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‘Flirting’: A sacrifice for all women

By RONDA RICH

“I’m just wonderin’,” gently began Diva Pinky, “if you’re doing yourself any good.”

She was referring to a new book that I am writing on the art of flirtation and how it might reveal too many of my own feminine ploys, thus sabotaging my road of courtship.

New York publishing wizards had pointed out that Southern women are the best flirts and since I couldn’t find one word to argue against that brilliant observation, I signed on the dotted line.

Pinky has a point, though. After all, I went through that with the first book that I wrote on the secrets of Southern womanhood. Those pages have haunted me ever since because they turned into something I never meant for them to become: an authoritative guide that is used against me.

“Now, is this what you say to do on, let me see, page 37?” asked one suitor when I employed one of the feminine tactics.

“Will you please stop reading that book?” I asked for the umpteenth time.

“No,” he replied in a teasing tone. “This is the first time I have ever been able to read a woman like a book. I’m liking this.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“It’s your own fault,” he replied without sympathy. “You’re the author of your own destiny.”

This time it’s different, though. I’m writing about flirtation as practiced by all Southerners, especially our women. We created and continuously practice social flirting, which is, quite simply, the art of making others feel good about themselves and about you.

Hard-nosed feminists shudder disdainfully at the mere mention of the word “flirting” and argue that the use of such sets the women’s movement back 20 years.

Of course, this comes from women who think that there is nothing wrong with wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

They also believe that a woman should always open her own door. You have to be careful of that kind of woman. She is not doing our side any good.

I argue that flirtation elimination is professional and personal suicide. I have no doubt that those smart women of the suffrage movement who fought hard and campaigned long for our right to vote in the early part of the 20th Century, used flirtation and femininity along the way.

Flirtation, after all, is an ancient art and in the early 1900s, women still proudly and unabashedly practiced it.

But these other women, who bristle at the thought of flirting, what have they gotten for us?

Have I missed something? Did the Equal Rights Amendment pass when I wasn’t looking?

We have long been called the weaker sex and, physically, that is true more often than not. Though, I have seen a few hefty women who could pick up their scrawny husbands, hike them up on their hipbone, tuck them under their arm and walk away with them as if they were errant toddlers.

The less muscular, non-body-building, steroid-free woman has learned that if you can’t outweigh ‘em, you have to outplay ‘em.

Is there any better way to do that than with the smart use of flirtation?

It’s just an idea, but the feminists might want to think about flirting with such a notion.

After all, it looks like to me that our way is working better than theirs.