What I Know About Women
I have spent the last ten minutes staring at a Word document with only the title “What I Know About Women” written at the top and acres of white blankness beneath, which I was quite tempted just to give in as my final copy.
For centuries clueless men have asked “What do women want?” I am a single 40 year old, who has never been in a relationship for longer than 18 months, facts which have prompted my erstwhile double act partner Stewart Lee to opine that, “In your case, Rich, what women want… is someone else.”
I think the problem most people have when coming to try to understand the opposite sex is that they treat them as a single entity, individually identical, controlled by one huge hive mind with a single purpose, like the Borg in Star Trek. But it is impossible and foolish to generalise about an entire gender, except to say that in most cases women are less likely to respond to a metaphor based on a science-fiction TV series.
I am not convinced that men and women are all that different. Of course this seems a ludicrous statement on the face of it: women are more sensitive, surely, more emotionally communicative, letÂ’s face it - just more communicative (do they ever shut up?), they are nurturing, child-loving, less promiscuous than menÂ… I could go on with these generalities, but I donÂ’t really believe any of them. After all I have met women who hate children, just as I consider myself a man who not only communicates my emotions.
Take the issue of women being less promiscuous then men. When I did my research for Talking Cock I asked both men and women various questions on an anonymous internet questionnaire. When it came to the question of how many sexual partners people had had, heterosexual women averaged around about 10, whilst heterosexual men claimed to be closer to 20. Yet if you think about it, heterosexual men and women must, on average, have had exactly the same number of partners – there is always one of each of us at every encounter. We are by definition, equally promiscuous (even if men would like to be more so if they got the chance). So whilst social convention means that men exaggerate their conquests, it also means women will tend to knock a few off their tally – even when they are responding to a survey where their anonymity is guaranteed. That’s how engrained our desire to conform to gender stereotypes and confirm our femininity or masculinity can be.
I think most people tend to behave in the way they think they are supposed to, at least outwardly, when inwardly we have broadly the same desires and goals.
During another of my shows, “The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace” in which I attempted to emulate the feats of the fictional demi-God, I dated 50 different women in 50 consecutive nights. It was a wonderful and terrible crash-course in dating and in interacting with women. Heaven and Hell rolled into one, only really bad due to the relentless nature of socialising with strangers day after day for almost two months. I am sad to say that the organ that was put under the most strain in this time was my liver. But it taught me a little about what women want, at least from a potential partner, and I have to report that they responded very well to honesty, openness and respect. Perhaps you might find that unsurprising, but they are tactics that many men seem averse to employing. And yet aren’t they exactly the same things that a man would look for in a woman? If you have ever been lied to be a partner, then you will know how important veracity is.
Having said all this, I still donÂ’t have a girlfriend, so perhaps itÂ’s best to ignore me and my ridiculous contradictory notions that women and men are, at the heart of it, more or less the same, whilst also being completely individual and impossible to sum up in 700 words. A blank page might have been clearer.
