. You could tell which ones were using, because they were easily enraged and prone to acne breakouts on their backs and shoulders. Their feeling was obviously, Anything for bigger muscles.

Now, men are urged to raise their testosterone levels if they’re feeling sad or tired or don’t always feel like having sex. Look at that poor suffering couple above. He looks around 20 but awwwww, he can’t get it up. She’s not helping with that awful white bra. Is she a nursing mother or something? Anyway, this image comes from an article about Low T. I wish she would just masturbate and leave him alone.

Here is a chart showing the rise in testosterone prescribing between 2000 and 2010:

I don’t know about you, but I see plenty of repercussions.  Angry, acne-ridden men who want to fuck all the time when they’re not dropping dead of a heart attack. I’m just not into it.  If you or your sad and apathetic husband still see more testosterone as the answer to you problems,  bookmark this ad:

100% wildcrafted and organic ingredients.  $22.00

What man worthy of the title wouldn’t love a couple of stumps? They’re honest, wildcrafted, they say “I’m no sissy, and I’m not afraid of splinters.”  Buy them at Need Supply.

I had lunch today at an Indian restaurant where my friend and I were regaled by the wisdom of a guy I’ll call Mr. Know-it-all.

Mr. Know-it-all (see above) is one of those guys who knows everything. And I mean everything. He reminded me very much of my friend’s ex-husband, who also knew everything. The ex-husband once insisted on telling me something about screenplays, even though I had been reading them professionally for ten years.

Anyway, Mr. Know-it-all had one of the cooks in his thrall, at one point telling the man something about India, the cook’s birthplace. The cook managed to say “India is a place of great diversity” before Mr. Know-it-all ceded the point and moved on to the subject of Pakistan. In his authoritative monologue, Mr. Know-it-all held forth about the economy, manufacturing, Russia, the Rockefellers, the Carnagies, Fidel Castro, Israel, Iran, and my personal favorite, where to get the best bagels in China.

Why do these people exist? Why are they always men?

I have to admit I was fascinated by Mr. Know-it-all, and had to fight an urge to interact with him, just to make him spew forth more information. I suggested to my friend that she offer to marry him, since she’s had so much experience for the position. Sadly, she gave it a pass. We may never know the full scope of his knowledge.

The food was great, though.

Imagine how upset I was to click on What’s New at net-a-porter only to find that I’d missed out on another impressive statement piece.   Those of you who rely on me for shopping tips, please try to understand.   I’m so busy doing nothing all day that it’s all too easy to shirk my duties.

Anyway, this fancy bustier by Dolce & Gabbana sold out at $13,760. I’m guessing there was only one.

It looks very nice with a simple black pencil skirt.

Why can’t we just decorate a bustier from the lingerie department with a couple of pounds of cheap costume jewelry from a thrift shop or the 99 Cent store? Let’s say the bustier is $50.

The white one comes in black, Macy’s for $55.   The black one is by Carnival, $38.

Another $50 should be enough for a pile of crappy jewelry and beads from a crafts store. Sew the shit on while you’re watching TV or arguing with your husband. Voila! You have saved enough for a new car, or to send your kid to college for one year (assuming you have scholarship money too.)

Now you are a hero instead of a chump! And when you wear it, your husband should prove to be very amiable and quick to see your point of view. A man who is immune to the power of lingerie is not a man worth having.

When I was little, I loved mermaids. I loved the illustrations in my book of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. I drew pictures of mermaids over and over, draping them in strings of pearls.

Now that I’m addicted to tumblr, I’ve discovered that mermaids are more popular than almost any other image. A mermaid also encompasses two hugely popular tumblr subjects: Tits, and women submerged in water. While tits need no explanation, the drowning women are disturbing.   Paintings of Ophelia tend to be lovely and melancholy, but depictions of modern women floating under water or laying dead in bathtubs are reminders that people like to see women in  jeopardy (if not actually dead.)

Mermaids are always beautiful and young, so that aspect of their attraction is obvious. In mythology and folklore, Mermaids are sirens who lure sailors to their death.   Do men find this danger seductive?

More important, mermaids have no genitals. Do men love them because of this or in spite of it? Does it relieve them of performance anxiety? I’m convinced that the anatomy issue is key somehow.

For me as a child, The Little Mermaid was a beautiful fantasy of a daughter who was loved by her family and showered with jewels.   I didn’t really understand why she would leave her home. I wanted a home filled with love and warmth. I didn’t feel good about her deal with the sea witch. The prince seemed kind of dimwitted not to recognize her or to intuit her love for him.

Later on, I remember reading The Little Mermaid to little Max, at bedtime. The book I read to him was an old unabridged translation of the original Hans Christian Anderson stories. It probably took several nights to get to the end, and I was so engrossed in the story that I forgot what was coming. I choked up with tears and tried to think of a way to spare Max the tragic last paragraph: The Little Mermaid threw herself overboard and turned into seafoam, comforted by some angelic sprites who asked her to join them. I think I made something up but I can’t ask Max.

Why do we love a story where the heroine sacrifices everything for love, even suffering constant  excruciating  pain, and ends up getting nothing but death? Until Disney changed the ending and turned a classic tragedy into a sappy feel-good product to sell other products, it was, for me, an inexplicably melancholy story.   It punishes a girl who seeks adventure and romance, so what else makes it such an enduring favorite?

Theories, memories, insults, anyone?

ASK A MAN #104: ABOUT HOMOPHOBIA

“Why are so many men homophobes? Why do they feel so threatened by gay men?”
–Andra

“It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men’s anuses – and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives’ vaginas!”
–Wallace Shawn

I hail from the Bible Belt where we don’t cotton much to sexual education. Everything I know about sex I learned from Japanese cartoons and Sunday school.   Penis monsters don’t want to ravish schoolgirls but they just can’t help themselves and Baby Jesus comes down and sends them all to Heck for doing it. Then the schoolgirls will summon the penis monsters back out from Heck on the night of the full moon. This is because the girls are actually werewolves and won’t be able to do their homework on account of they have to be running around on all fours in their sexy schoolgirl outfits all night. At first the demon ghosts of the penis monsters will try to help out with the advanced trigonometry but invariably end up in an accidental orgy of hyperbolic werewolf schoolgirl rape. The next day the headmaster becomes enraged because none of the girls have done their homework and he has to tie them up for discipline and the rope makes him break out in hives so he gets even madder and he takes out his whip but he must be allergic to that as well because his hives get worse and worse and worse until he turns into a penis monster. Then Baby Jesus comes down and sends everybody to Heck, even those of us who were just watching the cartoons for educational purposes.

So really the marital act in all its many iterations and permutations is just a bunch of horrifying hairy gooey swollen abominations that make Baby Jesus cry unless it takes place in the sanctity of the marriage bed. There, in the marriage bed, the same miracle of transubstantiation that turns saltines and grape juice into the body and blood of Jesus Christ also transforms the smelly gruntings, the swellings, the humid orifices, and ungainly herky-jerks of animalistic copulation into the soft-focus roseate sunsets, the burgeoning orchids, the smooth jazz, and delightful conversation over brunch at one of the better hotel restaraunts that’s known as lovemaking. This is why there have been so many crazy weather disasters lately: God is pissed because we haven’t married up enough gays. Having all the gays and lesbos running around and living in sin distracts God from the important work of inventing new guns for us to shoot the French with.

But none of this answers your question about the homophobia. Here’s the deal: we’re not really afraid of the gays. We’re afraid of being gay or, worse, being mistaken for gay. Because for many straight people gayness is the grown-up version of cooties or herpes. There aren’t necessarily any symptoms but once you have it you can never un-have it and if people find out you have it or just think you have it you’re subjected to fear, revulsion, and humiliation. As every kindergartner knows tolerance of people with herpes is the fastest way to get herpes yourself so whatever you do don’t be nice to the gay kid with cooties and herpes.

Also because when you’re chilling with your bros, drinking beers, farting, and cracking dick jokes while watching a bunch of animated penis monsters running amok in the all-girl werewolf high school, having a gay dude there would just make things weird and uncomfortable.

Question answered.

 © 2011 Anthony Robert Russo

ASK A MAN #103: ABOUT GETTING A MAN TO CLEAN

“How do I get my boyfriend to clean a little? I’m a realist and I know he’s never going to seriously clean something but he works half the hours I do and I’m sick of being a bitch around the house.”

-MG

“Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him.”

-Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program

Never underestimate the power of pride of ownership. Every man has some thing, some totemic object of power that’s super super important to him and yet isn’t part of his anatomy. Unless a man is fully prepared to protect his Holy Grail with violent force his spirit, sensing its vulnerability, will curdle up to half its normal size and retract into his ab-domen (this may not be the proper way to pronounce “abdomen” but if you try it out for yourself I’m sure you’ll  agree  it’s better). I’m guessing your man has suffered a loss of his Holy Grail or is not fully prepared to defend it, so why should he care if those dirty dishes have been sitting in the bathroom since Labor Day?

Now if it’s the latter case, if he still has his Grail but is not fully prepared to defend it, just go out and buy him a firearm already. I personally never bed down without my 9mm Uzi Pistol (fully loaded, safety off, and home-tooled bayonet attached) but production of this bad boy was discontinued in 1993 so even if you can find one you’ll be ponying up a big bag of pretty pennies. You’ll probably need two ponies to heft all those pennies around, but one sturdy mule could handle the load so you should just use the mule. If you don’t have the pennies or the livestock, you can’t go wrong with the Colt M1911 or the Glock 22, both of which are the single most popular gun. Since you can’t purchase bayonets for handguns, I had to make one myself using the forge and anvil I keep in my kitchen where the oven used to be and would be happy to provide you with helpful tips in bayonet forging techniques.

So anyway, once he has the means to defend himself your man will realize that life is indeed worth living and that although vermin make for great target practice around the house they tend to attract the French. As we all know, the French are not only an inferior species but their very inferiority endows them with an animal sexuality and techniques that enchant and corrupt the fairer sex, so unless your man is the kind of subhuman dude who actually wants his woman to be ravished by some beret-wearing mime then he’ll start tidying up toot sweet.

If your man is that kind of subhuman or, just as bad, if he has been deprived of his Grail, then you’re better off getting a new man or living in separate apartments like Woody Allen and Mia Farrow did. That whole deal seems to have worked out well for them.

Question answered.

 © 2011 Anthony Robert Russo

ASK A MAN #102: ABOUT NAGGING

“How do I make it sound less like nagging and more like reminding?”
-Sam

“It is of Hebrew origin, and the meaning of Samuel is ‘God heard’. Also possibly as ‘requested of God…’”

-thinkbabynames.com

While I’m no expert in regards to dude-on-dude relationships, I’m going to assume that your domestic partnership is just like the traditional male-female relationship only with 100% more man parts involved. Actually since monogomy is as mythical and rare as the female orgasm, most relationships have more knobs involved than your typical mosh pit but fewer than a Congressional session.

Since you’re asking the question instead of giving out answers I’m guessing you take on the female role in your partnership so my advice to you is to use your supernatural ability to imagine ways to improve interior decoration schemes, but use this skill to imagine yourself as the dominant partner. Imagine yourself running around and doing things, making decisions, dealing with immediate situations like bear attacks or “bear” attacks, driving well, and staving off the advancement of the French by recreating log traps you saw in that Swiss Robinson movie. I think there were net traps as well, but few things are as satisfying as felling trees and trimming them down to their trunks, then arranging them using your Y chromosome-endowed engineering skills in a precariously balanced heap in order to crush your enemies like so much foie gras! I don’t know for sure what foie gras is, but it sounds as if it’s mushy and French, so that’s what I meant by that last simile.

So anyway, imagine yourself out there doing things like stacking up gigantic logs and suddenly this person who knows everything but can’t stack logs and doesn’t even uderstand why you’re out there stacking logs in the first place, this person comes out to remind you that… Look, it’s like I can’t even imagine what would need to be reminded about because everything that’s important is being dealt with.

So what you should do is bring out a beer or, in your case, a wine cooler, because stacking logs is sweaty work, then praise the progress on the log trap, hand over the wine cooler, and then as your “husband” takes a swig, look with love and longing at the bulge in his plum-smuggler shorts, and then remind him of whatever it is you happen to think is so important that you have to interrupt the all-important task of shoring up domestic defense against the incursion of foreign threats.

And even though this is the best possible way to “make it sound less like nagging,” it’s still nagging and you shouldn’t do it. He heard your request the first time.

Question answered.

 © 2011 Anthony Robert Russo

ASK A MAN #101: ABOUT HANDSHAKES

“When they met one another, there was an uneasy moment as each watched the other’s right hand. If it went to his sword or gun, there was a battle, but if it went to his hat it was a salute of friendship or respect.”

–The Boy Scout Handbook

Doubt and uncertainty will get you killed. An indecisive driver is more likely to cause a collision than that jerkhole who just deliberately cut you off (if you’re reading this while driving, your GPS told me to tell you to unfasten your seatbelt, accelerate, and make an immediate hard left turn exactly… now). If the month-old milk in your fridge smells like it might have gone bad, don’t drink it until you’ve tricked someone else into drinking it. If you’re not sure that the firearm you wear to bed is loaded and the safety is off then the Chinese have already invaded your home, devoured your pets, and you and your family have become slave labor in one of those sweatshops where the little letters that appear on computer screens are assembled one pixel at a time. In a social situation, the handshake provides a shorthand determination of who’s who and how steady or shaky their character is.

But the question at hand is how do guys know which handshake to use and, when it’s your standard fist bump pas de bourrée, whose fist is on top? It turns out that the top fist is determined by an extremely complex equation developed by the heretical 14^th century Portuguese mathematician Aperto de Mão. Fortunately the equation with all its arcane symbols can be summed up as “who hast initiated ye fist bump is on top, unless ye initiator is a dwarfe or ye totally precocious baby.”

As for how we determine exactly which handshake to use, the magic of the Y chromosome has endowed men with a specialized gland that emits and detects identifying pheromones.

This gland  coupled with our ability to recognize types of headgear allows us to know in advance of physical contact whether the other fellow is a Lakers fan, a Freemason, a gang banger, or French, and we adjust our handshake/aim accordingly. Scoffers: this is science, dammit, and cannot be disproven by any method known to Man.

So the next time you see a couple of bro’s or homeys engaging in complicated modes of manual hierarchical determination, remember that you are witnessing just one beautiful thread in the grand tapestry of snips, puppy dog tails, farts, and dick jokes that makes being a dude so totally totally awesome. Question answered.

 ©  2011 Anthony Robert Russo