I’m a 34-year-old woman, worried I’m giving 1950s dating advice to my teenage niece by telling her I wouldn’t ask a man out. When she wanted me to explain, the best I could come up with was that I want a guy who has the guts and initiative to do the asking. What’s your take?

--Single White Aunt

Men are most attracted to what’s slightly out of reach, not what’s throwing itself in their laps, crushing their yarbles. Sure, they’ll say they love it when women ask them out. They also love women who’ll have sex with them 20 minutes after meeting them in a bar, but they aren’t going to make them their girlfriends. In the unlikely event they ask for a second date, it probably won’t be “Can I take you to a movie?” but “Meet me in section P3 of the parking garage.”

The question is, do you want to be politically correct or romantically successful? There are those who insist men and women are exactly the same -- perhaps prompted by all the good ole boys they see breast-feeding babies at Denny’s, or by the proliferation of NFL logo-imprinted Kotex. Data does show that men and women are cognitively very similar. Additionally, notes evolutionary psychologist David Buss, both sexes get skin-protecting calluses, have taste preferences for fat, sugar, and salt, and developed sweat glands for bodily cooling. Where men and women diverge, writes Buss in a 1998 analysis of sex differences, is in domains in which they’ve faced “different adaptive problems over human evolutionary history.”

Few people truly understand how far we haven’t come. While it’s only a matter of time before you can nag your robo-vacuum via e-mail, psychologically, you’re still the cave girl next door. Back in the Pleistocene era, when birth control meant being a fast runner, having sex could yank a woman off the mating market for nine-plus months, then stick her with a hungry kid -- long before readily available frozen pizza replaced readily diggable crawly grubs. A man, on the other hand, merely gave up a few minutes of his time and a teaspoon or so of sperm.

Now, there are a lot of really bad places to be a single mother, but probably one of the worst ever was 1.8 million years ago on the savannah. The ancestral women who successfully passed their genes on to us were those who were choosy about who they went under a bush with, weeding out the dads from the cads. Men had a different genetic imperative -- to avoid bringing home the bison for kids who weren’t theirs -- and evolved to regard girls who give it up too easily as too high risk for anything beyond a roll on the rock pile.

Sure, these days, you can slap a medicated sticker on your back and run around having lots of pregnancy-free fun. Unfortunately, as evolutionary psychologist Don Symons writes in The Adapted Mind, “Natural selection takes hundreds or thousands of generations,” so don’t count on our genes getting the message to upgrade to Cave 2.0 anytime soon.

Forget worrying about what’s equal or unequal, and stick to what works: A woman targets the guy she wants and flirts to let him know he’s got a shot. If he doesn’t ask her out, he’s either a weenie or not interested. Either way, if she tries to force a relationship, it’s unlikely to end well. As for accusations that your “old-fashioned” approach is a form of “disempowerment” practiced by women who secretly hate women -- if anything, it’s the disempowerment of women who secretly hate women who have dates.

My fiance and I are having a costume wedding. We thought having everyone dress Renaissance/medieval would be a fun alternative to stuffy black-tie. The problem is, my fiance wants his brother to be his best man, but the guy simply refuses to come in costume. How can I get over the resentment I feel toward his brother for not wanting to fully participate in our wedding?

It’s no surprise you long for days of yore, when it was much easier to get the peasants to follow orders. Unfortunately, like most people these days, you only got engaged, not coronated. All you can do is hint how pissy you’ll be for the next 50-some years if you don’t get your way -- which, as a motivational tool, doesn’t have quite the same punch as the power to flick your scepter and screech to the palace guards, “Off with his head!”

It’s your party, and you’ll make him dress like Friar Tuck if you want to! Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But, look where it’s gotten you. Suddenly, what should be a celebration of love is degenerating into petty infighting over who wears the pants in the family -- and if they can demand the rest of the clan wear knickers, curly-toed shoes, and tights.

Ask yourself what really matters: whether your wedding is the epitome of medieval accuracy, down to guests who smell like they bathed once (back in 1434) -- or whether everybody feels included. (“Well, having a historically accurate wedding, of course!”) If that’s how you see it, you’re probably feeling relieved you’re marrying your fiance, not his stuffybutt brother. Um, not so fast. You don’t just marry a person, you marry into a person’s family -- which means you’re vowing to spend at least part of the rest of your life with everybody from the groom’s brother to his flatulent Aunt Frieda.

In other words, it would behoove you to stop stamping your feet and insisting everybody meet your needs and start smiling and inquiring about theirs. But, wait, isn’t this supposed to be your wedding, that “most important day of every girl’s life”? That thinking is not only vomit-inducing, it’s what gets the mother of the bride chasing the mother of the groom with one of those spiked balls on a chain -- typically, over life and death issues like whether the centerpieces should be calla lilies or bud roses.

Shift your priority from getting married to being married, and your wedding could be a training ground for compromising for the greater good -- a skill you’ll be needing frequently once all the jesters and serving wenches go home. Consider that there just might be people out there (your fiance’s brother, perhaps?) who are horrified at the prospect of appearing publicly in, say, green control-top leggings and pointy elf ears, and worse yet, having their paunchy elf self preserved in your wedding album for posterity. Maybe now would be a good time to tell the brother and other guests you’ll have period hats and masks on hand, but all that really matters is that they’re there, stifling their snickering the best they can -- I mean, sharing your special day.

How can you get over the resentment you feel toward the fiance’s bro for not dressing up? Well, about the same way he’ll get over the resentment he feels toward you when he’s up there in a suit and tie looking like he’s trying to sell insurance to the Sheriff of Nottingham.

I was attracted to my girlfriend of six months before I ever saw her, during the three months we communicated by phone and e-mail for business. When we met, I discovered she’s very beautiful -- with one drawback: her enormous breast implants. Four years ago, she went from what was probably a very attractive B to a whopping DDD, and on a 5-foot-five-inch, 120-pound frame. Her implants are the new kind that feel more lifelike, but they don’t turn me on, and they’re embarrassingly big and obviously fake. She loves them and shows them off in low-cut tops, while I find myself hinting that she should cover up before we go out. She may as well be wearing a siren on her head -- the attention would be the same! She seems to be falling for me hard, and the feeling’s mostly mutual, but these implants could be a deal-killer.

The moment a guy mentions a woman’s looks, fingers start wagging that it’s what’s inside that counts. And yes, it is -- including whatever’s factory-sealed into those Hefty bags making up Mount Whitney and Friend.

Men’s eyes always go to a woman’s breasts. No guy’s going to avert his gaze from a set of Bs, or even a set of bee stings. They’re breasts. That’s all that matters. But, enter a pair like your girlfriend’s, lobbying hard for attention, and suddenly, it’s not just the guys’ eyeballs wandering; their minds start wandering, too: Is she a sex worker? Heir to porn star Wendy Whoppers? Does her version of dressing in “career separates” involve gluing on a pair of tassels? Or, on a less sexy note, how much wearable low self-worth can one woman pack into a baby tee?

A lot of guys hate bought boobs, but maybe you could’ve lived with your girlfriend’s if she’d opted for the medium instead of the Supersized. Being with a girl with freakishly huge fake breasts is a bit like being a celebrity -- the negative bit, that is. Just as Cindy Crawford can’t pick her nose in public without it making the international press, you can’t get a cup of coffee without the guy behind the counter asking your girlfriend’s nipples if he can take their drink order.

Unless her sweater hippos spring a leak, they aren’t going to get any smaller -- and neither will your feeling that they’re ugly, tacky, and embarrassing. Where you went wrong was in being so eager to make it work with her that you ignored your feelings, pretending that you might someday have the hots for what grosses you out. You may like her, and mostly enjoy being with her, but there’s a part of her you just can’t accept -- the part that paid thousands of dollars for a look that screams “Hooters is hiring!”

The right time to end this was the moment you saw the pontoons bursting out of her tiny top and felt the impulse, not to dive in, but to cover them with a tarp. Well, better way too late than even later. You don’t have to reveal what you really think of Dr. Frankenstein’s work. Just tell her you’re a low-key guy, and you’re always going to feel out of sorts with the crowds she draws with her chest. In the long run, she’ll be happier with somebody whose aesthetic ideal runs more to the circus-sized -- as will you, once you find a woman whose idea of beauty isn’t looking like the gas station attendant stuck an air hose down her bra and went to lunch.

This column has been moved here.

This post references the very important work of Dr. William Stayton. Here is some of his testimony in a court case:

Q Good afternoon, Dr. Stayton.

5 A Good afternoon.

6 Q Dr. Stayton, you are a psychologist and sex therapist

7 here in the Philadelphia area; is that right?

8 A That is correct.

9 Q And your current practice includes about 20 clients a

10 week; is that right?

11 A That is correct.

12 Q And your practice is now almost exclusively adult

13 couples; is that correct?

14 A That is correct.

15 Q You have maybe one or two minors, right?

16 A That is correct.

17 Q But mostly adults.

18 A That is correct.

19 Q In preparation for your testimony here today, you have

20 reviewed the affidavits that have been filed by the

21 plaintiffs in the ACLU action; is that right?

...

21 Q Okay. And I asked you, quote, and this is at the bottom

22 of page 58, "What if it were not shown in an educational kind

23 of context?" And you answered me, "Most often it is. Most

24 often -- you know, kids get together and they show their

25 magazines and that stuff, and they show stuff I wouldn't want

1 my kid to see, but they see it. I would much rather it come

2 in the context of my being able to interpret it and talk

3 about it and answer questions about it. I think children

4 often see material I would prefer my kids not to see, but I

5 don't have any control over that."

6 So this is material you would prefer your kids

7 didn't see, isn't it?

8 A There is material I would prefer them not to see. That's

9 not a blanket that I don't want them to see any of the

10 material or the material that you mentioned from like

11 Playboy.