Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, authors of The Rules, a 1995 book of relationship advice for hetero women gender-policing blockbuster of retrograde shit, have repackaged their stale turds in Not Your Mother’s Rules: The New Secrets for Dating. Of course, the "new" "secrets" for dating are, in fact, your mother’s Rules, assuming, of course, that you had a mother and that she loathed herself enough to take the original turds seriously.

I’d like to check out this "update," if only to see what Fein and Schneider are saying about queer couples. As I recall, there were some vague statements about folks like us in the original Rules books. However, without the "war of the sexes/genders" framework in which to slot each of the players and their "opposite sexes" paradigm with which they make sense of romantic relationships, their comments amounted to, "The Rules are a good guideline for all relationships, even queer ones. Because of reasons. Yeah, and, um…stuff." There was a lot of tokenistic, slightly panicked hand-waving in that dismissive paragraph or two, as I remember. It was actually pretty hilarious.

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