“I look good — no, face it, I look HOT — but men are frightened to approach me, because they are intimidated,” she wrote, so naturally I clicked on her name and then clicked “Add Friend”. Ten minutes later, she accepted the request and our whirlwind friendship began.

Not that I was looking for someone to date, you understand. Particularly not someone who lives in Austin, TX. I think of Austin as basically a tribute-band version of Nashville. Every time I go to Austin, I’ve asked someone from Houston to meet me there rather than fish in the local pond.

In any event, I wasn’t looking for someone to date. My dance card was (and is) full. But when a woman says she’s so hot that men are afraid to approach her — well, you don’t throw a challenge like that down on the e-ground and expect a brother* not to step up. With my very-much-in-a-relationship-status in mind, however, I decided that I wouldn’t contact her at all. That I would let her make the first move, and all the ones following. That this would be one of these things where I’d see how much of the “Red Pill” business is true.

After all, my experience has been that all of the Red Pill stuff is true. It doesn’t matter how depressing and crappy the manosphere’s assertion may be; it proves out in cold blood right in front of you. I’ve been stood up on a date by a woman so she could drive 210 miles each way to have her jaw broken by the ex that she was “totally done with”. I’ve lost a woman’s number when I changed a phone, ignored months’ worth of communications from her because I thought the texts were meant for someone else, only to bump back into her and find she was intrigued by my silence.

In the final analysis the quote from Roger’s Version holds half-true: “Once a man has a woman’s attention, anything he does to keep that attention — anything at all — furthers his cause.” Anything negative, I’d say. by way of amelioration. Anything nice you do for any woman with whom you haven’t had repeated and borderline non-consensual intercourse will just make her more interested in her dotted-line boss who told her that her pantsuit made her look chunky. This, incidentally, is why all the “feminist allies” on Twitter have gone without sex for years while women pine over Chris “Breezy” Brown and his remarkable right hook.

Not that men aren’t equally transparent and stupid and loathsome about relationships, of course. We just know what our own faults are, and we know that we are as shallow as a petri dish.

Back to my new Facebook love. I took a look through her pictures. My God, there was a time when she was hotter than the surface of the sun. Her father took a lot of modeling shots of her in various locations from Pittsburgh to Paris. He had a lover’s eye for her body and her movement. Yes, she was a knockout.

In 1989.

Today she’s a size 16 at a minimum, double-chinned, bowling-pin shaped. Obsessed with the Twin Towers of modern female stupidity: food and companion animals. Every photo was with food. Let me tell you why I don’t pose with food: because it reminds people that I’m fat. She should take the same approach. In a bathing-suit shot, there were love handles spilling halfway down the sides of her bikini top. I think that’s called “fatkini” and I think it’s a thing.

And her Wall posts? Straight from BuzzFeed and HuffPo. When A Racist Stood Up To Do Homophobic Things, What This Beautiful Fatkini Model Said Next Will Blow You Away. You get the idea. There was not a single thing she’d written about anything that I could not have guessed in advance. There were a few photos of her decent-looking but regrettably fedora-wearing ex-husband, along with some comments to the effect that he bored her. Okay then. Go be un-bored alone.

After ten minutes spent understanding this woman’s current state of mind and body, I’d decided that it might be best to unfriend her. Happily, I didn’t get the chance; when I returned to the page the next day we were no longer Facebook pals. She’d read my FB page, which is 25% stuff about my son and 75% ridiculous jargon, shocking sexual audacity, and repulsive images of the ghetto, and decided that we were better off not being friends.

Had she still been beautiful, I’d have been sad, though I neither needed nor wanted another beautiful woman. But as she was, I cared not. Her “HOT” self-image was as out-of-date as the Macarena, possibly more so. What do you get when you were in the business of being HOT but now you are NOT? With that floating around the edges of my mind, I sat down to edit a piece I was writing for a magazine. The notes I’d been given stated that what I’d written wasn’t very “Baruthian”. In other words, whatever magic I’d provided in the past, however minor, was not present.

My first impulse was to sneer and dismiss it. Anything I do is Baruthian, as Walt Whitman didn’t quite say. But then I thought about that fat, lonely old woman, wondering why people didn’t approach her when she was still sixteen and stunning inside, and then I let my hands fall to my sides, and I regarded the screen without judgment, and I wondered how long I’d still be worth anything at all, to anyone.

* obviously, I’m Bark M’s brother.