Can you tell that I've been to the bookstore?
There's a book out there called "Body Language," and it wants to make very, very sure that you are never the victim of a dominant handshake.
Apparently, this threat to all that is right and holy occurs when the person with whom you are shaking hands turns your palm, so that his is on top. (And that pronoun is not an accident. It's pretty much always 'his' in this case.)
An 'equal,' by contrast, is when the hands are parallel--which is the way 99.9% of the people I have ever met on this planet have done it. And I certainly have met men who were ego-driven. I suppose they didn't see any point to showing little old me who was boss. I was not, after all, trying to negotiate a business deal with them...which appears to be the arena in which dominant handshakes occur. That and politics.
To me this was a fascinating little bit of anthropology. If you'd asked me, before I read this book, what a dominant handshake was, I wouldn't have thought about palm position. I would have thought about grip strength. As far as I can remember, I've never been topped, but I've certainly been crushed.
Perhaps in those instances I failed to show enough neck. "Body Language" informs us that women show their necks and smile a lot to show submission to men. "Hi! Not a threat. No need to start hitting. Thank you." Of course there are those who take that signal as an opportunity--'good, she won't be any trouble'--so perhaps I showed too much neck.
Or perhaps I had the wrong kind of perfume.
I antidoted "Body Language" with a glance at "The Bombshell Manual of Style." As in the 'va-va-voom' type of lady. I hung around long enough to discover that she never wears green perfume.
Green, in case you were wondering, is a scent category for perfume. You've got your floral, oriental, woody, and fresh, of which green is a subcategory.
It made sense to me. You can see why fresh scents would be anti-bombshell; they range from bracing (citrus) to elusive (water), two things that bombshells are not. That type of girl wouldn't get along well with scents which evoke hiking or rain. The one is too vigorous, the other too eternal and spiritual.
I have a perfume sitting on my desk that smells like the cold. In a good way.
I should wear it more. But these things are hard for me.
