‘The Heat Is in Your Pants’: Studies in Crap fends off the ’70s worst pick-up lines with You Would If You Loved Me

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

You Would If You Loved Me

Author: Sol Gordon, Ph.D

Date: 1978

Publisher: Bantam Books

Discovered at: Avenue Thrift, Kansas City, Kansas

The Cover Promises: “Sex Lines! You’ve heard them. You’ve tried them. Here’s What you can do about them.”

In short, snappy answers to stupid come-ons!

Representative Quotes:

• “Don’t worry. You’ll only bleed a little.” (page 69).

• “Male: I just oiled my machine. Want to see how it works?

  Female: Why don’t you give it a cold shower and see if it rusts?” (page 15)

Americans have never found it easy to sit their children down and not have the big talk about sex, so it’s only natural that, eventually, we have left such awkward non-discussions to the schools, where not explaining condoms, pregnancies, or the ins-and-outs of ins-and-outs has in many districts been official curriculum for over a decade. The small price to pay for this convenience? Record outbreaks of chlamydia.

Thirty years back, parents had fewer options. To help out, Sol Gordon, PhD, has stuffed a paperback with hundreds of the “lines” young men have purportedly used to talk young women into bed. Unlike sex-ed, he covers all the bases, from the evergreen “Let’s make tonight something to remember,” to the boastful “The hookers usually pay me afterwards,” to the educational “It is said that having sex on the Jewish sabbath is a double mitzvah — which means ‘good deed.'”

Also: “Are you a dyke or something?”