Everything you wanted to know about men (but were afraid to ask)

Brigid has published a concise user's guide to the male sex, for the benefit of her sisters (although it'll doubtless have the side-effect of teaching some of us men a few things about ourselves we hadn't thought about either!). It's very funny. A few examples:

Impulse buying: Marketing everywhere will quickly tell you that the male of the species has always had a compulsive desire to drive four wheel drive vehicles on suburb streets in Florida while opening a bottle of wine with something that resembles an off shore oil driller.

Doing the routine shopping: ... when you just surprise your mate with "honey would you go to the store and get eggs and milk" and he's sent into battle with no time for preparation, bombarded by countless displays that make no ergonomic sense and people shoving food and products at him "want to try the new Kiwi/Persimmon Pop Tart, now with antioxidants" he just wants to escape and as quickly as possible. Which is why he comes home with a case of beer, a bottle of olives and a birch tree.

Relationships: If you wake up in the same bed and say hello, women usually think they have a relationship. Men usually own up to it sometime after your second child is in school.

Fixing things: Men love to take anything apart and will do so gladly, whether it's a range top oven, a computer or a chainsaw. Men are genius at taking the things apart that I could only tackle with a sledgehammer. Unfortunately, sometimes, for a few of them, there is a problem putting things BACK together.

Wrapping presents: Give a women a 15 inch scrap of decorative paper and she can wrap a Sikorsky. A man will carefully lay out the present, cut a swath of paper the size of Nebraska, and when he's done, there will be a gap in the back where you can see what the gift is. I realized in my anthropology courses that the Pharaohs had to be wrapped after death by women, otherwise the back of the mummy would be held together by a big piece of Scotch Tape.

There's much more where that came from. Go read!

(Thanks for the laughs, Brigid - but now I have to hide that article from She Who Must Be Obeyed . . . )

Oh, yes - there's another key to keeping men happy, this one reported by LA Weekly.

Forget massages, soothing music or aromatherapy. If you want to calm down a stressed-out man, just show him a few photos of meat. Preferably just-cooked hunks of beef filet, lamb chop and T-bone steaks, still sizzling and etched with blackened grill marks. Okay, perhaps not those exact cuts of meat, but researchers at McGill University in Canada did find that images of meat actually calmed men down and made them less aggressive.

. . .

The researchers expected ... that images of meat would increase aggressive behavior in males, similar to how dogs act out when meat is taken from them. Instead, the researchers say that the sight of meat calms men down because it reminds them of friends and family at mealtime. If you think about it, the idea makes sense; "hunting" to get the meat is stressful enough, both in prehistoric and present times. Anyone who's hit up Whole Foods during the after-work rush knows this to be true.

Wisdom indeed! There's more at the link.

(Damn, now I want a steak! Rare! With all the trimmings! And a beer!)



Peter