Taking the male out of female

So, yes I have been the Masochistic Bush to Germaine’s Bin Laden. I have made false prophecy, incited misunderstanding at best and derided a political campaign spanning decades of oppression. I have become a tabloid reader, the scourge of an independent thinking society and I have to find out why. The topic is women and more fundamentally their value in society.

I know women have less rights, I know women have unequal pay scales, YES! I know women are misrepresented politically and socially but what I don’t understand is why I can’t comprehend the issues. Why am I reluctant to say ‘Yes, that’s shit!’ Why, when posed with a hypothetical situation of masculine power play in the face of feminine submission do I ultimately defend masculinity?

My answer (and this might mark my place on top of many lone male assassins lists) is that just like British culture, males are just a little bit shit. How many males have had a party, desperately wishing for a bevy of buxom beauties to turn up (doesn’t this sentence alone say volumes) alone to faced with a blockade of balls, a multitude of man meat or a copious crowd of cock. Females at this age have ultimate power, they are the true embodiment of Mother Nature, beautiful and powerful yet unforgiving, and boys will do anything to behold them even for the briefest moment of time. I think we are forced to resent, or fear female clout from day one.

Eventually age ravishes us all, liver spots dance on our faces like fairies at a rave and grey hairs multiply like rabbits at a party at the Playboy mansion. Men eventually seek and gain power (from other men) and eventually, like Julius Ceaser we ‘Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war’, avenging our prepubescent rejection from the womanly world and asserting our place as the prince of prick.

So what do men have to offer? Our main attributes derive from the Neanderthal values of the past. Men are competitive, dominant and unforgiving, qualities that are cohesive with modern capitalism. Women are understanding, communicative and foster understanding, qualities that business disparage and professions such as teaching, nursing and human resources exalt. I ask you, what professions actually aid the modern world and what professions leech its soul?

So why do I ask this question? Why do I instinctively jump to the male defensive standpoint? Why do I feel like a serial killer in court with an escaped harrowed victim giving testimony? It’s because half the population are right, we rule with an iron fist only allowing women who imitate men to taste power or the amount of power the old boy network will allow them to briefly savour. We allow the male imitating women into the fold, tick the boxes, congratulate ourselves at being inclusive then stare at their breasts when they’re not looking.

But fear not! The female future is bright. Men cannot put shelves up, we cannot check the oil in the car, hell we don’t even know what a clitoris is, we think it’s a new type of car with 5 wheels and a GPS unit that impersonates Busta Rhymes. We are dolts, idiots, morons and simpletons. Point us in the direction of a hammer and we want to hit anything flat with a pointy end, point us in the direction of a whisk and we think it’s a masturbatory aid. The media acknowledges it, they represent the modern man as a bumbling fool who plumbs the toilet into the hosepipe and then guffaws as he cleans his BMW with a shit shower.

The time for female superiority is upon us, but mankind has been forced into a corner. I haven’t learnt the skills my father tried to teach me and I wouldn’t learn the skills my mothers tried to convince me would help in a new world. I am lost, battered, bruised and confused, wanting to lash out at every feminine standpoint. I overreact, grow to be defensive and fight without reason. I know all this and still fight therefore becoming unreasonable, irrational and illogical.

The stupid thing is all I have to say is ‘Yes, I agree’ and mean it. I would love to, I really would, but sometimes saying ‘Yes’ is the hardest word.

The Spectacle of the Monster with Four Eyes (who was incidentally looking the wrong way)

I have never had good eye sight; in fact at -7.5 I am reliably informed by optometrists that if my eyesight would get worse then I could be officially registered as blind. For the reader being this blind has its uses such as making you virtually useless in the morning and therefore removed from having to answer the door to the postman at 8am wearing your dubious spare pair of “sleeping” boxer shorts that has an opening at the front big enough to fit an elephants trunk, a fireman’s house and the branch of an oak tree simultaneously (trust me I have tried). Of course this ultimately leads to the insecurity and age old image that your girlfriend, fiancée or lover is instead having to answer the door, dressed in their finest lingerie, outrageously flirts with the postman and eventually leaving you for a uniformed man named Nigel, Alan or Mike whose main topic of conversation is that he gets a good amount of exercise every day and is back at home with a cuppa by 3pm.

The optometrists news actually pleased me, with the primary knowledge I could lay blame at the door of my employers for forcing me to stare at a computer screen for too long (proving my point that work will eventually be the ruin of me) and secondly because I would, with my new rating of severely visually impaired, be able to get the odd behemoth pair of brown rimmed specs for free (sellotaped hinge, additional).

So for many years before the joy of contact lenses became widespread, I and thousands of hapless souls like me were forced into hours of humiliation, torture and sporadic bouts of pain. As any scientist will tell you there are certain things in this universe that under any circumstances should not be mixed, these are toasters and baths, chilli powder and foreplay and of course the most dangerous – glasses and sport.

Schools the world over are attended by genetically impaired children who left to Darwin’s survival of the fittest would last about an hour before some grotesque twist of fate would have them blindly walking into an industrial sized blancmange maker or falling into a fiery pit of the damned. Before I was placed into the educational system I was reliably informed that having to wear a block of metal and plastic on your face is considered so cool, the other kids will immediately stop and compare you to the other cool metal and plastic block wearers such as Bill Gates, Elton John and that politician in the brown suit of the TV last night that nobody can remember the name of. These to a five year old are as cool as rambling.

In schools sports me and my spectacled brethren were given two choices: you play with four eyes or with none. Playing with four eyes meant having a football hoofed in your face was not just humiliating but also carried a certain kind of danger, akin to running around a field with a time bomb strapped to your head, ready to drop its load of shattered glass and twisted metal straight into your retina (at least you could see it coming). The other choice was worse, playing blind. The usual scenario involved me frantically chasing the ‘white blob’, only to find out I’d been chasing a plastic bag for over an hour. I often wondered why the other kids had plastic bags stuffed in their short pockets.

School trips were also complicated. One school project focused on the butterfly, its life cycle and how something fairly ugly can blossom into an object of beauty (ahhh what a metaphor for a adolescent glasses wearer), the project ended with a trip to large plastic bubble, pumped up with hot air and stuffed with plants and butterflies, also traditionally known as a butterfly farm. I had never really been out of Europe (or actually past Jersey at this point) so the idea of being immersed in a tropical (albeit fake) world delighted me. There a few moments in life that you can mark as the birth of a personality trait, good and bad and I think this was the proud moment of birth of cynicism and as every British person knows an invaluable commodity when dealing with day to day life in the UK, or speaking to banks or broadband providers