According to USA Today, The Rules is 20th on its best-sellers list. The book has sold over 455,000 copies and constitutes a statement about the realities of gender in a system incapable of real progress.

There is not a single fact in the book about the subject of romantic relationships. It consists entirely of 35 rules of dogma concentrating the nature of the romance culture. Among the points of advice -- never ask men out, never stare at men or otherwise indicate attention, never return phone calls, never spend more than 10 minutes with a man on the phone and always be the one to end a date. These kinds of pseudo-power games are a reflection of the fact that power is considered sexy, that we adjust to the fact of domination in society more generally and find it pleasurable thanks to the culture of the dominators.

There are about two rules that MIM agrees with: 1) Men don't change. 2) Don't talk about the book with your therapist.

MIM knows that men don't change, because that's the system we live in. Efforts of individual biological wimmin to get individual men to change are indeed futile. Men as a group are in a constant flux, but they do not change on account of individual efforts.

MIM thinks that people shouldn't talk about this book to their therapists because no one should be talking about this book to anyone, which is less useful than toilet paper. The authors do not want psychologists to challenge their book, recognizing that even though psychotherapy is about convincing women into being happy with their gender roles in relationships, even therapists find their drivel manipulative beyond the pale.

Most of MIM's readers will immediately scoff at The Rules and some will wonder why MIM takes it seriously. We answer that this book has sold more copies than any MIM book; it has received serious reviews and is in no way meant as a satire of our culture. The book is written by the Archie Bunkers of the gender aristocracy and the authors mean what they say; they spend much of their book talking about the need for determination to follow The Rules to the end.

Even the richest of people are no exception in their culture. In fact the romance life of Charles and Di or Donald Trump is the poor example that the ruling class sets for the people in the capitalist system. Indeed, following the romances of the ruling class is itself a multi-million dollar tabloid and television industry in itself. We cannot be surprised that the media conglomerate Time-Warner -- which is also the money and power behind pseudo- feminist leader Gloria Steinem -- published The Rules.

In an interview with USA Today, famous imperialist wimmin's author Erica Jong could not find the strength to condemn the book and admitted she had ambiguous feelings about it because she believes "it works" in finding Mr. Right and that men have always been "predators." Erica Jong should have developed this excellent point about the book: it sanctions men as predators. This would not be very important to MIM in itself, because dating culture is not inherently a life-and-death issue. It's a subject of leisure time activity. (But somehow our romance culture has managed to become the single largest cause of murder as defined by the FBI.) Of course, relative to other kinds of imperialist murder through starvation, war and environmental destruction, "relationship" murder is unimportant, but MIM still does not sanction it. MIM is concerned with toppling the patriarchy, not with making dating more fun or productive under capitalism. What should not be at all important involves antagonistic contradictions between the people and an enemy that is very difficult to pin down -- all men and the biological wimmin socialized to be men.

According to Fein and Schneider, men who really love their wimmin will chase them with dogged determination, and they should be forced to prove that obsessive determination or they are not worth wasting time on. The marrying kind are the ones who seek a "challenge" -- the "impossible" womyn that is "hard to get."

MIM translates: don't bother dating anyone who isn't stalking you.

We must state firmly that these Feins and Schneiders of the world should be busy working to overturn the laws against stalking passed this year. They won't, because to them it's the men who will risk crossing the pseudo-feminists and other p.c. fascists that are the most determined suitors worth settling down with. Instead of working to dismantle the patriarchy, Fein and Schneider are holding seminars on The Rules so that they can provide personal instruction to wimmin desperate for a "real" relationship. All the women participants interviewed for a Washington Post article Style section (Oct. 21, 1996) refused to give their names for fear that their potential dates would find them out.

Capitalist romance culture teaches people that love is worth risking stalking/being stalked and killing/being killed over. That is the reason this book has sold so many copies. There are tens of millions of people so lacking in any absorbing and worthy goals -- thanks to the profit-mad capitalist-system which sets people's sights so low -- these people actually go out and buy books like The Rules.

The wimmin who buy into The Rules tend to be gender privileged -- so gender privileged they won't rock the boat on even the smallest points, to the point where they can't even ask men out. The petty nature of these concerns combined with their doggedness reminds MIM of the labor aristocracy and its outlook against the proletariat and lumpen- proletariat.

Tens of millions of people absorb books like The Rules, but these same people are no where to be found with such a passion attacking the causes of disability preventing romantic life. Physically disabled and diseased people have their sexual privilege curtailed. Other millions of people wrongfully imprisoned also have their "rights" to access to the human body for leisure time drastically cut back. These are the kinds of people who want to change the patriarchy. Children (or young adults) who are owned by their parents until they are 18 are also an especially important vehicle of change under imperialist patriarchy.

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