When you think of Steve Martin, you probably don’t think “incel weirdo.” On top of being 79 years old and therefore simply having ample time to have encountered women, he’s been in several high-profile relationships with extremely non-desperate ones, including Bernadette Peters, Mary Tyler Moore, Karen Carpenter and Anne Heche. He’s even been married twice, and not quickie Vegas mistakes.

So you’d think, at some point, he’d have gotten familiar with women’s bodies and the things that they do to them. However, based on a passage of his 2000 novella Shopgirl — yes, the one that became a 2005 Steve Martin movie — we can only conclude that everything Steve Martin thinks he knows about women is wrong.

The passage in question concerns a woman on a quest to lure a rich man away from her co-worker: “To Lisa, Prada is as recognizable as her own mother, and seeing...