Question: Why do people treat you badly?

Answer: Because you let them.

Not long ago, at a social event in D.C., I found myself talking to a very intelligent, funny, attractive woman who is 31 years old and not married. She had just ended a "relationship" with a guy, and I was sort of amazed.

Why was she still single? And why would this guy date her and dump her? Surely, if he had any appreciation of her wonderful qualities -- some qualities evident to the eye, and others that might be learned in a brief conversation -- he would have spent all he had to buy her a diamond ring, fallen on his knees and, with tears streaming down his face, begged for her hand in marriage.

He had not done this, however. Rather, he treated her like Just Another Woman, not as Someone Special, and so they drifted along for a while and then parted company. As always in such cases, I advised the young lady how to avoid a repetition of her painful disappointment.

Update: (Smitty) An alternative answer would be: "They have the permissions and you can't stop them." This interruption brought to you while issuing a party foul for saying:

"You know the old story about free milk and a cow? Make up your mind to keep the cow in the barn."

How do you not embed the Georgia Satellites?

(There. Fixed that for ya. Back to the original post.)

Tactics, Strategy and Nookie
Excuse me if that sounds simplistic and old-fashioned, but it works. I'm not saying that women should be uptight, Victorian prudes about sex. And, rather than argue about "tithing mint and cumin," I'll take an agnostic stance on the wisdom and morality of engaging in what we might call minor premarital intimacies.

Still, if it is a husband that a woman is seeking, rather than just another in an endless series of going-nowhere "relationships," her negotiating posture in the marriage market is greatly enhanced if she avoids giving up the nookie -- humping, screwing, fornicating, making the beast with two backs, call it what you will -- until she can entrap her prey and drag him to the altar.

Ladies, please note that this is strategic advice. You don't have to be a Christian or a conservative or a pure-as-driven-snow virgin -- although it would be better if you were all three -- to benefit by putting your vajajay off-limits until you can persuade some horny fool respectable gentleman to make the pledge of "forsaking all others 'til death do you part."

Making the decision to keep your britches on henceforth does not require you to make a moral judgment about your sexual past. Even if you spent your teenage years slutting around like Meghan McCain after four margaritas, this doesn't necessarily make you a bad person -- unless you start writing ill-informed RINO political commentary for Tina Brown's Daily Beast, in which case, you're a total whore with pustulent chancres.

Habit, Behavior, Identity
It is important to understand, in this regard, how sexual habit can become sexual identity in such a way that people effectively trap themselves into self-defeating patterns. The largest and most vital sexual organ is your brain, and a lot of what is nowadays is described as sexual "orientation" or sexual "preference" is actually a matter of mental habit.

By repeated thoughts and actions, people's minds become accustomed to one sort of behavior, one sort of sexual ideation. The nature of the human mind is such that our minds can be trained to respond to stimuli in a patterned way, which is true not only in sex, but in eating, writing, talking, etc. If a certain Daily Beast columnist has a habit of slugging down tequila and then wandering off with any man who shows the slightest interest, this is a learned pattern of behavior. She wasn't "born that way."

Once well-established, these mental patterns and their associated behavioral habits are difficult to unlearn, no matter how unsatisfactory or harmful the results. In this sense, people with unfortunate sexual habits are kind of like people who keep voting for Democrats no matter how badly the Democrats screw them over. It's a matter of personal identity: Being a Democrat is who they are.

And so, for some women, being a "party girl" becomes a matter not only of mental habit and behavior pattern, but also a source of self-identification. One sometimes encounters a woman so far gone in this kind of hardened whorishness that, like Naomi Wolf, she scoffs at the very idea that chastity might be considered more virtuous than promiscuity. And if you try to defend the concept of chastity in argument with such a person, you'll quickly find yourself accused of misogyny or being "anti-sex."

Hypocrisy and the Damage Done
Anyone who's known me for more than five minutes would laugh to think that I might ever be accused of being "anti-sex." If you don't consider my 20-year marriage and six children sufficient proof of my pro-sex bona fides, perhaps you ought to inquire among friends who knew me before I met my wife, when I was a extremely wicked person.

"Well, see there?" says the scoffer. "You're such a hypocrite! You slutted around until you were 29, but you expect other people not to do that."

Oh, if only you knew what harm I did -- to myself and others -- during my days of heedless wickedness. We are talking about harm that cannot be undone, lives that cannot be repaired, dreams left shattered like glass. Had it not been for grace, and the persistent prayers of those who cared about me, who knows where I might have ended up? And who knows what further harm has befalled innocent others because of the ripple effects of evil I did more than two decades ago?

"Judge not lest ye be judged" is one of those passages of the Bible that always gets twisted around to mean something quite different than what it actually supposed to mean. Jesus never hesitated to call sin by its right name.

In fact, in one of the most famous incidents of the ministry of Christ, when he saved the life of the woman caught in adultery -- "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" -- after telling the woman that he did not condemn her, Jesus then commanded her, "Go, and sin no more." Having extended grace and mercy, he asked in return her repentance from the sins for which he had refused to let her die. And who can doubt, from that moment forward, this woman lived a life of extraordinary virtue?

The Vajayjay Gospel
Sometimes I'm amazed at how superficial and judgmental professed Christians can be, and how they insist that everyone engage in a pharisaical pretense of sinlessness, not even acknowledging the sin they see everywhere around them, except to condemn it in the stereotypical fashion of Official Church Talk. To these "churchy" people, it is abhorrent to speak to a sinner in terms the sinner can relate to -- and what am I, but a sinner myself? -- as if writing humorously about "nookie" and "vajayjay" might lead someone astray.

Let's go back now to that 31-year-old lovelorn lady whom I advised to keep the cow in the barn. She was raised in a religious home, and would almost certainly like to live a life that her parents and grandparents could admire. "Churchy" people are effectively telling that woman she only has two choices. She can either (a) be all uptight and churchy like them, or else (b) keep on fornicating like a two-bit floozy.

Excuse me if I consider that a false dilemma. If you live long enough to see a few miracles worked in people's lives, you know that many decent, respectable Christians -- the finest pillars of their community and exemplars of moral conduct -- were once the most horribly shameless of reprobate sinners. And even today, the redeemed may face terrible struggles and temptations as they strive to live up to the repentance that was asked as the only price of their priceless salvation: "Go and sin no more."

When I talk to young people (and some not-so-young people) about developing their careers and initiating projects -- whether in politics, business or anything else -- I like to say, "If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it." To explain what I mean:

• Conceive it -- Anything we accomplish in life begins with a concept, some idea we have of something we wish to do, whether it's starting a rock band or organizing a petition drive. We may alter our plans along the way, improvising and revising by the process of trial and error, but we must begin by coming up with an idea -- conceiving -- of something we wish to do.
• Believe it -- There is something almost magical about the enthusiasm and confidence of someone who truly believes in what they're doing. At CPAC '08, a month before I started blogging full-time in March 2008, one of my earliest endorsements came from Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs: "The most enthusiastic blogger I have yet to meet." Although I only got 6,000 visits that first full-time month, I knew in my heart that if I worked as hard as I could at it, using what I'd learned in my journalism career and what I'd picked up from studying the work of successful bloggers, I could make it work. Every small success therefore was welcomed as affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and every disappointment shrugged off as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than an insuperable barrier to success.
• Achieve it - What could possibly be more enjoyable than succeeding at something where no one ever expected you to succeed? Imagine the satisfaction of seeing all those naysayers and detractors eat their words when you accomplish something they told you couldn't be done. You've earned it, you sweated for it, you kept plugging away no matter how often you failed and despite all the criticism of those who called you crazy for even trying. Now you're the freakin' big dog, baby, and those critics look like fools for having ever doubted you.

William Jacobson just crossed the million-hit threshold and if you'll look around, you'll notice all kinds of people achieving things that people told them couldn't be done. Andrew Breitbart was once a slacker with ADD, and Glenn Beck was once a washed-up alcoholic DJ.

God loves to make the impossible happen, just to remind us that he's still in the business of miracles. And when I see someone like that 31-year-old lady -- smart, funny, attractive -- feeling lonely, unloved and unloveable, I want to share with them the idea that it doesn't have to be that way. All you've got to do is to conceive it and believe it, and you can achieve it.

Trust me. As the Rule 5 guru, I'm a good judge of what guys like, and this girl's definitely got it. She must merely learn to negotiate from a position of strength -- keep the cow in the barn, honey, and don't let guys treat you like Just Another Woman -- and she'll have 'em begging for it.

That's why I remind you of the motto of The McCain Institute: Good nookie is a terrible thing to waste.

Update: (Smitty)

Bride of Rove links and ponders this post.

Update II (Smitty)
Further linkage from:

• Little Miss Attila and
• Villainous Company