Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale mesmerized its readers with
vivid descriptions of what a black woman wants in her man, and how hard it is
to find it. Women loved it; men were not so thrilled. A friend of mine
suggested that the male version of Waiting to Exhale would be much shorter:
"What I'm looking for in a woman is someone who's great in bed, and then
turns into a six-pack and a pizza." That is, of course, exactly the
problem: The women in Waiting to Exhale are tired of being treated as
disposable commodities by men who will tell them anything before sex and have
nothing to say afterward.