Beware of lingerie

Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,

It's our one-month anniversary and I'm taking my girlfriend to Paris for the weekend. I want to give her some nice underwear for the occasion. I don't know where to start.

Tom, Putney

Uncle Dysfunctional: Jesus. She's already wearing your bollocks as earrings. No man in the history of shagging has ever remembered or acknowledged a one-month anniversary. Look, Tom, these are the rules for lingerie: don't. Simple as. Your job is getting it off, not adding to it. That's all you've got to remember. Never, ever, give underwear. You don't know her size. Her friends will lie about her size. She'll lie about her size. Take an old bra into Agent Provocateur and the shop assistant will lie about her size. Just going, "Oh, about a handful", isn't enough. Men and women see completely different things when they look at bras and knickers. No woman who doesn't keep tenners in her garter belt has ever worn red underwear. Men put on their Berlusconi heads when they step through the door of Victoria's Secret. Women grow instantly frigid when presented with a bra and thong set. What they see is a whole night of humiliation and logistical and ergonomic problems. Any man who could choose aesthetic, sensual underwear in the correct size is not the sort of man they'd want to wear it for. Here's what you need to know about erotic presents and Paris: give her a riding crop. Unless she's got a horse. If she's already got a horse it's not an erotic present, it's a cheap gift.

The pantyhose of class

Dear Adrian,

I'm just starting at a Southern uni. No one from my family, school or estate in the North East has ever been to university. I can handle the work. I get on with the other students. I'm not teased or bullied. I'm popular and everyone likes my accent. It's all cool except I really can't handle the dressing up. Why are middle-class, privately educated Southern kids so childishly obsessed with fancy dress? Every Friday night the town and campus looks like a cross between a hens' night and MGM's back lot. The streets are littered with vomiting bunnies and discarded togas. Every event comes with some embarrassing instruction to dress up as your favourite sin or an animal with the first letter of your name. Or there are instructions on what to arrive as, and then find your blind date who'll be dressed as Wilma to your Fred, or Courtney to your Kurt. I've just had another one from my tutor that says, "Dress: smart-casual". What the f*** is "smart-casual"? Come as an oxymoron?

Clive, by email

UD (aka Adrian): Clive, you've stepped into the pantyhose of class, the last codpiece of the English class system. Everything else – the Empire, the deference, the big house, the cosy snobbery and a gardener with only one name – has been taken away from them. All that's left are tarts and vicars parties. And if you want to feel really out of place, turn up as a vicar. All posh English boys want to dress up as women. They can't see a balloon without sticking it up their jumpers. If you want to separate the public schoolboys from the comprehensive ones, just put them in a room with a wig. The reasons for this are many, deep and distressing. Don't go there. On a fundamental level, the class system was always about fancy dress. A hierarchy of funny hats, ribbons, chains, breeches, riding, shooting, Henley and judges. It's been pointed out (by badly dressed Americans) that the English ruling class has clothes instead of character. Their whole lives are spent dressing up to be someone else. When they say clothes maketh the man, they mean it literally. They have kit to be brave in, kit to be clever in, kit to be romantic in and pyjamas with flies that don't work for rudimentary sex. Your best bet is to play to the stereotype. Have a couple of default costumes: a Jarrow marcher; a coal miner; or Rodney Bewes from The Likely Lads. As for smart-casual, no one knows what it means. It's the garment version of "How are you?" or "I'll give you a ring". An empty instruction, a request without emphasis or meaning. It's just there to stop people phoning up all week asking, "How should I dress for your drinks party?" It means, not a dressing gown or the robes for the Order of the Garter. And in your case, I think the Rodney Bewes outfit will be fine.

A threesome with Anna Karenina

Dear Unc Dysfunc,

A girl I've been sort of mucking about with said she couldn't love anyone who didn't love The Bell Jar. Apparently, this Bell Jar isn't anything to do with kitchen equipment. It's a book by some other bitch. So, I said I couldn't love anyone who didn't love Grand Theft Auto V and then we had a row and now she's going with some nonce who wears a scarf indoors. What's all that about? I've mentioned this to some mates and they've noticed the same thing. Not The Bell Jar, but other stuff. One girl said she couldn't love anyone that didn't love Anna Karenina. So, my mate said he'd never touched her but if she was fit and wanted a threesome he was up for it. And then there's this gang of girls down the pedestrian precinct who are always mocking me and my mates, shouting, "You never read no Jane Austen, mong boy!" This has just happened in the last year or so. What's going on? I need a list of books that I can say I've read, that will get me loved. Just give me a heads up. You get me, bruv?

Piers, by email

UD: It's hell out there, Piers. It's a f***ing library. It's this thing that happens to girls. They come over all fictional. It gets really bad in their late teens. They're generally over it by the time they're 30 but I doubt you want to wait that long. There's no point in trying to cheat on books. You'll just get caught out. And if there's one thing worse than being an illiterate philistine, it's being an insecure illiterate philistine. And don't google "philistine", it looks needy. Leave literature to the birds. No threesome ever conceived is worth having to plough through Little Women for. (That's a novel, not dwarf sex.)

What I suggest is that you up the cultural stakes. Get poetry. Then you say, "Oh, you must know Keats' Ode on Melancholy? Come back to mine and I'll read it to your twat." Nothing beats poetry. It's the death star of culture. It's the bollocks. And most of all, it's short and rhymes. And if you don't understand it, that's okay because you're supposed to just feel it, like Deep Heat. And you'd be surprised by how much you already know. Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense. I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter. They've got no literary immune system. Sonnets are like aural Viagra, so don't go quoting to people you don't want to get with. "Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine / His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might . . ." F*** knows what that means but it's the best hook-up line in the world.

The sweetest revenge of all

Dear Uncle,

I've just discovered my fiancé is shagging a girl I've asked to be a bridesmaid. We're supposed to be getting married next month. What surprised me wasn't that he'd hump the sad, stupid, diseased little tart, but that I don't feel heartbroken. I'm not in bits, I'm not devastated, there is no sobbing. I am not writing this from a humiliated pool of desolate rejection. I am cool and focused. I am steely and smiley. But mostly, I am furious. Incandescently, levitatingly, titanically, stratospherically, scorched-earth angry. I am so angry I could sack a city. I am angry enough to become a child's dentist. I could stamp on kittens in stilettos (me, not the kittens). I am so angry I could tweet. But I am also contained. He doesn't know I know. Like a thermos, I am cold on the outside; inside I'm a meltdown of boiling broccoli and stilton. I don't want your pity, or caring strategies for coping. I don't need homilies on forgiveness. I want vengeance. And you are obviously a fickle and twisted man. I'd bet you've taken a loved-one's trust and cynically used it to seduce another. You've looked into a partner's eyes and lied into her teeth. So I need you to tell me what will really hurt. What will inflict the most agonising and lasting damage. I want his entire existence to be bitter gall and wormwood. I need him humiliated and ridiculed. The rest of his life must be a long and bleak plodding repetition of remorse, punctuated with bouts of incapacitating self-pity. For him, happiness must be a stone in the shoe that momentarily takes his mind from what a f***ing monumental c***-struck irredeemable tragedy he's made of his sorry existence.

Fiona, by email

UD: Marry him.

Misunderstanding

Dear Uncle,

Nobody understands me.

Charles, by email

UD: What?

Sexual inequality in pubs

Dear AA,

Why do women complain so much? I mean it's so much better to be a woman than a man. They get everything paid for and they can have sex whenever they want. A woman can walk into a pub and shout "I fancy a f***!" and there'll be a dozen blokes all over her. If I walked into a pub and shouted "I fancy a f***!" I'd get my head kicked in.

Joe, by email

UD (AA):I could put you right on so many things, Joe. I could point out the comparative earning and career opportunities between men and women. I could draw your attention to the incidence of violence toward women and the rape statistics. But you wouldn't listen. And we both know you're right. I would just add, though, that the reason so few women do stand in the doorways of pubs shouting "I fancy a f***!" is because they'd be pulling a dozen blokes like you out of their underwear. I'm pretty sure you don't have to say anything to get your head kicked in.

Extracted from Uncle Dysfunctional: Uncompromising Answers to Life's Most Painful Problems by A.A.Gill, published by Canongate/Allen & Unwin, $24.99