Why Men Are *ahem*

[cheers]

<p>"Gordon Ramsay reckons women can’t cook. Ad exec Neil French says they make rubbish employees. And Harvard president Larry Summers says genetic differences condemn the fairer sex to failure in science. Who the hell are they to talk? Here, leading female figures have their say on male failings - and they’re not holding back… "</p>

<p>

AS BYATT
Author </p>

<p>I rather like men. I’ve always felt I am interested in people, and quite a lot of people are men. I find it quite hard to think of specific areas in which men obviously fall down. </p>

<p>One thing that women do better than men is that they tend to remember what you’ve just said to them. And girls seem to do quite a lot better at school. I put that down to the group culture. Boys tend to hang around trying to look as if they’re not doing much work, and therefore probably don’t do much work. And also women seem to have crept into the traditionally male areas of knifings and muggings. Women seem to be doing those things quite efficiently.

</p>

<p>

JENNY COLGAN
Novelist </p>

<p>I like men very much. They’re funny, straightforward and good at sums. On the other hand, there are some areas of life where they are complete and utter uncontainably useless arses. There’s the dancing thing, and the, " Oh, sorry, we’ve been going out for 19 years and you thought we were serious? " thing, and the Saudi Arabian mullah thing, but by far the most irritating is the totally **** car thing. </p>

<p>Men who love cars are boring. Jeremy Clarkson is a terrible advert for this, in that he himself clearly isn’t boring, but he serves as the inspiration to millions of fat shouty men without an ounce of his wit, giving them carte blanche to bore on endlessly. Talking a lot about your car makes you a brain-dead idiot, with the aesthetic sensibilities of a flea. Bringing up your car as a way of finding out the financial status of the man you are talking to is pre-pubescent ***** pulling. Buying a brightly coloured expensive sports model shows you up to be a complete and utter desperate arse, as, by the way, does the teenage Russian girl in the passenger seat. </p>

<p>Oh, and by the way, boys - of course we don’t cook (or eat) ever since you decided that you could only find us sexually attractive if we had the body of a 12-year-old boy who’s had an accident with two grapefruits and a staple gun. Thanks for that.

</p>

<p>

LUCY PORTER
Comedian </p>

<p>I have never had a decent cup of tea or coffee made by a man. That’s their big downfall. I think that women are also better with a certain type of veiled itchiness. Men are often a bit straightforward. That advertising executive who made those comments about women bosses - a woman would never have been that tactless. We would have said something far more veiled and dressed it up as a compliment.
It’s only taken us a few decades of being treated as intellectual equals for us to break the glass ceiling and outperform men at every educational level, but you’d never find us so tactless as to say it. </p>

<p>And finally, and importantly, women have more scruples, which means that we’re probably worse at advertising but better people in general.

</p>

<p>

MARY KILLEN
Journalist </p>

<p>I once had a weekly column in The Times, just holding forth. One week, I wrote a piece about my husband Giles and what a hypochondriac he was. It triggered a giant mailbag of comments from women whose husbands were, they said, like mine in this. I was “poached” by The Sunday Telegraph on the strength of this article. They wanted me to write a weekly column for them, to be called “Family Life”. There was one condition - that I write about Giles and how annoying he was each week. </p>

<p>Giles was only too happy to be the focus of these attacks, often jotting down notes about annoying things he had done to help me as I composed. He said he welcomed any attention, even negative attention. Whether it was losing his car keys or wallet, or being negative about having to go out to dinner, complaining bitterly all the way there, then sailing in to be the life and soul - whatever he did, there would be a mailbag from other women saying: “My husband is exactly the same.” Blurting out secrets, complaining about traffic jams, being queeny in the kitchen: from my postbag, I see that men seem hard-wired to have these defects.

</p>

<p>from <a href=“http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article322132.ece[/url]”>http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article322132.ece&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[UCLAri]

<p>

And Harvard president Larry Summers says genetic differences condemn the fairer sex to failure in science.

</p>

<p>This is misquoted to the point that people actually believe he said that. He didn’t. He offered genetic differences as a potential hypothesis. Not as a definitive reason.</p>

<p>I don’t agree with him, but I’m not going to use blatant lies in order to debate the issue. I suggest you don’t, either.</p>

[curmudgeon]

<p>UCLAri, the little quote-y marks (EX. “words of another”) in this instance mean someone else said it, and cheers is quoting them saying what Summers said. She didn’t say it. She didn’t aver that Cousin Larry-Bob said it. Jeez. And as for your helpful suggestion, I’d suggest you not use blatant misreadings of her post WHICH WAS MEANT TO BE FUNNY. Lighten up. Goodness. “That’s entertainment.” LOL. </p>

<p>Now if you are critiquing cheers on her quoting of someone else’s blatant lies for her own purposes, maybe she used to work in the White House. You never know. Old habits die hard.;)</p>

[weenie]

<p>Here’s what I think: (get ready – it’s earth shattering…)</p>

<p>Men and women are not the same.</p>

[UCLAri]

<p>curmdgeon,</p>

<p>Thank you for pointing out what quotation marks mean, I had no clue. :/</p>

<p>Even if you quote someone else, you’re citing them and using their words as a source. Using bad sources, in some cases, can be just as bad as making the statement yourself. </p>

<p>Either way, it doesn’t matter. She used it as a source to make a point, and regardless of whether or not it was supposed to be for humor, it’s furthering the propogation of an untruth. I know that most people seem to believe that the Internet has lower standards for truth, but I disagree.</p>

[marite]

<p>Weenie, in France we say “Vive la difference!” :)</p>

[weenie]

<p>marite: Yup!</p>

[garland]

<p>So, in the last several months, my S has lost his phone twice, his drivers license, and his wallet (the last one in Port Authority!!!). Except for the license, each of these was returned, intact (even the money in the wallet), by kind strangers.</p>

<p>After the last incident (wallet), my H was really fuming about S’s carelessness, until remembering the time he’d driven halfway to Cape May with his wallet sitting on the engine block…</p>

[amith1]

<p>I do think men and women are so different that I am not sure how they live together. my husband is stinky, whereas I find offensive smells, well, offensive and like candles, lotions, CLEANLINESS. my husband finds fault in everything, but his “oh, that’s good enough” statements and projects are just fine. problem is my son is exactly alike. they can’t find anything to save their lives, but give me 2 minutes and it’s in my hand. they have admitted that fault. they have absolutely no ability to multi task, or even follow simple instructions in many cases. i am amazed that men survive on their own sometimes. I guess it’s why they marry, or else they would be stinky, wearing dirty clothes, eating bad food and constantly walking in circles looking for their keys and wallet. is that some kind of genetic thing?</p>

[emeraldkity4]

<p>my husband threw away his cell phone.
It was on his desk- covered with whatever, and he took everything off and threw it away
When something went * clunk* he peered into the trash bin, but didn’t see anything</p>

<p>But I have to admit- at least he was trying
I don’t clean off my desk- if I can’t see it- I don’t know where it is-</p>

[tsdad]

<p>I know that it makes for very funny ancedotes, but the differences betwen the sexes is greatly exaggerated according to Janet Hyde a Professor in the Women’s Studies and Psychology Departments here in Madison. </p>

<p>UW press release 9/21/2005</p>

<p>MADISON - Aiming to dispel misplaced - and widely prevalent - stereotypes about the differences between men and women, a scientist has finally confirmed what many have intuitively known for years: psychologically, at least, the two sexes are basically the same.</p>

<p>Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the psychology of women, distilled the results of 46 large-scale studies on gender differences into one over-arching analysis. In the case of most traits, such as self-esteem and mathematical ability, Hyde found that men and women live on the same page - and not in different books altogether.</p>

<p>Reported in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal American Psychologist, Hyde’s work strives to lessen the hidden costs of faulty social beliefs that she says have been perpetuated by the public and mass media.</p>

<p>The false stereotype that men make better leaders, for instance, may have caused numerous women with leadership potential to miss key opportunities in their lives. Similarly, Hyde adds, the notion that adolescent girls have lower self-esteem than boys is another mistruth that comes with potential side effects.</p>

<p>“If we keep thinking that girls are the ones with all the self-esteem issues, then we miss all the boys with low self-esteem,” says Hyde. “And those are the boys who may end up doing something like Columbine.”</p>

<p>The recent work is also important because it finally addresses a pervasive public question with a rigorous scientific approach, says Hyde. “Finding unambiguous scientific evidence of similarities between the sexes can open our eyes to phenomena that we routinely see but miss due to public perceptions about gender differences.”</p>

<p>In compiling her analysis, Hyde explored the relationship of gender to an array of psychological traits, including cognitive abilities, verbal and nonverbal communication, psychological wellbeing and motor behaviors like throwing distance.</p>

<p>In 78 percent of cases, Hyde found little or no difference between the sexes, though she did find that men display more physical aggression and throw much farther than women. Men also deal differently, Hyde found, with certain aspects of sexuality.</p>

<p>To continue eroding misconceptions about gender difference, meanwhile, “We have to continue providing the right education and doing the right science,” the psychologist says.</p>

<p>Also see the article from 10/25/2005 Daily Cardinal at </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.dailycardinal.com/article.php?storyid=1027309[/url]”>http://www.dailycardinal.com/article.php?storyid=1027309&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[UCLAri]

<p>amith,</p>

<p>I can cook, I clean my apartment on a daily basis, I shower twice daily, hardly lose anything, and oh yeah, I can multitask. </p>

<p>One thing I do better than all those? I really hate stereotypes.</p>

[driver]

<p>Oh Lord, tsdad, another women’s studies professor trying to make the sexes the same despite all common sense evidence to the contrary? I posted this article a while back–I think it’s much more convincing.</p>

<p><a href=“Deep, Dark Secrets of His and Her Brains”>Deep, Dark Secrets of His and Her Brains;

[tsdad]

<p>Driver:</p>

<p>Actually it’s not her study. It’s a review of other people’s studies.</p>

[tsdad]

<p>RAISE YOUR SONS DIFFERENTLY.</p>

[sjmom2329]

<p>Actually, I hope my sons turn out just like their dad. He is opposite to me in many ways, which makes up for my many failings!</p>

[garland]

<p>Tsdad, I absolutely agree, but the forgetfulness thing? It’s way beyond my abilities to change–I’m guessing they both have some undiagnosed ADD going on (my H thinks that’s likely, too.)</p>

[TheDad]

<p>Of course the sexes are different. I have never had a guy come up to me and say “Nice shoes!”</p>

<p>I have also never excused myself from a restaurant dinner table to go to the bathroom with another guy.</p>

<p>Otoh, I make a decent cup of tea.</p>

<p>Otoooh, TheMom does not appreciate some of the things I do for her, like pre-reading the Sports and Comics pages for her enjoyment.</p>

[Alumother]

<p>The one article I quote recently on the data-driven differences between men and women comes from the periodical Foreign Affairs. The study they quote is that men and women do not appear statistically different on any tested characteristics except:</p>

<ol>
<li>Aggression</li>
<li>Hierarchical status-ranking behavior, i.e. I scored higher than you on Worlds of Warcraft.</li>
</ol>

<p>Otherwise men and woman’s personality traits and behaviors are statistically equivalent.</p>

[cheers]

<p>Knock, knock…overly earnest Americans? Tongue in cheek? Meant to be funny? Eeegads…not everything is scientific banter! </p>

<p>I picked out the funniest comments but only TheDad seems to have enjoyed them. Sigh.</p>