One Drunken Night

(THAT, ladies and germs, is a teaser.)

Last weekend, at about 1am on Sunday, OOF and V were expounding on the subject of MinCat, her true inner self, and what men want from women. No, really. There was a lot of whisky.

According to V, I am all tough on the outside, but deep down I'm just waiting for a white knight to sweep me up onto his horse and ride off into the sunset. Ahem.

According to OOF, that's all very well, but two weeks later I'm going to refuse to believe that white knight and start making him jump through hoops.

Which brings us to how to hook men. Apparently, they like to be challenged. But, as any Strong Independent Woman knows, that's a crock of shit. Challenge a man by being his equal and he will either think of you as a guy or a ballbusting bitch. Ah, OOF interjects, it's not enough to be challenging, women must be playful while they do it.

Sigh.

Sometimes I want to line the whole species up and smack it upside the head with a large, blunt instrument.

Now, not to belittle your sage advice, OOF, it's probably spot on, but why oh why are we, as a generation, so idiotically obsessed with creating these structures of conformity in relationships that entangle us so much that eventually we forget what we want or like from a person and train ourselves to think in some warped stereotype: women must be so to get men's attention, and men must want women who are so to get their attention, and so on ad nauseum.

Honestly, I like having arguments as much as anyone (ok, ok more than most people), but even so, if someone challenges me all the time, as many men seem to think is mandatory too, I get very bored, very fast, and tune out. Similarly, I can play games and be hot and cold and throw tantrums to have people do things my way - but what's the point really. Imagine how exhausting it would be to keep doing that.

Because, you see, the flaw in these theories of inter-gender interaction is simply this: they assume that at some point, one can drop the charade and be oneself; the make up and push up can come off and one can return to comfy pjs on the couch. Unfortunately, we're all so well trained to expect the framework that when it is dropped we decide we must seek it out somewhere else, somewhere new. "There's no excitement anymore."

It's a bit like that Calvin strip where Hobbes comments on his attention span, or lack thereof, and he says: If it cant be distilled into 45 seconds then I don't want to know about it. If behaviour does not follow the prescribed patterns then we cannot assimilate it, or react to it.