Getting down the Goethe

Clancy Martin writes about a friend who gives Goethe to the ladies and they, in return, have sex with him. No, seriously, that's what the guy says. Martin writes:

I have a friend who, after a date or two, would give the woman he was trying to seduce a copy of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” “It’s like feckin’ magic, Clancy,” he told me, in his churning Irish brogue (which helped him, I suspect, more than the book). “It’s short enough they kin read it in a night. Da next day they’re straight into the sack, I’m tellin’ ya.” The ploy here is to convince a woman that you believe in a certain kind of love–the desperate, romantic sort–and that even if she’s currently with a man, that man is the everyday, sensible, dull “Albert” sort (like Lotte is condemned to marry in the book), while my friend is the desperate romantic willing to die for love, like Werther.

This proves either one of two things. One: ladies are easily bamboozled. Two: this guy is handsome, and has completely deluded himself into thinking that the ladies are interested in him for his suave smarts as opposed to his looks. I vote option two. What a sap.