Some Girls Play By Rules The Popular Book That Teaches Women How To Catch A Man Is Reviled By Some

There is a certain kind of woman who is given to long, tousled hair, sheer black panty hose and acting maddeningly elusive to every man, from the security guard at work to the cute guy eyeing her over his double latte at Starbucks.

She never talks to a man first, rarely returns a suitor’s telephone calls and would just as soon stick pins in her eyes as accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.

She is breezy, confident and independent, as well as coy, manipulative and very, very hard to get.

She is a Rules Girl.

Rules Girl? In 1996? Get real.

Go ahead, snicker. Let Jay Leno poke fun, let Oprah’s audience go ballistic, let critics rail that the feminist movement has been set back 50 years by a silly, duplicitous, outmoded code of courtship that implies men will make idiots of themselves over women who are tantalizingly unattainable.

Rules Girls don’t give a hoot. Across the nation and in Britain (where romantic relationships are presumably as muddled as they are here), there is a rapidly growing sisterhood of single women spawned by the controversial, best-selling dating guide, “The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right,” by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider (Warner Books, $5.99).

It was first published in hard cover in 1995, and the paperback edition was released last February. Today, it appears as the No. 1 paperback on the New York Times best-seller list for advice, how-to and miscellaneous books.

Propelled by feverish buzz, many thousands of women have not only bought the slender volume of 35 rules (800,000 paperback books have been printed so far), but they have also deluged the authors with letters for advice, tied up call-in radio lines, flocked to the authors’ $45-a-person seminars and paid $250 an hour for phone consultations with them (“Can I send my limo to pick up my boyfriend?” inquired one clueless Hollywood executive, Schneider recalled. The advice: “No way.”)

What’s more, women have organized Rules Girl support groups that meet everywhere from Sarabeth’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to a condominium in Denver. Members encourage one another to apply the rules to the messy free-for-all that passes for courtship in the 1990s.

Rules Girls not only call one another when they are on the verge of breaking all-important Rule No. 5 (“Don’t call him and rarely return his calls”), but they also go out together instead of spending Saturday night microwaving a Lean Cuisine and brooding over a Prince Charming who says he needs his space.

“We just share our experiences and support each other,” said Anne, 34, a manufacturer’s representative who heads the Denver group, and, like most women interviewed for this article, spoke on condition that her last name not be used because she didn’t want her social life made public.

“It’s not therapy sessions, and there’s no high drama. My feeling, like those of other women, is that I’ve had enough soured relationships that I don’t need to keep repeating the same mistakes.”

Anne recalled how, before latching onto the rules, she spotted a “great-looking guy in a sharp car” and flirted with him as they cruised. They exchanged numbers and went out a couple of times, and she was so smitten that she sent him a rose.

“I learned he had a girlfriend,” she said. “If I hadn’t pursued him, he probably never would have pulled over to talk to me, and I wouldn’t have gotten myself emotionally attached.

“When I read that rule, it really made sense to me.” (Rule No. 2: “Don’t talk to a man first.”)

A 33-year-old Wall Street analyst recounted how, in her prerules days, a longtime boyfriend gave her an espresso maker for her birthday.

“It probably cost $500, but, come on, it was an appliance,” she said. “It turned out he really wasn’t serious about me.

“Had I followed the rules, I wouldn’t have hung in there for another year.” (Especially Rule No. 12: “Stop dating him if he doesn’t buy you a romantic gift for your birthday or Valentine’s Day.”)

The analyst recalled another incident when she accepted a date from an attractive doctor who called her on a Thursday to go out on Saturday.

“I could tell he wasn’t really interested in me, but then why would he have asked me?” she said. “I asked a friend of his, and he said, ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. He just wanted something to do on Saturday night.”’

She recently became engaged and said she practiced the rules on her fiance.

“I wasn’t being devious,” she said. “I was just being a little more independent. Just because I ended a date first or got off the phone quickly didn’t change the essence of who I am.”

Did she think Mr. Right would have proposed if she hadn’t used the rules?

“Who knows?” she said. “But I wasn’t willing to take the risk.”

Rules devotees, many of whom live in Los Angeles, tend to have one thing in common: They have pursued men and been dumped.

L.A. is “the worst place for a woman to be single, because men are so spoiled here,” said Kathy, a divorced movie producer in her early 30s.

They have asked men for their phone numbers, invited them to the NBA playoffs, showered them with Hallmark greeting cards and Cartier cufflinks, slept with them on the first date (a violation of Rule No. 15: “Don’t rush into sex”) and confided their hearts’ desires, only to be devastated when their boyfriends sailed off into the land of the uncommitted.

“In the last generation or so, women have been told it’s OK to be as aggressive as men, to be open, honest and equal in all ways, including courtship,” said Jack Nachbar, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

“It’s symbolized by the yuppie commercial where the woman gets her new credit card and invites the guy out to dinner on her. If that style of courtship works for you, then you think the rules are stupid.

“But, for a lot of women, it hasn’t brought success. So, they figure, why not try something else?”

Even members of the younger generation, the adventurous granddaughters of the women’s movement who grew up thinking of boys as peers and asking them to the prom, said the rules helped impose some order on a chaotic dating scene.

“Things have gotten a little out of hand in the last couple of years,” said Sara Ford, 22, a human resources assistant at a Manhattan publishing company. “Before, I’d always call a guy - I’ve done that since high school - or I’d tell my whole life story on the first date.” (A violation of Rule No. 19: “Don’t open up too fast.”)

“Now I don’t do that,” she added. “So far it’s working really well. It’s fun. It’s like a game, trying to get off the phone first.

“And if some guy doesn’t call back, you don’t mope. It’s more like, ‘Who cares? Someone else will.”’

One of the authors, Schneider, 37, said women were going loopy over a cliched dating guide that their grandmothers could have written because “they’ve tried everything else, nothing has worked, and they want results.” Fast.

“They’re not debating whether it’s setting feminism back or if it’s manipulative or whatever,” said Schneider, who with Fein is writing “Rules II.” (The film rights to the first book have been sold for $250,000.) “They’re beyond all that. They just want results.

“They tell us: ‘I’m dating this terrific guy. I don’t want to screw it up. What should I do?”’

Schneider, who lives in New Jersey, and Fein, 38, who lives on Long Island, boast no credentials other than their marriage certificates. In fact, their advice is pretty basic: Leave Prince Charming alone.

“We tell them, ‘Don’t chase him; don’t be so available; don’t annoy him,”’ she said. “A woman in London phoned her boyfriend at work five times a day even though she lived with him.”

She continued: “One Florida woman was seeing a businessman who traveled a lot. He gave her the keys to his apartment, and she’d go over and clean it and sit on the sofa waiting for him when he came home.

“Forget it. The guy wants to sort his mail, watch a ballgame and go to sleep.”