What I Learn About Love From A Touch of Mink

You have to question cultural socialization. Ok, I have to question it. It is like this, I used to stay up and watch movies. I could exist on three hours of sleep every other night and it would not phase me a bit.

Damn I miss those days!



A Cary Grant movie was like required viewing. It was a reading of how men acted, talked and could be toward women. I did not care if he was scruff or in a tux and tails. He was and shall ever be all right with me.

I didn't learn until later that he was an illusion. I don't care, he was a grand illusion. Special shout out to Houseboat and Holiday with Katherine Hepburn. Oh, and Indiscreet.

So there I am watching this movie in the 70s and the Doris character does not want to shag the Cary dude. I didn't get it.

I thought she was plum crazy. I'm thinking what is wrong with a little making out? The movie continues and I'm getting more steamed. I could hear someone driving down the street in their car with "do it, do it til your satisfied" traveling down the street. Yet this full grown woman is saying nyet to that hair, those eyes and the body in the suit.

By the end of the movie I was cussing her out. I was mad. I would have taken the one perfect night and been dang glad of it. I was so mad I voluntarily refused to watch another Doris Day movie for years.

Hindsight. I am no longer mad at Doris. It wasn't really Doris it was some of the characters that she played on screen. Miss Day is a great singer and a fine actress and no disrespect is intended.

I didn't like this sophisticated form of matrimony game playing. It was the 1962 version of "Put a ring on it."

I can now appreciate a little bit about not bonking just any old body. I even get that it is ok to say you have requirements that you don't want to wavier from for the sake of a slap dash.

Not disagreeing with it and have employed it when my life required common sense approaches to human behavior.

I just didn't like the movie's implication that in order to get the rich dude you had to hold out for as long as possible and then you could trap him. No, no and no. Men are human beings. Not supposed to trap humans.

I knew that at 15 and I still believe it now.

So my lesson was actually the anti-lesson. Not to marry for the sake of sex or having a husband. Marry because you actually love the person and can live with the faults as well as the joys.

Shag him or not, it is your choice and responsibility. Unless he is Cary Grant. Then I say rug burn and be glad.