Women, Thy Name Is Mystery

I am a man. No, really, I am. And as a man I can safely say that women are a mystery. No two ways about it, men do not understand women. Oh, we can get close to them. We can become friends, occasionally more, with them, and we can generally come to some kind of understanding of a few particular women, but the gender as a whole? Not a chance.

The flipside to that is, women seem to understand men, but then, and lets be honest here guys, life as a man simply means "do whatever a woman tells you but pretend you were gonna do it anyway".

So why are women so unfathomable to us? What is it that we're missing? Where is the mystery?

Well, a while back, while walking home from work one evening, I think I hit upon it. There was an event in the park which happened to be letting out as I was making my merry way. Cardiff was packed with groups of excited women, some dragging folorn looking men along with them, and why? What was the cause of this? What is the key to understanding women?

Dirty Dancing. Yep, the film with Swayze and some baby you can't put in a corner. There was a showing of it on a big screen in a field, and that was enough for most of the female population of Cardiff to get excited. Women love that fucking movie!

Now, before I get comments from the ladies saying "actually I think you'll find that movie sucks", let me point out that this is a massive generalisation, and I'm fully aware that there are plenty of women who can't stand Dirty Dancing.

But it is only women who like it. There's something about the flick that just makes it impossible for a man to get, and yet nobody can pin point exactly why. I can't think of one man I know, straight, gay or other, who likes it, and that makes it unique in the entire pantheon of movies this world has seen. Can you think of a single other movie which an entire gender shudders at the mention of? Most men have been forced to sit through it by a girlfriend or a sister or a friend at one time or another, and we will inevitably find it to be a distinctly uncomfortable experience. We don't just dislike it, we collectively shrink away from it the way a vampire shuns the daylight, whereas women seem to flock to it like zombies to a warm body.

Name any other so called chick flick and I guarantee I can find you a man who likes it. And there is no film liked only by men. I know plenty of women who love Bond, Star Wars, Die Hard, Lord of the Rings, Batman and movies where Chow Yun Fat kicks people in the head.

No, there is only one movie which makes half of the worlds population furrow their brows in confusion. We don't understand how a man (Swayze) that dances like that and acts like that can possibly be straight, let alone such an object of desire to women the world over. We question the use of the word baby as someone's name. We still haven't got a fucking clue why we can't put Baby in the corner. And we most definitely have not had the time of our lives.

Maybe if we watched it enough times, we could start to come to an understanding of Dirty Dancing, and through understanding Dirty Dancing maybe we could start to understand women. But you're never going to find a man who can sit through it enough times to do so.

And that, my friends, is why women will be a mystery forever.