The Chauvinist’s Guide to Modern Romance by Morris Rollins is an utterly unique novella laced with satire and jabs at the misogynistic perspective. Morris provides his target audience, ‘modern-day eunuchs,’ with advice and methods on how to win over women in a highly feminine world following the fall of Man’s patriarchy. The author explores how these men can take back their power from women while wooing them, assisted by helpful charts and illustrations.
Morris begins by quickly breaking down how ‘Woman’ set herself up to take power from ‘Man’ back during the time of Adam and Eve and in subsequent eons. According to the author, Woman is the ‘weaker sex’ and has been since men and women existed in a ‘state-of-nature’ environment in which Man was a dominant, conquering force of nature. Woman crept in when he wasn’t looking, however, and take control through her work to establish peace and spread morals. Woman’s intelligence and psychological prowess made her cunning and efficient, and Man’s control of society gradually lessened as Woman came to dominate more aspects of civilized life.
The novella then goes on to illustrate important differences between the sexes, primarily their motivations to find a romantic partner. For women, he explains, an ideal partner is a delicate yet complicated balance of strength, good looks, financial stability, observable emotion, and success. Different attractive traits are broken down and organized according to their importance while different ‘subspecies’ of men and women are explored, ranging from sharp and smooth guys to nice and bad girls and so many more types in-between. In order to win the battle of the sexes and obtain the intimacy ‘all men strive for,’ Man must note the different types of women as well as the types of men they go for if he wants to successfully woo them.
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This book was a wild read. The author’s humorous treatment of Man and Woman as if they were wild animals made reading about them very interesting. Morris employs a generous amount of satire, a lot of it coming off as comedic despite it sounding as if a stereotypical ‘nice guy’ were narrating. I admittedly laughed out loud a number of times, and enjoyed the mock-seriousness the author implemented. The categories, or subspecies, of men and women that he covered were humorous and surprising at times, and there were a lot of them! The author’s self-awareness provided excellent commentary in different sections, and did well to break the informative tone of the book where appropriate. I was also surprised to find that there were some actual facts sprinkled in the midst of the exaggerations.
Despite how amusing it was to read, I’m not generally a fan of crude books or anything meant to be ‘shocking’ or otherwise ‘trashy,’ and though the book did not cause me any real discomfort or offense, it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. There is a lot of strong language within, and sexual subjects are frequent; the entire book is basically instructing men on how to sleep with different types of women. There were a lot of suggestive or inappropriate images inside, which isn’t something I necessarily want to see when reading a book. To put it simply at the risk of sounding vague, the book was weird, and it revelled in it.
There were very few errors throughout, usually involving issues with punctuation or the lack of it impacting sentence flow, and a missing word later in the book. The errors, though minimal, did unfortunately catch my attention and broke my immersion in the book. As a whole, though, it seemed professionally edited, and I am content to rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. I think readers with a love for satire and social commentary would greatly appreciate this book, or really anyone with a good sense of humor.
This book would likely make a good gift for people who find themselves single. I strongly advise against a younger audience reading this book, however. It contains strong language, adult content, and mentions of alcohol and violence. People who are very sensitive to these subjects in addition to sexism may want to skip this book so as to avoid unintentional offense.
