Because women have the wrong kind of power

"I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war." Robert Meuller

In my not so humble opinion, the coupling of the sexes has very little to do with reproduction, it has far more to do with power.

This is played out once the initial throes of copulation have been exercised. After all, if it were all about biology both sexes would be happy to move on. However both sexes want to hold on to the other. Both of them would like the freedom to move on and yet strangely both start to set up, obey and try to outwit the other on certain “rules” that are laid out at the start of the relationships. Sometimes the rules have been divined by them, sometimes they’re invisible rules that were created many centuries ago, but are so imbedded in our psyche that we are committed to them beyond an y hope for free will.

The bulk of these are mercilessly played out by women.

Women will use the power that has been allocated to them – that is sexual power and emotional warfare, to maintain power in a relationship. They don’t use power like intelligence, self-respect, confidence or strategy to gain power over themselves – which is a higher option for all human beings.

Instead women will use emotional power to run the household, ruling with an iron fist and making everyone who lives in the same premises as her feel guilty about anything that they want to do that may disobey any of the rules that none of them had a hand in setting up (nor did they officially agree to them).

They will use their sexual power to hook their man and then use it to seduce other men half way (rarely actually authentically following through) throughout their life into getting what they want.

In romance novels power between couples is shared. The decidedly macho guys encourage the use of positive e power in their women and the women don't take advantage of popular stereotypes in order to gain access to short-term power. This for a woman is an ideal, even if in real life she doesn’t even try for it.

Because men think they'd be better at being woman than a woman

“Being a woman is of interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.”  Fran Lebowitz

I read once that drag queens are just men who think they can be women better than women can. I was a little shocked to read it at the time (being a healthy left-wing woman myself) but as I placed distance between myself and the words, they started to make sense to me.

We’ve seen on this blog before, men would really rather do anything than women’s work because they don’t want to be mistaken for women under any circumstances. This is partly what is behind homophobia as well. An unsophisticated straight male wants to kill any other male who is tempted to treat him like he is a woman.

However, underneath all that there is a belief that a woman’s life is not one that he doesn’t understand.

Despite the endless protestations that they can’t understand women, men think that they do have a good handle on who she really is and how her day is. Deep down they do like to think “gee, how hard can that be?”

At least, if they don’t think this, then their actions send the message that they do.

But let’s get away from the straight men and take a look at the gay men.  One of the first political acts of a gay male when he comes out (and often before that) is to take on falsified characteristics of being female. This is also true for certain styles of lesbians. But it is the men who think they can “out female” the women.

Nowhere is this more accurate than in the drag shows. The men dressed up in those shows do not look like women, but they do look like what men think women should look like. And except for certain female gay icons, for the most part, the men are sure they can “be female” better than the women.

In romance novels even when the men love other men, they try to be men. They could be men in dresses but they’re MEN in dresses, not men pretending to be women. Women who love romance novels don’t mind experimenting in the bedroom. It’s lending out their lipstick that leaves them cold!

Because women fall in love with unobtainable men

The theories about why women fall in love are many but none of them explain why a woman is so desperate to have a man that is unobtainable.

It defies logic, and it also defies any of the reasons as to why women like to get themselves into relationships. With the unobtainable man you can’t have a baby, you can’t get married, you can’t be taken care of and you can’t be rescued. He is unable to fulfil any of these functions that are supposed to be the reasons women want men in the first place.

But just as excellent contraception made women want MORE sex, not less, so women will always confuse those who want to narrow their desire for connection to one or two simple causes.  

The unobtainable types of men women will go for are many, but here is my top ten:

1. Married men


2. Gay men


3. Werewolves


4. Rock stars


5. Vampires


6. Characters in novels


7. Film stars


8. Shape shifters (a whole pathology behind that one)


9. Dead men


10. Men on the internet in another country

Ask any woman and she will without question have had a deep intense affair with at least one of the character on this list at some point in her life. And it’s not the same as men getting a crush on Pamela Anderson when they were fourteen. Women have very real love affairs. Thirty percent of the girls between ten and eighteen right at this moment will be having intense affairs with Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner.

Why women do this is not clear. I understand the lust for movie stars (he will never be real so he can’t let you down) and I understand rock stars ( ask any person that cleans up after a  rock concert and find out what those seats the women have been sitting on are like) but married men and gay men I can only explain by saying you get to beat someone else in the conquest and we all know women love to beat each other.

In romance novel every hero without exception is one of the perfect imaginary men. These men fill every criteria on the list, except for two. They are never dead and they are never, ever married. Women just love them and they can’t get enough.

Because men can only fix machines

"If it can't be fixed by duct tape or WD-40, it's a female problem. "  Jason Love

There is a divide between men and women along the lines of accountability for certain sorts of problems that might go in on a household.

Change a light bulb – ask him

Deal with the tantrum of teen angst – ask her

Give the car a grease and oil change – ask him

Get his sister and his parents talking again before Christmas – ask her

Repair the burnt out motor in the fridge – ask him

Find a good school for the kids – ask her

It was assumed that this divide went along the lines of emotion versus practicality. However, we have seen before in this blog that men are every bit as emotional as women, and women are every bit as practical as men.

So what is really going on here?

The bottom line is emotional problems are a hundred times more difficult to fix. They require long-term strategizing, curbing and containing your own emotions, concentrated listening to someone else, team building and leadership skills. If a man was expected to do this as part of running the Dubai branch of Halliburton, he could do it with skill and competency.

However, when he comes home at the end of the day, he just wants a beer and TV.

Ask any woman if she’d rather change a light bulb or manage her teenager’s ainxt ridden sulks and the light bulb wins hands down. It's an easier job with instant results.

These days, of course, it’s getting better.

Men are now at least trying to do some of the above things, and in rare cases, doing a really good job. For the most part its one of those little things they toss their hands in the air about and defer to her ‘Superior natural’ skills in the area.

To counter balance this women are now expected to change the tyres, keep the car up to date and change the light bulbs too.

I guess that’s a kind of progress.

In romance novels the roles are clearly defined because they have been drawn up by women and therefore always fall in her favour. Each and every hero does defer the emotional tasks to her, claim she has superior knowledge, and then listens enthralled as she recounts, word for word the lengthy conversations it took to get there. If she has to be assigned certain roles, the best she can hope for is to have them appreciated.

Because women act like they hate their men when they want their men to come closer

I have said on this blog many times that women send confusing signals and don’t take proper responsibility for what they want and making that clear.

However, there is very little as confusing as this particular topic. Often, when a woman is treating you like shit, it is because she wants you to come closer to her and reassure her.

Now, I’m no rocket scientist. But even I can tell that any person, male or female, that gets a combination of the cold shoulder treatment, monosyllabic responses and passive aggressive door slamming, is going to want to run for the hills as soon as they get a chance.

It is usually when a woman is feeling at her most vulnerable and needs someone the most that she will act like the biggest bitch.

Now, why is that?

Primarily, she wants you (no matter if you are the man in her life of her best girlfriend) to reach out. She thinks you should be able to SENSE it. Just like she does when she does all those little things for you that you barely notice – you just thought she liked to do it and it is a happy accident that you love / needed that too – she wants you to come to the party without her asking you.

And bingo, you realise the woman you take to your bed each night has regressed to the little girl you’d never actually met.

Women will not take responsibility for what they want, when they want this sort of emotional care. No, you should KNOW what they need and damned if they’re going to fill you in on the details. It needs to be spontaneous. To spring magically out of the unique love that you share, even if it took two days of passive aggressive behaviour to get you to wake up.

In romance novels, all the men are as intuitive as the woman in their life, or they go to a much-loved (and very loyal) best friend who will fill them in. The men do not just sit on the couch while all the banging is going on around them thinking if she doesn’t tell me, how do I know what the problem is? No, the hero in a romance novel will literally tilt the earth on its axis if it meant he was able to get to the bottom of why she came home in such a bad mood.

Because men need to reinforce their masculinity all the time as if it were going to dissapere

“The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.” Germaine Greer

We are told all the time that men and women are different.

We are told that this difference is a genetic one, and that while conditioning may have something to do with it, primarily it is a difference in our wiring that makes men men and women women.

Why then, is masculinity so fragile that it needs to be reinforced all the time?

One is barely able to have any sort of conversation without someone in the group piping up that ‘boys will be boys’ and that you have to expect men will behave in a certain way. Men constantly need ‘nights out with the boys’ so they can be men together.

They need fast cars, football, scantily clad women on the covers of magazines and the third page of every newspaper, violent movies, petty daily competitions and the list goes on. All the time, hundreds of small devices must be injected into an average day to help a man feel more like a man.

Of course, you may shout out that men like these things because they are men, and that is what is making them gravitate toward certain types of activities.

However, take a closer look. It’s the way that each of these machismo generated activities make him FEEL. And each makes him feel more like a man. Or rather, they remind him what it feels like to be a man.

Masculinity needs constant reassurance, as if it were going to fade with the next strong wind. Huge amounts of effort expended keeping men men.  Otherwise, there is a fair chance they will just turn into ordinary human beings like the rest of us.

In romance novels the men are fictional and therefore miraculously one hundred percent men all the time. However, when a woman writes the perfect man, she writes his flaws into his character. No man is an island in romance and erotic romance, and each needs his woman to rescue him from himself. Women love these novels because machismo is nowhere to be seen and the men are vulnerable and open to love and relationship, just as they are being one hundred percent man.

Because women think going shopping is being creative

Going shopping is not the same as  being creative.

Just because you can match a shade of green with a certain shade of turquoise, or because you know how to fit a belt, does not mean that you are creative.

Creativity is the essence of the elevation of human endeavour. It surpasses the ability to complete research, it surpasses the meticulous detached performance of the historian and it surpasses the inquisitive rigor of the scientist. It is in itself the development of human contemplation. It is extending the human mind literally into places it has not gone before. It is evolution in progress.

Creativity has thought everything before it has been researched or proven.

It is not finding the right shoes to go with the correct skirt.

While we’re at it, neither is it, matching tablecloths with napkins, finding the perfect dog collar or baking the perfect muffin.

Women dance around the outskirts of their creative selves (and each of us has a measure of creative self- out of which our own personal vision for yourself comes) and use the smallest amount of the abundance to choose the perfect handbag. Although one taps into the resource, to actually call it creative is the same as calling buying your third television on sale, frugal.

Shopping and accessorising are not creative.

In romance novels when a woman matches the perfect green scarf with the ideal bustier her wild Vampire turned good man exclaims with delight that she is so creative, despite the fact that he just formed a divine piece of music out of nothing, dedicated it to her and performed it with unmatched elegance.

Because men are looking for their mother

“It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.” Helen Rowland

Freud taught us this one. We now know all about the man and his quest to turn his wife back into his mother.

Men want a mother in a wife. This is why they have so much trouble making love to the women they marry. They turn a wife into their mother as fast as they possibly can.

Often it’s the mother-meshed-men who won’t settle down. They refuse to give up sex addictions or playing the field primarily because they’ve accepted no one will ever come close to the perfection of their mother and all the other women of the world are just for games.

However, if you have a mother enmeshed man as a husband, he will try to make you his mother.

Men will often marry a woman who they’ve decided is like their mother. But even if she’s not, as soon as the new woman is on the scene in a permanent way, she is expected to look after him physically.

But that’s not all a mother does is it?

She also has to nurture you. She has to make your problems more important than her own. She has to pretend she has the deepest interest in whatever crises you are having and that whatever is on her mind is of no importance at all. She has to embrace your projects and support you in them, after she is launching you into the world. It’s a good reflection on her if you do well, so it is her job to ensure you have all you need to succeed.

This is what men expect of their wives. However, sometimes they want to mould you – just as they did to their own mother. Sometimes they want to play Henry Higgins to your Eliza Doolittle. However, one thing is for certain, they have a great deal of trouble seeing you as something separate than that holiest of holy women – the creature that gave birth to him.

After all, she did a remarkably good job of that didn’t she? She deserves to see him be a huge success.

In romance novels, men never see the heroine as his mother. If she is the kind of woman who wants to support t him and provide those womanly nurturing type supports he will accept it with gratitude, never taking it for granted. However, for the most part, the heroines in romance and erotic romance aren’t that kind of gal.

Because women both love and hate everyone in their world

One of the things that makes it very difficult for men in their interactions with the women that they love, is that women change their mind all the time about how they feel about the people in their life.

This would not be such a bad thing, if she was willing to let her guy off the hook if he couldn’t keep up. But this is rarely the case. He is expected to interpret from her heavily detailed account of the flow of events during the day, what her position is on the behaviours of a person that, (just because they’ve been friends for twenty years) is not protected from her judging eyes.

The trick is which side of the coin to go with when trying to converse.

Women know clever little tricks when they talk to each other to gauge where their girlfriend is as she’s telling you a story about another person. No woman would ever assume she knew – she’d make comments like:

“Wow – how did that make you feel?”

Or

“Gee, I don’t know how I would feel after hearing that.”

This way she can tap into what her friend wants to hear and offer her the validation she is really after at this time.

However, a man who does not know these tricks can’t hope to get it right. He’s left wondering why she’s telling him the story if she got so upset when he asked

 “But she was your new best friend just yesterday. How could you have not seen this aspect of her personality when you talked to her then?”

Or

 “Huh? You hated her last week. What were you even doping out with her today?”

A woman’s opinion will change all the time, but don’t expect her to take that into consideration when she is relating the particular mood of the day. She will tell her tale with as much emphasis when she is friendly as when she is venomous and simply expects you to be able to keep up.

This problem is multiplied many times over when she’s dealing with her mother.

In romance novels the men rarely misunderstand, and if they do, it is to prep the reader for an impending breakup, or some sort of discovery that will have our heroine find that he was an evil man intent on hurting her all along. This will serve to clean her slate and prepare her for the real hero who will never, under any circumstances, misinterpret her position on any given day.

Because men need to take up as much physical space as possible

Ok! So one of the things that women do not understand, is the need men have to spread their legs as wide as possible and take up as much physical space as they can get away with.

I know the answer. It’s all about your penis. I also know that men like to give the impression, at every opportunity on life’s journey, that their penis is so enormous they have trouble walking straight.

However, one of the things I don’t think men do realise is that women get to take a swift glance when your legs are spread that wide and the first thing we notice is – that bulge does not need that much room. This recognition is fast followed by an observation that asks, so why are you spreading your legs so wide apart?

It doesn’t look that good for the guy.

Of course, it isn’t all about the legs spread wide either. Men will spread what physical bulk they have as wide as their skin will stretch. Is this an attempt to get me to notice him,  she thinks as she piles the third shopping bag precariously on top of the others so that he can have more room to spread his legs and stretch his arms across the back of the train seat.

Men like to think the world can’t quite contain them. It is in their psyche to see themselves as special and a stand out in any crowd. It is a natural next step from this perspective, to want to spread yourself around. Legs wide, arms extended, deep loud breaths followed by overenthusiastic exhalations are all ways that men make sure they get noticed and are recognised as a valuable contributor to the space they currently inhabit.

In romance novels, men are the same. It seems there is no place where a man’s right to spread himself wide and take up as much airspace as possible is questioned. One thing they don’t do, however, is spread the legs so wide any woman can, at a glance realise, they don’t need to spread their legs that wide.

Because women like girlie trinkets

I can hold this one off for a while, but it will grab me eventually. I will have lived the almost normal life of a sophisticated, mature woman, and then (usually around Christmas) my need for glitter will overwhelm me, and I will have to buy a Christmas tree bauble.

What is it about women and silly little girly bling? Does that little girl deep inside who wanted to be a fairly princess have that much control over our lives still?

You will see it everywhere.

The most mature woman will cave at some point and stare longingly at the gaudy sequined dress. The chic yummy mummy will experience a slight touch of envy as she liberally sprinkle’s diamantes all over her daughter’s fairy costume. The successful business woman will pick up the Hallmark card with the bad poetry, and the crown covered in rough scratchy sparkle and sigh as she puts it away in favour of the blank card with the Jack Vetriano print.

Usually this appalling addiction gets fed and nurtured around Christmas time. This is when “permission” of a kind is given to women to indulge these inner princesses, and sprinkle everything liberally with thirteen kinds of glitter and peacock feathers. Bling will hang off Christmas tags, Christmas trees, cakes, ham, turkey, tables, family members, the outside of homes, and every space in between as they deck their halls.

However, this obsession with things little girly and silly isn’t just confined to Christmas time. Grown women will hang pink fluffy things off their mobile phones, the end of their pens and their shoes, and still expect you to take them seriously. In fact these days, it seems to be getting worse than that. The desire to indulge these consumerist fantasies extends to insisting the ache for bling be legitimized as “female” and therefore “misunderstood and worthy.”

In romance novels, as far as I can find, bling is absent. Because romance and erotic romance are for the most part written by women for women, I can only assume in a perfect world a woman loses her desire for bling. She is able to grow up and be fully herself, confidently using her smile, her warmth and her inner charm to bring her all the sparkle she will ever need.

Because men can't understand a woman's basic needs

Men often complain that they don’t understand women. In fact, aside from complaints about sex, this is one of the biggest irritations about women that men will come up with.

But, is it really true that men don’t understand women?

I mean, how hard can it really be?

Men are able to understand machines. They can invent them, pull them apart and (hopefully) put them back together again.

Men can understand mathematical equations. They can understand light speed, voodoo economics, philosophical applications and the theory of relativity.

They can turn a dollar into one hundred dollars on the stock exchange, calculate compound interest, discover psychotherapy, practise as a psychologist and discover neural pathways in the human brain.

Apparently, the following needs of a woman, however, are completely beyond him:

1. Her need to be held


2. Her need to be noticed


3. Her need for respect


4. Her need for something productive and valuable to do


5. Her need to extend herself intellectually


6. Her need to talk with her friends


7. Her need to care for the children (which includes her need to have a break from the children)


8. Her need to care for her parents


9. Her need to bitch about her mother which you are not allowed to do


10. Her need for sex that includes her pleasure

In romance novels, all a woman’s basic, human needs are met. Not only are they deeply and properly met, but they are met by their gorgeous buffed lover, who understands her needs because he taps into his own needs, recognises hers and gives her what he would want for himself.  This is another reason women love erotic romance novels.

Because women think anorexia is beautiful

No matter what they tell you, no matter how deeply they protest, no matter how firmly convicted they sound, women deep down, secretly admire extremely skinny women.

It’s a sickness we have, a disease.

You won’t find a woman defending this admiration, or telling people about it openly, but catch her when she thinks no one is looking and she’ll be checking herself in the mirror, looking to see if those rolls are visible to anyone other than her.

Fat is still a woman’s secret shame, and this leads to an admiration for extremely skinny women.

But why is this?

It’s not for the men. They like their women to be fleshy. Not necessarily fat, but they like to hold on to her tight and not have to touch her rib cage.  No, this female obsession is all about the other women.

Skinny is a sign of superiority between women. It inspires envy because it implies control. Somehow the skinny woman has mastered her eating habits and she is able to control herself in an area where all women want total control. Because eating is such an emotional thing, it also implies she is “together” if she is thin. She has mastered the great enemy of all women – herself.

Never underestimate a woman’s need to control herself and after that to inspire envy in other women. Women will go to enormous lengths to get thinner, making themselves sick in the process. But even sickness is not as worrying to a woman as being fat. That is, of course, until she gets very sick.

In romance novels one of the most exciting things of all is that the heroines don’t worry or end up not worrying about their weight. For a woman, the idea of utopia is that you can eat what you want when you want and your lover desires you with intense passion anyway and your girlfriends are all they same weight as you. Until that glorious day actually arrives (and does not just exist in romance novels) women will continue to long to be skinny.

Because strange things threaten masculinity

My son (age eight) came home from school one day filled with news about the forthcoming school dance. He had talked to some girls and organised his partners ahead of time to avoid some discomfort when it came to walking across the room and asking a girl outright.  I thought this was a clever way of dealing with a potentially socially awkward situation, so I asked if his friends were doing the same thing.

His answer? “Oh, they think dancing with a girl is gay.”

This is one of the early signs of the heterosexual males confusion about what “gay” is and what makes you look “gay”.

For me, there is nothing as “gay” as getting together with your mates and watching porn. A bunch of men choosing to deliberately get aroused in each other’s company is definitely homoerotic.

Or what about going out together, drinking and then going to watch women (untouchable on a stage) take their clothes off while you hang with your mates? Definitely suspect.

Of course none of this comes close to the almost total "gay-ness" of  men sharing a woman sexually.

As far as I’m concerned any “straight” man engaging in any of the above may as well be wearing a dress.

But men don’t see these behaviours as connecting them sexually with other men. They think the opposite. That going out with your mates and encouraging each other’s erection is an affirmation of heterosexuality and masculinity! Go figure!

So what actions DO men want to avoid in case someone thinks they might be homosexual?

Consider the following...

1. Riding in a sports car with another man with the top down


2. Taking the kids out in public


3. Buying tampons or pads


4. Standing in underwear shops (male or female)


5. Holding their partners handbag while she pauses to use two hands.


6. Meeting gay men


7. Growing a handlebar moustache


8. Riding a bike normally without doing stunts, speeding or standing up


9. Posing for photographs


10. Wearing pink shirts

In romance novels men don’t think sitting with a woman and her friends in a cafe is “gay”. In romance novels the sexy masculine heroes don’t even think having sex with another man pigeonholes them as “gay”. Sexual stereotypes are debunked left right and centre and different ways of exploring sexuality are celebrated. And that’s another reason why intelligent women love them so much.

Because women make small gestures mean too much

Picture this scenario

A couple have been dating for a few months. It’s Christmas, and she is over at his house, and they are wrapping presents together. Wrapping presents together means two things. To her it means he wants her around and likes to share the little things with her. To him it means he’s gotten out of having to wrap the presents, and he’ll get laid. (No wonder that smile is so wide)

However, after the first present – the one to his grandparents – she dramatically and suggestively hands him the gift tag and asks him to write on it. After all they are his grandparents.

Of course, thinking about getting laid, he scrawls across the card:

“Dear Nan and Pop – Happy Christmas – Joe”

Grinning he hands back the card so she can attach the prepared sticky tape that is now suspended in air, dangling off the end of her finger as she stands frozen staring white faced at the card he just wrote out.

He knows something is wrong, but he can’t work out what. Did he just say something about her tits out loud? He wasn’t really thinking, because the TV had last night’s game scores. What did he do? What did he say?

She is feeling sick to her stomach. He left her name off the card.

To a woman whose been dating a man for a couple of months that is the equivalent of saying:

“I only want to have sex with you; I am secretly hoping my grandparents never find out about you / meet you.”

The same rule applies if you’ve been dating for a few months and the man has to leave his apartment and doesn’t want to move straight in with his new girlfriend, or if he doesn’t invite her to any family event.

The latter is true even if you just met in a nightclub. Even if you haven’t kissed her yet, if you’ve thought about it and she can tell, you’d better introduce her to your brother / sister / best friend when they walk up to grab the keys to the car off you.

IN romance novels every single gesture hold intense significance. Men are focussed, concentrating constantly on how to best please their mate. There are no accidents (toward the end of the novel when the happily ever after is within reach) and everyone speaks “romance drama”.

Because men always get more food

"Feed the man meat" - Australian ad campaign

There is a peculiar tradition in our society that states men need to get more food than women and children.

This starts when they’re young. Boys get more food than girls, teen boys get fed more than teen girls and it moves on into adulthood when the men and the male boys still get the larger portions of food.

This is primarily a status thing. Even though men have 5/10% more muscle mass than women this only generates an average of a need for 5% more food in a day – an amount that would barely be recognisable, and especially not represented by a 40% increase in the size of the meal offered the masculine family members.

Also, when a woman is pregnant, breast-feeding or menstruating, she needs more food than men, and almost at any point in her life she will need more iron and calcium. Male and female nutritional needs may be different at different times, but only at the point of balance, not necessarily content, unless there is a very dramatic size difference.

And yet, we do it.

Food is not now, nor has it ever been simply a means of nutritional nourishment in our society. For all consumers it has much more to do with emotional issues than it does the actual needs of our bodies. One thing Doctors do agree on is that all of us in the Western world eat too much and too much of the wrong thing.

One of those emotional myths about food is that the boys in the house need to be fed faster, first and more.

In romance novels, the full-figured woman who eats a healthy big meal is admired and adored for her appetite and her round fleshy curves. No emphasis is placed on what the men eat, only on what the women eat, and in that case there is never anything other than love, understanding and quantity.

Because women think the big issues have nothing to do with them

Women like to think that the most important things in life are children and a happy home. Ok – at a stretch we’ll add in looking chic, intuitive accurate accessorising and taking care of yourself in retirement. Outside of these essential components of life’s journey, they’re all theory and no practise.

However, don’t think a woman can’t campaign.

If the school needs $4000 worth of library books, she can organise a lamington drive that will knock your socks off. If the local church needs a roster for the meals on wheels programme, she can come up with a schedule that could stream line News Corp. If local fete needs volunteers for managing the jumping castle, she’ll get you free helpers so competent your day will gain a reputation for enhancing child development.

But...

Ask her to contribute to the latest campaign in your area to help raise funds and awareness for ending world hunger, or contribute helpers to collate research for a paper to present to the government about green house emissions, or consider getting informed enough to challenge a CEO at the next shareholders meeting about his huge bonus while shareholders lost 5%, and you get an instant deaf mute stare back at you, incapable of comprehending anything you say.

Just as a female who cooks is called a wife and a man who cooks is called a chef, so women will involve themselves in projects that involve little risk of self exposure. They refuse to tackle the large issues, choosing instead to try to talk the world into the idea that the school lamington drive is as important and valuable as ridding the world of greenhouse gasses.

In romance novels the woman is always recognised in the place that she sits rather than having to actually extend herself to be noticed. She is allowed to stick to lamington drives while her Greek God of a husband who travelled through time to find her fight off the demons that threaten the entire race, she is perfectly entitled at the end of the day to say “Yes, but you should meet our mothers group. You’ll be DYING to spend more time with your demons then.”

Because men will avoid difficulties and hope that they just go away.

Never underestimate the lengths a man will go to in order to avoid anything that he has been unprepared for in life.

That means anything involving:

 talking about how he feels about something; explaining his behavioural changes toward you; organising or buying new clothes; visiting a doctor for a routine check up or anything that is less severe than at least a few litres blood loss; haircuts; housework beyond the basics that a person outside the home may notice; how he feels about children or what his plans for the future are.

In fact, anything where a man has to take responsibility for himself you will find him reluctant to follow-up on. Never expect him to say something out loud - other than football details, car details or work details – because declarative sentences are feared almost as much as taking responsibility for themselves.

This is what lies behind the whole “I just want to sleep with her” thing. Have sex with a stranger is a way to avoid intimacy. And it is a particularly useful way, if you are already in a relationship with another woman. You get to destroy to avenues to intimacy with one stroke – so to speak.

All this would be acceptable if it was what men wanted, but it isn’t. They want to be in relationships, they want to settle down with “the woman of their dreams” (remember they invented marriage) but have no idea how to take responsibility for that desire and make it happen in their lives.

Of course, these generalisations do not apply to all men, however I will bet any man, if he is close to a female and asked her if she ever got the impression he tries to avoid being responsible for himself, I bet she can come up with a couple of examples to replace those listed above.

In romance novels the men are decisive and they get what they want. Every hero wants to make his vision come true. Every hero wants to be in a relationship with the heroine and every hero will stop at nothing to make that come true. It’s very hard not to admire someone with that much backbone!

Because women can't tolerate male imperfection

"Women get the last word in every arguement. Anything a man says after that is a new arguement." Anonymous

This is a bit of a doosey isn’t it?

 Where men will barely notice their women (perfections or imperfections) men’s errors, lapses in judgement and imperfections seem to rate under the Richter scale for irritation. Women will analyse and magnify any imperfection their man or a man close to them has performed and have no conscience at all about giving him what for over it.
Let’s take a look at the list of errors men make that are hated by women. These are not in any particular order:
1. Putting their clothes etc in the wrong place when the house is clean
2. Not ‘appreciating’ dinner
3. Thinking your day was worse than hers
4. Reminding her of her father
5. Reminding her of your father
6. Not noticing she had her hair done
7. Getting upset when you found out how much it cost to get her hair done
8. Thinking her best friend is horrible when the best friend is in the good books.
9. Thinking her best friend is lovely when the best friend is in the bad books.
10. Sitting down and relaxing when she is still busy with things that don’t need to be done.
Some of these aren’t even character flaws.
Part of the problem of course, is that both men and women have built men up. They’re supposed to be “hunters” , most excited when they’re out there making lots of money or gathering up heard of wilder beast for dinner so they can bring it all home panting in sweaty thrill of having provided. Because no man is ever this creature, could ever be this creature or has ever been this creature, the stay home wife who is doing her best to “act naturally” and care for the cave, is pissed off to high heaven when you cut work early, had a drink with the boys in front of the football at a topless bar.
It is every single time a man falls short of the illusive ideal, that the woman gets endlessly, relentlessly shitty. And when the ideal is unobtainable, it happens pretty often.
In romance novels, the women have designed the men according to spec. These men are the ‘real’ men. The men women keep being told over and over existed all those years ago, the men that are supposedly at the genetic throbbing heart of every walking talking male today. Not those poor lost souls struggling to keep up with an ideal they can never hope to attain.

Because men refuse to learn how to do women's work

Caption Reads:

"There are only a few sheets left...

I'd better change it now."

(Pic and caption taken from 'Porn For Women' website)

“My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance”

Anonymous

We live in a different world these days.

Women are driving cars, voting and as Henry Higgins would say, ask for advice, listen most polite and then go out and do precisely what she wants!

Things have changed for the men too. They’re expected to do things they’d never considered doing in the past. They have to get up from delicious slumber to hold crying babes, come home to cold dark houses without dinner smells if the wife’s still at work, wash the dishes in the sink (as opposed to spraying them with a high-powered hose outside) and occasionally vacuum.

Of course men fought having to do this. They held the tidal waters at bay for many centuries but when that dam burst it buried the small kingdom it had previously nurtured and men were forced to accept they will have to do some of the work they’d previously assigned to people with vaginas.

Now for men, doing some of these jobs is tantamount to actually having a vagina and this is a real mans worst fear. If he is seen washing his own clothes, hanging sheets on the line or – heaven forbid – cleaning the toilet, he is quite sure he will be mistaken for a woman. It’s a fine line a man walks here. He does not want to incur the wrath of his lady fair (and unfortunately she does have a newly found logical point about not having to do all the housework while she’s been at work too) so men have become very crafty at working the situation to their advantage.

If there is anything they don’t want to do they simply do such a crap job, that blind Freddy can see the task would have been better had it not been attempted at all, and the frustrated female simply pushes him out of the way with a curt “oh let me do it.”

He looks at her like a puppy, laments that he is useless, makes a comment on her remarkable skill at getting that baked on grease off that pan, grabs his beer, flops in front of the television and imagines himself at the top of the food chain, once again.

In romance novels women never have to deal with the cunning petty manipulations of men. Buffed men with round brown muscles bulging, don frilly aprons and not much else, demanding that she get off her feet at once so he can cook her a nice healthy meal that is 100% on her diet plan.

(Porn For women is a Book produced by the Cambridge Women's pornography Cooperative and is available here.)