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Divining Men - Part I Posting Date: Aug 19 2007 10:31PM If you’re a heterosexual woman over the age of twenty-five and you do not have men completely figured out by now, well, you’re not trying very hard, are you? Determining what pushes men’s buttons is easier than figuring out the motivations of a goldfish, and that’s a creature capable of eating itself to death if you let it.
Here, then, as a public service, are three things a woman needs to understand about the men in her life. There are more than three things that are important to men, but I can’t fit the other two into this week’s column.
Gear: If you want men to care about something, gear it up. You can make us give a crap about gardening, cooking and shopping if there’s enough gear involved. There’s a big difference, however, between “gear” and the things most often confused for gear: appliances, tools and anything that can be used safely by or for children. Don’t try to tell us that a microwave is gear. It isn’t. However, a bread maker may be, but only if it’s made of stainless steel and makes pretzel dough.
Here’s a quick guide to figuring what qualifies as gear. If your garden rake has a wood handle and rusty tines, it’s just a thing in our garage. If the handle is graphite and the claw is titanium, it’s gear. If the baby stroller is a hand-me-down from your aunt Helen, it’s unmanly. If the stroller is made by German engineers, folds into a backpack with the press of a button, and has wheels that look like they came off a Hummer, it’s gear.
Mostly though, if something costs more than it absolutely needs to, looks cool in its natural environment, incorporates significant technology and it makes our friends green with envy, it’s gear.
Television: Men have a bond with television that no woman will ever understand. Men grow up being told explicitly and implicitly that we can control the universe. We live in a society we are supposed to rule on account of its now-lambently patriarchal culture. We are groomed to rise to power, make history, win medals, to live the life of the rich and powerful. Instead, we usually find ourselves growing up to be definitively average, in control of pretty much nothing. Only when the television remote is in our hands and the channels are dancing rapidly across our screen can we seize a measure of the control to which we all subconsciously aspire. It’s a control thing. There is an entire universe of television options these days and he who has the remote is Caesar. Standing between a man and his dominance of the television is the deepest cut – it robs a man of his one, temporary shot at omnipotence. If you lose your omnipotence, you lose a lot.
Conversation: Ladies, when men are together, we talk about stuff and old stories. This is completely different from what women talk about which is apparently themselves and their families and their friends and their enemies and their favourite actors and clothes and jobs and relationships. Men don’t talk about these things. Men can spend an entire weekend together on a golf trip and not talk about anything. How? We talk about that golf shot we just hit and how it resembles a shot we hit seven years ago. We talk about where we should eat. We talk about the route we will take to get there. We talk about the way our car handles while we do it. We know none of this qualifies as conversation to women because when we return home we can’t answer your questions like, “How’s his mother?” “Did his daughter ever take those clarinet lessons?” “Is he planning anything big for his wife’s fortieth birthday?”
You know what? We don’t know. No clue. We didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell and most importantly, we don’t really care. That’s why men want our wives to be friends with our friends’ wives … that’s the only way we find stuff out.
Next Time: Next week we will discuss everything else that is important to men. Then we’ll get some chicken wings and watch porn. |
