Women and Men #2

Quick Reference

• Dilbert
• How to Get a Date
• How to Stop Hair Loss
• Women are just so perfect...
• Male Research
• Say What You Mean

Dilbert

I get about 100 e-mail messages a day from readers of my comic strip "Dilbert." Most are from disgruntled office workers, psychopaths, stalkers, comic-strip fans -- that sort of person. But a growing number are from women who write to say they think Dilbert is sexy. Some say they've already married a Dilbert and couldn't be happier.

If you're not familiar with Dilbert, he's an electrical engineer who spends most of his time with his computer. He's a nice guy but not exactly Kevin Costner.

Okay, Dilbert is polite, honest, employed and educated. And he stays home. These are good traits, but they don't exactly explain the incredible sex appeal. So what's the attraction?

I think it's a Darwinian thing. We're attracted to the people who have the best ability to survive and thrive. In the old days it was important to be able to run down an antelope and kill it with a single blow to the forehead.

But that skill is becoming less important every year.

Now all that matters is if you can install your own Ethernet card without having to call tech support and confess your inadequacies to a stranger whose best career option is to work in tech support.

It's obvious that the world has three distinct classes of people, each with its own evolutionary destiny:

Knowledgeable computer users who will evolve into godlike non-corporeal beings who rule the universe (except for those who work in tech support).

Computer owners who try to pass as knowledgeable but secretly use hand calculators to add totals to their Excel spreadsheets. This group will gravitate toward jobs as high school principals and operators of pet crematoriums. Eventually they will become extinct.

Non-computer users who will grow tails, sit in zoos and fling dung at tourists.

Obviously, if you're a woman and you're trying to decide which evolutionary track you want your offspring to take, you don't want to put them on the luge ride to the dung-flinging Olympics. You want a real man. You want a knowledgeable computer user with evolution potential.

And women prefer men who listen. Computer users are excellent listeners because they can look at you for long periods of time without saying anything. Granted, early in a relationship it's better if the guy actually talks. But men use up all the stories they'll ever have after six months. If a woman marries a guy who's in, let's say, retail sales, she'll get repeat stories starting in the seventh month and lasting forever. Marry an engineer and she gets a great listener for the next 70 years.

Plus, with the ozone layer evaporating, it's a good strategy to mate with somebody who has an indoor hobby. Outdoorsy men are applying suntan lotion with SPF 10,000 and yet by the age of 30 they still look like dried chili peppers in pants. Compare that with the healthy glow of a man who spends 12 hours a day in front of a video screen.

It's also well established that computer users are better lovers. I know because I heard an actual anecdote from someone who knew a woman who married a computer user and they reportedly had sex many times. I realize this isn't statistically valid, but you have to admit it's the most persuasive thing I've written so far.

If you still doubt the sexiness of male PC users, consider their hair. They tend to have either: (1) male pattern baldness -- a sign of elevated testosterone -- or (2) unkempt jungle hair -- the kind you see only on people who just finished a frenzied bout of lovemaking. If this were a trial I think we could reach a verdict on the strong circumstantial evidence alone.

I realize there are a lot of skeptics out there. They'll delight in pointing out the number of computer users who wear wrist braces and suggest it isn't the repetitive use of the keyboard that causes the problem. That's okay. Someday those skeptics will be flinging dung at tourists. Then who'll be laughing? (Answer to rhetorical question: everybody but the tourists.)

Henry Kissinger said power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And Bill Clinton said that knowledge is power. Therefore, logically, according to the U.S. government, knowledge of computers is the ultimate aphrodisiac. You could argue with me -- I'm just a cartoonist -- but it's hard to argue with the government. Remember, they run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about satisfying women.

You might think this was enough to convince anyone that men who use computers are sexy. But look at it from my point of view: I'm getting paid by the word for this article. I'm not done yet.

In less enlightened times, the best way to impress women was to own a hot car. But women wised up and realized it was better to buy their own hot cars so they wouldn't have to ride around with jerks.

Technology has replaced hot cars as the new symbol of robust manhood. Men know that unless they get a digital line to the Internet no woman is going to look at them twice.

It's getting worse. Soon anyone who's not on the World Wide Web will qualify for a government subsidy for the home-pageless. And nobody likes a man who takes money from the government, except maybe Marilyn Monroe, which is why the CIA killed her. And if you think that's stupid, I've got 100 words to go.

Finally, there's the issue of mood lighting. Nothing looks sexier than a man in boxer shorts illuminated only by a 15-inch SVGA monitor. If we agree that this is every woman's dream scenario, then I think we can also agree that it's best if the guy knows how to use the computer. Otherwise, he'll just look like a loser sitting in front of a PC in his underwear.

In summary, it's not that I think non-PC users are less attractive. It's just that I'm sure they won't read this article.

How To Get a Date

Top 118 Reasons Why Tamara Should Go Out With Rob

1. His shoelaces are hardly ever untied
2. Doesn't pick his nose in public
3. Has never put a red shirt in with the whites
4. Was not directly responsible for the Holocaust
5. When getting off an elevator at a 20+ story building, he doesn't push all the buttons so everyone has to stop at every floor
6. Elvis is dead and Bob Saget is married; who's left?
7. Reads National Geographic, and not just for the nude pictures of African gorillas
8. His cat seems to like him
9. Hasn't wet his bed for at least two weeks now
10. Has his own 'Captain Kirk' coffee mug
11. Always keeps his printer paper well-stocked
12. Doesn't turn into a werewolf during full moons
13. He hardly ever slurps when drinking soup
14. Knows the capital of Eritrea
15. Always manages to resist the urge to poke sharp objects into his ear on the first date
16. Is very proficient at whistling the French national anthem
17. Is only mere words away from completing a New York Times crossword puzzle he began in 1981
18. He is not an alien from another dimension bent on World destruction
19. Played no part in the Cuban Missile Crisis
20. Has never been Captain of, nor been aboard, the Exxon Valdez
21. Very rarely has homicidal tendencies
22. Makes excellent use of his spare time
23. DOES NOT OVERUSE THE CAPSLOCK KEY
24. He subscribes to the theory that the world is round
25. He does not make fun of Boutros-Boutros Ghali's name unnecessarily
26. Is mixing up 'dessert' and 'desert' less and less every day
27. He found Waldo
28. Has never passed out on any world leader's front lawn
29. Has never been fired by George Steinbrenner
30. Cried at the end of John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men'
31. Has never found rude shapes in clouds
32. Tries not to giggle when he cuts one
33. Has never blatantly misused a blender
34. Rarely blacks out for more than a few seconds
35. Makes a real effort not to spit when he talks
36. Owns the Led Zeppelin box set and makes copies for his friends
37. Doesn't scrape his vegetables onto his grandmother's plate when no one is looking
38. Wears male undergarments
39. Has never been struck by lightning while simultaneously being hit by a falling meteorite
40. Is an accomplished tv-watcher
41. Has never been involved in the shipment of plutonium to Germany
42. Has never opened fire on an innocent group of unarmed people
43. Did not mastermind Julius Caeser's death; that was Cassius
44. Owns issues 1-34 of Starman comics in near mint condition
45. Has Patrick Roy's autograph
46. Had no trouble committing his phone number to memory
47. Regularly gets the high score on "Super Mario Bros."
48. Rarely stares directly at the sun
49. Has never dumped in his pants while sliding into 2nd base
50. Has never broken into a bear's home and eaten all his porridge
51. Has never given the bird to a lady over age 60
52. So far, has never resorted to cannibalism
53. Has never exploited the tradition of mistletoe to kiss his aunt
54. Never stares at someone's wart for more than 2-3 minutes
55. Has never caused a traffic accident because he was fixing his make-up
56. Has no communicable diseases
57. No tyrannical system of government is named after him
58. Has no plans to ever give the Pope a wedgie
59. Was completely uninvolved in the trade that sent Doug Gilmour away for Gary Leeman
60. Never rings doorbells and then runs away before they answer
61. Hard as it may be to believe, he has never lost a pole vault competition
62. Never forgets his bug spray when going out into the woods
63. Has never pulled the football away from Charlie Brown
64. Very rarely ties cans to a cat's tail
65. Hardly ever referred to as 'infernal'
66. Has never suffered from lockjaw
67. Recognizes Xenon as a noble gas
68. Excellent at compiling purposeless lists
69. Would give up his appendix for the right woman
70. Great with kids; even better with roast beef
71. Holds the record for the highest spot on the cafeteria wall he got his cheese to stick to in grade six.
72. Has never hit a silver-medalist in the knee with a club
73. The part he played in the bombing of Hiroshima is largely exagerated
74. Has never gambled away a girlfriend in Las Vegas, as well as many other places in the world
75. Has managed so far not to decapitate himself
76. Gets fewer and fewer 'ice-cream headaches'
77. Wouldn't smoke nor drink while pregnant
78. Has always managed to avoid being a victim of a 'piledriver'
79. Has never locked himself in a car
80. Has never played a mean trick on Smokey the Bear
81. Does not use cruel mouse traps
82. Has never let Frank Sinatra down
83. Contrary to popular belief, does not comb his hair with a fork
84. Has never attempted to dance naked in a Jerry Lewis Telethon
85. Very rarely has delusions of God
86. Never placed a bet with Pete Rose
87. It's been over a year since he last got his neck tangled in a telephone cord
88. Can sing "Frere Jacques" much better than Jean-Luc Picard
89. Rarely eats paste between meals
90. Is not the ominous voice in Mortal Kombat which says 'FINISH HIM!' just before a fatality
91. Usually remembers to take the shell off of an egg before eating it
92. Tied Jose Canseco in home runs last week
93. Was nowhere near the grassy knoll November 3rd 1963
94. Often resists the powerful temptation to shave rude swear words in his hair
95. And when he just can't resist, it's usually shaved somewhere where you can't see it
96. Has managed to overcome a long-lasting desire to clean toasters in a bath-tub
97. At Speedy, he's a somebody
98. At a touch of a button, can have a pizza delivered to him personally in under 30 minutes
99. Unlike Vincent Van Gogh, would not chop off his ear for a girl
100. Enjoys better table manners than John Belushi
101. Is (marginally) more popular with feminists than Rush Limbaugh
102. If it came right down to it, he could beat the pants off of Steven Hawking in a fair fight
103. Would never forget to clean the microwave after having placed a small rodent inside
104. The rumours of his involvement in the Chernobyl crisis are mostly unfounded
105. No longer bears a grudge against Santa Claus for failing to deliver an automatic rifle in Christmas of '80
106. It is increasingly rare that he makes obscene phone calls to Bea Arthur
107. Come on, he's not that much of an eyesore!
108. Is not fooled when given poisoned candy on Halloween from his mother
109. Refuses to play 'let's hide grandma's teeth'
110. Can be easily entertained for hours with simple, one-piece toys
111. The sources which publicized his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal were unreliable
112. As of yet, has never overlooked the importance of regular, continuous breathing
113. There is a refreshing absense of monsters under his bed these days
114. Has never smuggled tinker toys onto an international flight
115. Nevers pees in someone else's sink
116. His picking a fight with an inanimate object is quite uncommon
117. Is heterosexual, unmarried and has a pulse
118. Give me 118 reasons why she shouldn't

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Things that men hate about women

By Tim Dowling. Extended and revised by Adrian Hilton

Illness

Women are crap when you're ill. Their firm belief that all men are hypochondriacs and oversensitive to pain makes for an indifferent bedside manner. Instead of tea and sympathy, you get two aspirin (no water) and a lecture on how painful menstrual cramps are. If a man wants proper nursing from a woman then, as with many other things, he has to pay a complete stranger.

Hair

Women leave hair everywhere. While this is a fact of life that most men accept, it is a source of endless annoyance to us that your regular copious hair loss doesn't result in a corresponding bald patch. It just isn't fair.

Squeamish

They're much tougher about things that make men squeamish: blood, baby sick, mouldy bread. Most of the time this is a good thing - because they can remove dead mice from traps and cut babies' fingernails without fainting - but makes them useless as food testers. A woman given a carton of some highly questionable milk will try some and invariably say "It's fine" even when it's so curdled that it won't pour.

Work

Women work too hard. Sitting next to a woman at work can be a shaming experience. While female co-workers can sometimes be drawn into idle chat or cajoled into sloping off early, it usually turns out they've finished all their work early.

Back massages

Women continue to require men to give them back massages as part of foreplay, even though it usually just puts them to sleep. Even the most naively compliant of us men, however, eventually see through this ruse.

Sex

As far as sexual experimentation goes, women generally run through their repertoire once with a new boyfriend, like it's a driving test, and then after a month settle back to counting ceiling tiles. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but we can't get any of them to return our phone calls.

Impotence

"It's all right, I don't mind" is not a comforting thing to say to a man suffering from a bout of impotence. It just implies you didn't want to do it anyway. Granted, "I'm really disappointed" doesn't sound much better, but at least it doesn't suggest a narrow escape. Offer him a face-saving way out; ask for a back massage and then start snoring after a few minutes.

Hormones

Women feel free to use their hormones as an excuse for almost any mood or behaviour: weeping during Casualty, not being able to parallel park properly...

Revenge

Women don't seem to have any statute of limitations on revenge. It doesn't seem odd to a woman to fling a glass of wine into a man's face for something he said six weeks ago. Women are proud of this faculty but shouldn't be surprised if the results are disappointing. Men are like dogs; they have to have their noses rubbed in something pretty much right away to get any reaction other than bewildered whimpering.

Fat

There's no correct answer to the question, "Do you think I'm fat?" when it's asked by a woman. "No" means "yes"; "yes" means "yes"; and even "it doesn't matter", surprisingly enough, seems to mean "yes".

Mother

A woman says she's tired of being your mother when you leave a towel on the floor, but she's perfectly happy to be your mother when it comes to criticising your haircut, making you feel guilty or buying you dodgy jumpers.

Gifts

Women use gift-giving occasions to test a man's taste and judgement, to see if he will once again hand over a hideous dress, vulgar jewellery or a nasty perfume. He will, so stop testing him and tell him exactly what to get - and where to get it from.

Matchmaking

Women muck around with each other's personal lives in a highly cavalier manner: matchmaking incompatible couples, giving disastrous advice to friends who are having affairs and reporting all confidential information directly to the person who isn't supposed to know. The resulting havoc is then consumed as dinner-party conversation. In this dangerous game, men are but pawns.

Gay Men

Women pretend to know exactly which men are gay and which men aren't. But, if truth be told, they haven't actually got a clue who is and who isn't. Most women have said, "I always knew you were gay" to every single one of their boyfriends - except the one who really was gay.

Friends

It's the aim of every woman to replace all of her boyfriend's friends with all her friends' boyfriends. Women are so territorial about friends that it's safe for a man to assume that she will hate any friend of his that he didn't meet through her.

Music

Men often regard women as having the most terrible taste in music. This is an old stereotype but it holds up pretty well. A man can usually flip casually through his new girlfriend's CD collection and immediately pick out the ones which her previous boyfriend gave her in a desperate attempt to improve her taste. Men still hold womankind directly responsible for The Thompson Twins.

Channel Surfing

Women do not understand the proper method or purpose of TV channel-surfing. That's why men are reluctant to allow them access to the remote control. It's not a power thing, it's just that when women channel-surf they stop dead every time they see a picture of a koala chewing some leaves. If you've got cable TV, you'll know that there is always a koala eating leaves somewhere.

Losing things

Women lose things and make men look for them. Men lose things too, but don't have time to look for them. They're too busy fishing under the fridge for the earrings you left in the shop. Here are a few tips: your sunglasses are on your head and your keys are probably still in the door.

Long Life

Women live longer. There's a smug, built-in biological swagger in the way women carry around the extra 10-odd years which life has dealt them. It gives them a kind of patience in arguments, knowing that they'll eventually have the last laugh when they're still around to unplug your life-support machine.

Navigation There is such a thing as the map-reading gene. This is obvious because women lack it. In itself this is not fatal; however, women also lack the gene that allows them to realise that they can't map-read. The only solution seems to be to suss the route out yourself beforehand and blithely ignore the stream of commands and corrections from the front seat.

Food

Women go on diets. They buy half the food that they normally buy. This means that the man too only gets half the food he's used to, even if he is bordering on malnutrition already. Is it any wonder that we patronise kebab vans and curry houses?

PMT

OK, so PMT is a fact of life. But when it gets blamed for a woman's irrational activity for four weeks on the trot, even the most naive man is going to start smelling a rat. And it's been happening to them monthly since their early teens, so you'd have kinda hoped that they'd have worked out how to cope with it by now.

The Bathroom

Women have on average 102 items of personal hygiene equipment in the bathroom. Men have 6 and that includes the razor. There may be a reason for this imbalance, but it escapes us. Surely there aren't 102 distinct parts on a woman that require different soaps, potions or ointments? Or is there something you're not telling us?

Babies

Women cluck over other peoples' babies for hours to a quite nauseating level. It's called the "mothering instinct" only because "behaviour aimed to scare the crap out of your boyfriend-stroke-husband-to-be" is too much of a mouthful.

DIY

Women spend days drawing up elaborate, beautifully conceived and elegantly suitable designs for the house. Men spend weeks fruitlessly trying to implement the more impossible of these ideas and then get grief when the Grand Design starts to fall behind schedule or when paint gets on the old curtains (which are going to be thrown out in a few weeks, for goodness' sake.)

Your mother and your girlfriend

They are either at each other's throats or ganging up on your throat. Either is bad. There is no alternative.

Male Research

• Most men believe that the four food groups are beer, chips, ice cream and pizza.
• The average male spends 4 hours a day thinking about the female anatomy.
• 9 out of 10 men respond to the question "What are you thinking about?" with the word "Nothing."
• 10 out of 10 women believe them.
• 95% of men think that the picture of dogs playing poker qualifies as fine art.
• 6 out of 10 men cannot locate the dirty clothes hamper in their homes.
• 10 out of 10 men are able to find the TV remote control, even blindfolded.

Say What You Mean

Can I help with dinner?

(Why isn't it already on the table?)

I do help around the house.

(I once put a dirty towel in the laundry basket)

What do you mean, you need new clothes?

(You just bought new clothes three years ago)

You're spending money on frivolous things.

(Do you really need to buy car insurance and toilet paper?)

I don't care what color you paint it.

(Unless it's not blue, gray, mauve, black, turquoise or any other color besides white)

That's interesting.

(Are you still talking?)

Take a break, honey, you're working too hard.

(I can't hear the game over the vacuum cleaner)

I'll mow the lawn right after the game.

(After the Superbowl, which is in January. The lawn will be under 4 feet of snow, and will no longer need mowing)

She doesn't understand me.

(She's heard all my stories before, and is tired of them)

It would take too long to explain.

(I have no idea how it works)

I was just thinking of you, and got you these roses.

(The girl selling them on the corner was a real babe)

I need a change in scenery.

(I'd like to look at other women for a while)