The blurb on the back:

The Inept Seducer is the Tragic Figure of our time. He like [sic] girls. Girls like him. But before anything delicious can happen, he wrecks everything by doing Silly Things. What the Inept Seducer fails to understand, says the author, is that Bad Intentions are very nice, but they are just not enough.
Culled from a tear-stained survey of hundreds of juicy, yielding girls, this book is dedicated to all the dear, yearning, urgent, needful, yummy men who do Silly Things.
Inept Seducer types dealt with here include: The Grotty, The Mummy's Boy, The Mother-Chatter, The Sord, TheLethal, The Narky, Rafe the Café, Teastall Terence, Mr One, Jeremy Clenchjaw, The Window-Climber, The Liverpoodle, The Young Bailey, The Put-Down, Spider Man, Bela Lugosi, The Joker, The Fumbler, The Father Superior, The Talk Dirty, The Inept Guru, The Noodge, The Inept Snob ... and so on. All of these should consult the final section on How To Be Ept.

opening lines:
This book is not about Boudoir Olympics, compulsive running broad jumps or techniques of survival on playing fields. Nor is it yet another clinical dirge on oral turpitude or other carnal trivialities.

A throwaway humorous book by a woman taking the piss out of men is not the kind of thing we normally bother with here. There are far too many of them out there, with barely an original joke between them, and there's no sign of them letting up. They're rubbish rather than trash, and they're not appropriate to this site.

This one, however, sneaks in under the wire on the basis that it's so old that it carries a certain value as a social document. Written after the advent of the Pill but just before the rise of the women's movement, it comes on like a manual for sexually liberated young women at the height of the Sixties revolution. But just when you think it might have some radical agenda, we find that actually, no, it doesn't: 'By nature and because of nature, a woman is a second-class citizen, designed to serve the needs and desires of a man and, in that way, find her own fulfilment.' (pp.93-94)

What intrigues me is that while Ms Sakol is (as far as I know) American, and this was first published in the States, it reads as though it's British. Here's one of her clichés:

Cultural Claud
He goes to strip clubs as an observer, he says, in order to write an essay about moral decline. Nobody buys the essay. He rewrites it as a letter to the Sunday Times. They ignore it.
He believes Americans are cultural barbarians who know nothing of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, Auden or Eliot. He tells this to American girls. When they give him the cultural heave-ho, he says this proves how barbaric they are. (p.56)

What happened? Did she actually rewrite for the British market? Surely no one does that.

Interesting in its own way.

Jeannie Sakol