This is where the differences between the sexes show
A GUY BUYS SHOES. Color choices: black, black or black? Design choices: featureless, featureless or featureless?
In business district shoe shops, men only have one actual decision to make. I slipped into each pair to see which was most comfortable.
A pair of Josef Seibel slip-ons felt as if I had been wearing them all my life. Sold.
A work colleague watching this operation was outraged.
“It takes me DAYS to buy shoes, and they hurt like hell for the first month,” she said. “How come a guy can get perfect shoes in five minutes, in his sleep?”
“Sorry, did you say something?” I replied. “I was asleep.”
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Without wishing to be sexist, it must be said that shoe-buying takes up 30 to 40 percent of the mental energy of several females I know, but less than 0.0001 percent of the consciousness of any male I know.
Male-female differences came into sharp focus recently when my wife disappeared with my eldest daughter for what I thought was a hairdressing binge. On their return, I duly complimented them on their new hair, but it turned out they had been to an “eyebrow shaper”.
Why would anyone PAY MONEY to change the shape of their eyebrows? And if you did, why would you NOT get them shaped into your name or an image of a skull or portrait of Einstein or have them made to look like a pair of question marks or something? That’s what a guy would do.
Lo and behold, the very next day there was a report in the media on eyebrow shaping trends. For decades women preferred thin high lines in a McDonald’s “golden arches” shape, fine arcs sometimes reaching right up to their hairlines, as if women were permanently in a state of extreme surprise (as many are).
But in recent months women have been asking for lower, thicker wodges of hair, more like men have. This is an “unconscious” message that women are muscling into men’s worlds, the Daily Mail said.
A friend in the cosmetics industry said that in New York, MEN pay US$75 for a “guybrow” trim, which is when a specialist trims a man’s eyebrows in such a way that no one can tell they’ve been trimmed. So what’s the point of that?
But going back to where we started, reader Ko Wai-sze later that day sent me a cutting about a pair of shoes that I must admit any man would get excited about.
The shoes have a GPS gadget built into it and little flashing lights at the toe end.
Like ALL men, I will buy ANYTHING which has a tiny red flashing light on it. You put a little red flashing light on a used cow uterus and we men will line up to pay a small fortune for it.
The GPS shoes detect your home by locating a satellite signal and guide you to it with the flashing lights. Cool.
Mrs Ko said: “I said I’d get a pair for my husband, but my friends said that the only people who go around with lights in their shoes are children. But then I thought: children, husbands, what’s the difference?”
Mrs Ko understands men.
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Watch this and fall in love:
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