Good Guys, Bad Guys: The Hite Guide to Smart Choices

Examines the hidden emotional patterns of relationships, and discusses sexuality, fighting, ending a difficult relationship, and staying single by choice

Good Women, Bad Guys would be more like it for this latest from best-selling author Hite (Women and Love, 1987, etc.), here writing with Colleran, her assistant. Far from being the ``revolutionary'' guide to choosing a good mate and establishing an egalitarian 90's relationship that the authors promise, it's a whiny, biased kvetch against the male sex in general, written in grade-B women's-mag style. By a conservative estimate, 50-60% of this book consists of excerpts from questionnaires Hite distributed to an unspecified number of women (she never explains the methodology she used to reach such eyebrow-raising conclusions as, ``Most single women over sixty-five like their lives very much''). Hite and Colleran's contributions are limited to pep talks (if you take inventory of your relationship and find it more rewarding than degrading, ``Enjoy!'' they exhort: ``We give you total permission. In fact, we insist!'') and superficial analyses in which ponderous terms like ``emotional violence'' are hefted about but never precisely defined. A man's glancing at a sporting event on TV while his woman is pressing for a discussion of feelings seems to rank right up there with outright mockery and revilement, on the E.V. scale. Overall, men are represented as scapegoats in every intimate failure: ``In the beginning, [a relationship] usually is happy, but as the stereotypes...gradually creep in and the woman tries to fight against them, the situation starts to deteriorate.'' The intelligent woman reader must ask, ``Aren't we beyond all this?'' (Male readers are advised to avoid this book, lest the urge to drop-kick it off a roof be taken as further evidence of their emotional violence.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.