Ugh, Valentine's Day already?

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Have you guys already made arrangements for Valentine’s Day?

Yeah, I know… lame.

Now there’s an advocate in our corner for making it socially acceptable to ignore the so-called holiday.

New York life coach and relationship expert Jay Cataldo has decided to wage a war against what he calls a “disgraceful holiday.” This year, he plans to single-handedly put an end to Valentine’s Day once and for all.

Is he just bitter over a painful breakup and sad that he has no one to blow his money on?

“Not at all,” Cataldo says. “I’m picking this fight because Valentine’s Day causes more trouble than it’s worth and I’m sick and tired of it. Cupid is on my hit list and I’m about to take him out.”

This “Love Ninja” turned hit man believes that putting an end to Valentine’s Day will actually help strengthen relationships. Maybe he’s right. Probably about a million guys who break up with their girlfriends the week before Christmas or Valentine’s.

Cataldo says no man should have to deal with the pressures of this “pseudo-holiday.”

“Valentine’s Day is nothing more than a competition between a woman and her girlfriends… There’s nothing romantic about it. I say it’s time for men to stop giving in to unrealistic expectations and put an end to this nonsense for good. The fairytale ends now.”

He said men are tired of spending a month’s pay on dinner and gifts only to receive a foul attitude because it just wasn’t good enough.

“There’s no reason why a man should have to accept his girlfriend’s unspoken demands while receiving nothing in return,” Cataldo said. “This wretched day of massive expectation and zero appreciation needs to be destroyed. I’ll be preaching the evils of Valentine’s Day until Hallmark has me banned from every store.”

I think this dude just hit the nail on the head. Commerce. The occasion generates sales for retailers at a time of year when they’ve start to run out of that extra Christmastime money and we’re all tucked away at home in our sweatpants comfortably watching TV instead of blowing our cash out on the town. Valentine’s Day is all about sell cards and jewelry and fancy dinners — all nice things that men AND women should consider giving their special significant other. But such gestures are essentially meaningless when done at the barrel of an emotion gun. Basically, do this or look like a supreme, uncaring jerk.

If you don’t at least go to the florist and spend $40 on dumb roses that are just going to be dead in a week, you’ve failed to do the bare minimum as a boyfriend or husband. Now chicks are conceited enough to dismiss even that as not enough. “I expect him to do something thoughtful and romantic,” they say in that pampered princess tone. Romantic? Ugh. Double Ugh…

Oh, she’ll still take the roses (or some other outrageously priced item she doesn’t really need), but you better go the extra mile and remember that obscure thing she mentioned 7 months ago that she liked if you want her to be impressed. Women really are the smarter sex, you know. They’ve convinced us to stop treating them like our property yet we still pick up the dinner tab. What are you going to do about it, Mr. Man… NOT have sex? Yeah right. If she buys you something for Valentine’s, it’s just gravy — not mandatory.

I wonder if it would even be possible to pull off a boycott of Valentine’s Day? Probably not. There would be guys breaking the strike line and making the rest of us look insensitive, plus I hate to think of the starving jeweler.

Every year I buy my wife roses on Feb. 15 — just to make a point that my feelings aren’t determined by an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Taylor Swift, aka my future second wife.

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That poor Taylor Swift chick can’t get no respect! Well, unless respect comes in the form of awards and accolades.

Winning comes at a price for the beautiful young country/pop singer. First, Kanye West famously stormed the stage at the Video Music Awards (they still make music videos?) to declare that Beyonce deserved to win an award for her “Single Ladies” video instead of Swift.

And at the Grammy Awards Sunday, after Swift won an award for best album of the year, social media like Twitter lit up with vicious comments declaring that Lady Gaga was “robbed” by virtue of not winning instead. One guy said hearing Swift perform was like “sitting through my high school variety show again.” Ouch…

Listen, none of these performers are hurting real bad, with the possible exception of Swift, who may have seen too much success too early on to escape a bit of resentment targeted directly at her pretty face. She’s a talented kid who writes and performs her own stuff, and I feel like I have to defend her (maybe she’ll appreciate it and take her clothes off for me — a boy can dream). If you asked me, Kanye probably did her a favor by making people feel sympathetic.

How Swift is going to top the success she’s had this year is beyond me. Her songs are catchy, yes, but will we still be talking about Lady Gaga in 2020 in a relevant way? Will she be a Madonna or a Vanilla Ice? How long can Beyonce remain totally gorgeous and awesome beyond words?

If you want to talk about overshadowed talent, how about Pink? The something of a has-been chick with the ballsy attitude and drop-dead gorgeous looks could not be missed despite it being a night cater-made for Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift to shine.

Safe to say this was a night for the female performers. Sure, we saw Elton John, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Dave Matthews, Bon Jovi, Green Day, Usher, Kings of Leon, and Smokey Robinson — yet the only male performer to really make the day-after highlight reel, Michael Jackson, is dead, if that tells you anything.

Women are increasingly wearing the pants in their families, both literally and figuratively, these days.

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A new Pew Foundation report says more women today are marrying men with less education and less income than they themselves have.

The “Rise of Wives” report focuses on the economics of marriage and U.S.-born men and women aged 30-44, “a stage of life when typical adults have completed their education, gone to work and gotten married,” say Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, the report’s authors. “Americans in this age group are the first such cohort in U.S. history to include more women than men with college degrees.”

Wow, could you handle your wife being the breadwinner and flaunting that she’s better educated than you? I honestly don’t know if my ego could take my wife having the upper hand, although in the economy we’re experiencing, more construction workers, carpenters and electricians are spending days at home scanning the unemployment ads in their pajamas while their wives go to their jobs as teachers, nurses and secretaries.

The upper hand? Yes, as much as we talk about there being equality between two working spouses, it’s an unspoken reality that the person who brings home the most bacon enjoys having more of a say in big purchasing decisions — in vetoing those purchases. Can a guy really buy his toys with a clear conscience while his wife is the one earning the dough? And furthermore, is there anything more emasculating than your wife telling you to cut back on spending because she’s tired of carrying the heavy load? Ouch.

I’m not slamming any guy reading this who is marooned at home due to cutbacks at his job. You have my deepest sympathies because I know you’d rather be at work right now. You’re probably aware that if your wife has the corner office and the corporate bonus instead of you, there’s going to be a certain amount of pressure for you to curb your personal spending (i.e., spending on anything she doesn’t get to enjoy) and to do most of the chores at home — things traditionally associated with housewives — otherwise, you’re branded as a lazy jerk for expecting your lady to do TWO jobs while you sit on your lazy a$$ watching TV.

With so many other business models broken by the modern world, could we be seeing the disintegration of the model where young women aspire to “catch” a rich old man? Is that being turned on its head or vice versaed? I increasingly see professional women openly drooling over pretty boys — even feeling as if they deserve a trophy man.

Anyway, back to that report, the bottom line is that in recent decades, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women. In other words, more guys are wanting to get shacked up to enjoy a better lifestyle (whereas in the past, it’s been women who found economic security by getting their boyfriends to propose).

“Men are still the major contributors of household income — with 78 percent making at least as much or more than their wives — but the percentage of women whose income has outpaced their husband’s has more than quadrupled, jumping from just 4 percent in 1970 to 22 percent now,” reads the Washington Post’s writeup.

While I’m sure women are glad to see their influence in the workplace grow, I’m also pretty sure they aren’t dancing with joy because they’re growing more dominant in the work-away-from-home world as a result of men losing our jobs as work goes away or the people making the decisions hiring someone else cheaper to do the same work. In a perfect world, men and women would both succeed rather than women seizing a larger size of the pie, partially at the expense of men. It’s happening because the pie appears to be shrinking for everyone.

If women are ruling the roost, can a change in the way divorces are handled be far behind? Will we soon see a day when wives don’t get half of a man’s stuff, a day when they ask their boyfriends to sign pre-nups to protect their finances?

You know you'll watch.

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A Lindsay Lohan sex tape? Stranger things have happened and considering her recent racy topless fashion shoot and how she was recently spotted at a party promoting a new luxury sex toy, I can see it easily. What does she have to lose? Certainly not her dignity…

The Daily Mail in the UK reports a 47-second video clip of LiLo performing a certain act is “dynamite… It is pretty seedy and shows Lindsay engaged in a particular sex act, which, obviously, should remain behind doors.” The Mail also reports the video was apparently shot by a “waiter in a well-known chain restaurant.”

Interesting, but definitely not surprising. The only surprise is that it took this long for one to allegedly surface.

The clip is being shopped around, which means somebody’s going to try and make money off it before it goes viral and every adult website steals it. Not the most ethical businessmen, those porn guys. They’re going to put it on some offshore website so there’s nothing her lawyers can do to stop it.

Stop it? Why would she do that? Paris Hilton’s infamous sex tape made her a star and she now receives profits from it. Her friend Kim Kardashian was just another Hollywood brat until her sex tape with Ray J was “leaked.” The celebrity sex tape is the new sex-on-the-first-date: These chicks will participate as long as they have plausible deniability.

I know you boys will be looking for it when it hits, pervs that you are, but don’t forget those opportunistic hackers out there who will try to trick you into downloading what you think is Lohan getting busy but is actually a virus to take over your computer. Tread carefully.

Until my eyes have seen the glory, my imagination will just have to do. The video supposedly has her frolicking naked with a mystery male (could they be mistaking Sam Ronson for a dude?). I haven’t been this eager to see Lindsay perform in front of a camera since “Mean Girls” came to DVD (hey, there were some hot girls in that movie so don’t judge me!)

Lohan was once such a promising young actress, but then she started hanging with that rich, reckless Hollywood crowd. I’m shocked this chick is still alive with her hard-partyin’ ways and messed up family life. Maybe after a nuclear war, there will only be cockroaches and Lindsay Lohan left.

Okay, I can think of two pretty good reasons why she topped the list.

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Askmen.com has come out with its latest Top 99 Women of 2010 list. Pretty good list. There wasn’t anybody that I thought, “Ugh, are they serious?” Couple of hotties I’d never heard of but are sure to be on my radar now.

Askmen declared Emmanuelle Chriqui as the No. 1 beauty. Okay. I can buy that, although I don’t think she’s necessarily the hottest chick on the list. Not saying I would send her away if she wanted to buy me a beer, but is she really more stunning than Megan Fox (who didn’t even make the top 10)?

And what’s up with Jessica Alba at No. 5? A couple of years ago, I would have defended her as a solid Top 5 choice, but somehow since she got married and had a baby, she doesn’t really set off fireworks for me anymore. It’s not just that she had a kid — Heidi Klum is a dinosaur in the modeling world and has squeezed out four baby seals but I’d say she still deserves to be ranked higher than 28 on the list.

Alba was all groomed to be a big leading lady but ended up bombing with Dane Cook.  Maybe it was her whining about doing sexy photo shoots that turned me off — a cautionary note to No. 30 Olivia Munn. Or maybe it’s knowing that she’s married and, thus, unattainable. I’ve known lots of models who lied and said they were single just to keep their fans lusting after them.

I think these lists have as much to do with publicists and momentum as how beautiful they are — magazines trying to anticipate who’s going to be on the upswing by the time the next list rolls around. How else can you explain Kristen Stewart being double digits ahead of Angelina Jolie? It’s noteable that Chriqui has two big movies coming out in 2010, costarring with Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham and Alexander Skarsgard. Ahhh. She’s hot, but likely to more well-known.

Others making the top 10 are Marissa Miller (2), Kate Beckinsale (3), Alessandra Ambrosio (4), Beyonce (6), Penelope Cruz (7), Cheryl Cole (8), Eva Mendes (9), and Miranda Kerr (10).

Of course all of the Victoria’s Secret models are on there. These lists become a tedious exercise (as tedious as gazing at gorgeous women can be anyway) like learning which girls you already knew were going to make the varsity cheerleader squad every year. Zero suspense.

But then there is always a new freshman joining the pack who perks your interest. In this case, check out No. 73 Alesha Dixon, No. 59 Coco Rocha, No. 52 Holly Weber, and No. 44 Emily Scott. Yum-diddy-yum-yum. Daddy likes!

Check out the list yourself and decide who your new obsession should be.