I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (31 page)

M
Y
fellow King of Comedy Steve Harvey has made a great name for himself dispensing romantic advice to women, especially black women. I think what’s he’s done is terrific, and I salute and applaud him. As a consequence of his success, I often get asked if I have similar advice to give to the ladies. To be honest, I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Women are naturally very beautiful to me—and the key word there is
naturally
.

Black women claim that they view themselves as beautiful, but they do everything possible to
escape
looking like black women. LaDonna looks much better when her hair is in its natural state
than when she’s got a weave in it or when she has it all straightened out. Many of the attributes that society calls beautiful stem from black women: plump lips, darker skin, a thick butt. Those are all things that
white
women desire. They get collagen shots, they darken their skin, they get booty pops. At the same exact time, in the shops on the other side of town the sisters are getting weaves and contacts. It’s almost like they’re switching places.

Women’s beauty techniques have become so artificial that it’s downright scary. Some sisters get these blue contacts, and it looks like old people who are going blind from cataracts. Where’s the sex appeal in that? I even saw a girl who didn’t get her blue contact flush, and it was sliding down her eye.
She looked like a Siberian husky
. If she had a fur coat on, I’d be mushing her through the snow to the Palins’ house. No one wants to screw a girl who is halfway turned into a motherfucking wolf—and that’s all that beauty really comes down to. When I, or any straight man, see a beautiful woman, the thought is,
I want to fuck her
. It’s not whether I think she’s
nice
or whether I want to hang out with her. Those are all elements of it, to be sure, but in the end the question is: Do I want to fuck her?

There’s a move in our culture to equate beauty with accomplishment, and that’s just nonsense. A comedian isn’t funny
because
he’s handsome, and he isn’t handsome
because
he’s funny. Some of us just happen to be blessed with both qualities. A woman isn’t beautiful
because
she’s done great things. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a completely false notion that’s being pushed on men by women. How can you dictate what someone finds
attractive
, or even argue about it? How is that even possible? A woman is beautiful if she causes motion in a man’s drawers, period.

I was at a party one time with a really tall Sudanese model named
Alek Wek. She was so dark that she looked like a walking eclipse. Everyone kept telling me how beautiful she was and I just didn’t see it, literally. She could be called elegant, or graceful, or lithe, or invisible at night. Those qualities she had. Between her height, her complexion, and her actual features, she looked just like Manute Bol. In fact, I dare people to put pictures of the two of them side by side. It’s like one of those puzzles that’ll keep anyone occupied for hours, where you have two identical drawings with minor differences that you have to find and circle.

I’ve even seen articles that called Caster Semenya beautiful. She’s a female runner from South Africa who broke world records and is incredibly athletic. That’s great, and no one is denying her accomplishments. Bravo! But Caster is
incredibly
athletic. That broad is so fast and so
ugly
that the rest of the runners were saying that that bitch has
got to be
a man. The running organization eventually had to run tests on her to establish her genetic identity. The early reports said that she was a hermaphrodite who had testicles that hadn’t fully descended. She supposedly had three times the normal amount of testosterone for a female; strong enough for a man, but made like a woman. That’s a tagline for a
deodorant
, not a beauty queen. Beauties don’t have secrets like testicles all up inside them, and hormone levels so high that they develop a manface. Yes, she is a great athlete, but no, I do not want to fuck her! I don’t even know if I
could
fuck her if I wanted to. That’s as far from attractive and beautiful as you can get.

But beauty is only part of it. The fact of the matter is,
LaDonna is the only black woman I could ever marry
. I like her friends, but I can’t really be around them that much. They are very, very loud. I don’t
just mean one or two of them; I mean
all
of them. It gets really bad when they all gather together in this women’s group that they have. They read books, and they pray, and they cry. Sometimes the group meets at our house, and my dumb ass always manages to walk in when one of them is telling some heartrending story: “…  and then my husband … left me … when I was pregnant!”

“Jesus is giving you strength!”

“I know, girl!”

My timing is perfect. I always open that door right when the tears are streaming at their peak, and all eyes turn to me.

“Hey, D.L.! Come join us!” they plead.

“Uh … 
no
.”

If I was married to one of those women, I just know that I’d have to choke the hell out of her. “Who put the quarter in you?” I want to ask them. “Shut up!”

Women read all these books about how to make men like them and what it means when he doesn’t call. Forty-five percent of black women will never marry, which either means 45 percent of black women talk too much or 55 percent of black men are deaf. All women just need to know one thing: If you want to make a man like you, then you should try shutting the fuck up once in a while. If a man hasn’t called, that means he doesn’t feel like talking or he doesn’t feel like talking to
you
.

Black women have convinced themselves that black men
can’t
handle them. “He goes to white women because he doesn’t want a strong woman,” they claim. Like I said before, everything in nature seeks the path of least resistance. As part of nature, men are the same way. No one wants to make things more difficult for themselves than necessary. That doesn’t make any sense. Every animal experiences some attraction—and every animal also runs away
from loud noises. When an elephant trumpets, everyone gets the fuck out of the way.

The truth is, it’s not a question of black men fearing a strong woman. It’s about black men fearing a constant headache. Strength does not equal volume! Jesus was a strong man with a strong message, but he didn’t use a bullhorn when he gave the Sermon on the Mount. His words are in red in the Bible, not in boldface and all-capital letters. If a woman is hunting for a man, she should pretend that she’s hunting for a deer. She should refrain from making any sudden movements, make sure that she smells nice, and
above all
not make any loud noises. It’s as simple as this: Hush for love. Women only have to do
one
thing:
Be quiet
.

Men, on the other hand, need to do
three
and
only
three things. Or at least that’s the way it was when I was a kid. It was like the three commandments of being a man:

That was it. That was all you had to do.

When I was a little boy, I decided that I was going to play a prank on my father one day. We had a van with seats in the back that you couldn’t really see into from the driver’s seat. I knew he was going somewhere so I hid in those seats. We drove and drove and drove and after a while I popped up like a jack-in-the-box: “Ta-daa!”

My father immediately pulled over, mad as a motherfucker. I don’t know where he had been planning on going, but he turned the van around and we went back home. He couldn’t have me knowing his plans for that day, and I
still
haven’t found out. But if
I discovered that my father had a woman on the side, I wouldn’t be upset. I wouldn’t care at all. Yet if my
mom
had done that to my dad, it would be a problem. Obviously, there’s a double standard.

The reason I’m fine with having a double standard is that I don’t think monogamy is a particularly natural state. Sex is as animalistic as people can get, and we can learn a lot from nature. One of the things I learned is,
There are very few animals that are monogamous
. I think it’s pretty much ducks and horses. Otherwise it’s always one male and several females, and there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

Women’s obsession with monogamy is ridiculous. Look at the Tiger Woods debacle. Tiger Woods is a
billionaire
. If you’re a billionaire, you should be able to have all the sex you want. Marrying a millionaire wasn’t enough for his wife. She had to have a billionaire. So why should one woman be enough for Tiger? His
name
is Tiger. It’s not Horse or Duck. Tigers have harems. They do that stuff a lot, and they do it naturally.

But nowadays, it’s a lot harder for a man to be discreet. With Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, everybody could know your business all the time. Not too long ago, LaDonna called me when I was in New York and she was back home in Los Angeles. It was one a.m. her time—which meant it was four in the morning in Manhattan. What was the crisis that couldn’t wait until morning? No, there hadn’t been a fire. No, our kids weren’t in any kind of trouble. The emergency stemmed from the fact that my wife had gotten on my e-mail. LaDonna saw that some girl was flirting with me—and she also saw that I had
never
responded. “Who is this woman?” she demanded. “
Why aren’t you saying anything
?”

She wasn’t mad because I flirted back. She was mad because I didn’t even respond! What am I supposed to do in these situations?
The best thing for me to do is to not take the woman up on it. I’m not going to
admonish
her. If I’m a guest in someone’s home and I’m served food I don’t like, I’m not going to eat it—but I’m not going to make a scene about it, either, and ruin a relationship. In fact, I’m still going to take that woman’s calls if she needs to speak to me about business. At the same time, I’m not going to put myself in a situation where the two of us are alone. I’m in a business where people flirt all the time. That’s just the nature of the industry, and it always will be.

That sure makes a lot of sense to me. But not to LaDonna. “If that was me …!” she snapped.

Well, it ain’t you! I don’t understand why women always go for that line. Men and women are very different. A man ain’t just a woman plus a dick. Women seek monogamy while failing to understand that men don’t want or need it. It’s like how we pee standing up. We’re just wired differently. Monogamy is so unnatural that they had to do research and involve giant multinational corporations to facilitate it. Viagra wasn’t invented for new sex, but for sex with who you’re with already. The problem wasn’t that your dick couldn’t get hard for
new
pussy. They had to make a pill for when you have the same pussy over and over again.

Carlito’s Way
said it best: “You don’t get reformed, you just run out of wind.” It’s not that men don’t
want
women when they get older. We just don’t want all the
bullshit
that comes with it. You don’t feel like driving, or you don’t want to talk. You’re tired, or logistically it don’t fit in. It’s not like men ever become poster children for monogamy. We just get
exhausted
. We stop arguing with women not because we
agree
with them. We stop arguing because we want to go to sleep!

I might be tongue-in-cheek with some of my advice on how to
keep a man, but the issue of absent fathers is really at the crux of many of our social problems. The housing crisis we have in this country is a crisis of broken homes. It’s a nation where fathers are absent, and no one is passing on the reality check that only a dad can provide. But I’m no hypocrite. I put my money where my mouth is and try to be the best father I can for my kids.

Unfortunately, sometimes I wish that they’d try to be the best kids they can be for
me
.