Email: Corny pickup lines [EH]

I don't understand why men think those corny pickup lines are any good! It must be like "pro" wrestling -- you know it's fake (OK, some don't), but you're into it hoping for excitement anyway. If I were a woman and heard any one pickup line in those books, I would just spew my drink every time! I think women pass them around for long-suffering laughs, while men pass them around secretly (or openly) thinking they will work. Men do tend to have this theory (though scarily and too often it does work) that "chatting up" a woman and just keeping her attention will eventually "pay off." Yuck! The other thing that sickens me about those pickup lines -- and I have never read one that didn't strike me as pathetically unoriginal -- is that they seem to presume the man somehow has an ownership stake in the woman's time, attention span, or her very person -- they are almost always a violation of personal boundaries and a contradiction of the values that most women hold dear. They are fishing expeditions is what they are: Trawler bait for women who have the least common denominator in brains and morality. Any man who would use a pickup line does not care about the particular woman he is addressing; he will pull in the first fish to bite at his line.