The difference between men and women
Newspaper/Mark Belokopylov/flickr
No, it’s not what you think. Damesnet doesn’t normally like to enter the battle of the sexes – some of our best friends and contributing dames are men, and I know we are supposed to be abandoning genders anyway. But as it’s the silly season, I’m going for a blatantly sexist blog, with the pathetic excuse, which I’ve lambasted elsewhere on this site, that ‘it’s only a bit of fun.’
These, then, are my three principal anthropological findings, fruits of indefatigable observation of adult males in their natural habitat across three continents over more decades than I care to remember. (NB: I can neither confirm nor deny that any of the men in my family conform to these outrageous stereotypes.)
1. The newspaper is a sacred object
Have you noticed that there is a force-field round a man’s newspaper? In fact, it’s an anti-magnetic field. You can feel it repelling you as you try to come close. This is because a man’s communion with his newspaper is sacred, and none shall breach that mystic bond.
Not many people know that the wing chair was invented to preserve the sanctity of this relationship. How better to enforce the privacy needed for the rites of absorption and digestion of current affairs and comment than to make the newspaper itself the fourth wall of a little horsehair enclave? Virtual reality headsets – who needs them?
2. Men snort in the shower
Whether it’s in campsites in Europe, beach showers in Australia, or swimming baths in Leeds, snorting rules. Why do men do this? Does it have any therapeutic benefits? As a tradition, is it a feebler Western cousin of the hard-core yogic practice of Sutra Neti, in which a waxed cotton string is inserted through the nose and pulled out through the mouth? As far as I can see, snorting is not explicitly handed down from father to son, yet it persists down the generations. And why don’t women snort in showers? I suspect it’s because we do not scrub our faces vigorously in the shower. No, instead we probably dab at them daintily with cotton wool soaked in a preparation infused with ‘gentle camomile, herbs and linden extract’ that ‘refreshes, stimulates, softens and smoothes the skin’ – well, I know I do.
3. Men want regular meals
. . . preferably sitting down. I don’t understand this one either. It’s not as though they need feeding up to follow woolly mammoths for miles across the barren steppes. What’s wrong with picking a few grapes from a bunch every time you pass until you’re full, if you’ve got other things to do. No matter how tight the timetable or how acute the crisis, everything stops for a meal at the prescribed time. I can’t believe that there is a universal epidemic of hypoglycaemia among men, but that’s how it seems some time.
Sorry – I know this has been unforgivable, so guys, please, please respond with your uncharitable (yet printable) observations of female behaviour, either in our comments or in a guest blog.