Pet Peeve # 1 (of many to come!)

Drop that Cone!

I confess, I can't stand watching men eat from an ice-cream cone. I don't know whether it's the phallic undertones but the very thought of a man gingerly licking melting ice cream off a waffle cone is enough to make me lose all respect for him and more importantly, all interest in my ice-cream.

There are some men who try rather hard to make the entire act look a bit more manly by keeping the licking to a minimum (thank god!) and instead opting for large, teeth-hurting bites to avoid imminent meltdown and dumping the bottom half of the cone in the trash bin. A commendable attempt but at the end of the day, you're still a man eating from an ice-cream cone and looking like a little girl in pigtails.

Other offensive ice-cream eating behaviour for men, especially while on a date, include -

1) Candy Bars - By the end of it, you're just licking a stick.

2) Sundaes - Eating from a little plastic cup is much better than ordering a humongous sundae that you will then proceed to slurp from a little metal spoon. Not attractive and definitely a no-no if you're on a date.

3) Please for the love of god, stop yourself from asking for silly toppings such as marshmallows and chocolate sauce!

4) Choose your flavour quickly and without fuss. Opt for the basic flavours - chocolate, vanilla. Don't ask to taste a couple before you finally decide. Eating ice-cream should be incidental for you, you're just giving your date some company.

5) Never, ever admit you have a favourite ice-cream flavour until after the third date.

6) Don't relish the ice-cream. Just eat it matter-of-factly. Only indulge in conversation about the ice-cream if initiated by your date.

I think women find men who confess a distaste for sweets far more attractive... even if it just implies that there's more for them to eat!

Funny Business

Haven’t you come across a lot more funny men than you may have genuinely funny women? To me, an allegedly ‘funny’ woman is always extremely self-conscious of the fact that she’s about to crack a smart one. While some still develop a certain skill at witty repartee, they never quite match up to the men in their company. Most others stumble their way through, often giving themselves away in that crucial lapse of a second, which can sound a veritable death knell for a joke before it is even uttered. It’s a stereotype that women are always late but when it comes to comic timing, they miss the bus almost every time.

Read why Germaine Greer believes men are socially conditioned, or rather compelled, to be funny. According to her, men use humour as a competitive tool to gain acceptance, either from other men as a way of male bonding or from women so that they can get straight to third base on the first date.

According to Greer,

“Women famously cannot learn jokes. If they try, they invariably bugger up the punchline. The male teller of jokes is driving towards his reward, the laughter of his mates. The woman who messes up the same joke does so because her concentration is not sharpened by that need. She is not less intelligent, simply less concerned.”

Greer seems to imply that a woman, in her presumably superior state of being, needn’t resort to such petty tactics. And why should she? She’s probably much too busy trying to manipulate men with her body right from the time she hits puberty or spending the rest of her life too scared to express her true self, lest she pose any real threat to the men who dictate her life. As Greer herself points out, it’s not like women have any less a sense of the absurd but maybe this sense is more inward-directed than it is for men.

Perhaps it’s not that most women are less concerned about appearing funny, but the fact that they’re far too self-conscious to really be funny, at least in the uninhibited sort of way that true humour demands. We are raised to constantly look inwards, to pay attention to the inner workings of our minds and hearts, while men are taught to think out of the periphery of their own bodies, in terms of their selves in relation to the world. A simplistic example would be of little boys being given construction sets that allow them to build and create, while little girls spend hours playing with dolls which are often extensions of their own selves, in socially accepted gender roles. This is probably why self-derogatory humour is so difficult for women to hone, since it necessarily demands a certain stepping out, to look at oneself as a fallible entity and to make light of this fact. Of course we women know we’re fallible but the knowledge of what it is that makes us so is far too dangerous to admit, instead being viewed as a constant liability, better to be hidden away.

I do agree with Greer that there are hardly any female comedians out there who have been able to make a lasting impression, most of them limiting themselves to talking about men, menstruation, breasts and the pitfalls of being an easy lay. In other words, male comedians are just comedians but a woman comedian is first always a woman, and we can't help but look at it any other way.

Is humour really gendered? Are women actually raised to find men's jokes funnier? If men are funny (or try to be) so as to be able to propogate the species, do women have no evolutionary need for humour except to respond to it? Are funny women, then, a cultural anomaly?