Men, p.8
Men, page 8
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Your average bachelor’s bedroom is so rancid even the bed lice walk away with disdain. The pillows have no cases and the only beverage on offer is out-of-date juice drunk straight from the cardboard carton. His flatmates shake their knobs and make woo-woo noises as they return from a bathroom which is full of E. coli bacteria big enough to saddle up and ride home. A woman should demand medical benefits before entering such an unsavoury environment. And yet what do we women then do? Move him into our nice clean homes.
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Hygiene Most men can’t turn down a bed. Anybody’s. Which is why you should suggest that while he’s washing his clothes, why not throw himself in with them? Left to his own devices, the average man reverts to bachelordom. But it doesn’t mean you have to become his unpaid domestic servant. Tell him that the only Iron Man competitions women would like to see would involve the male of the species, some starch and a laundry basket. The trick is to pretend to be even worse at housework than he is.
Survival tips
Housework Tell him you feel like blowing up the marital home, while chortling maniacally, ‘That’ll be the housework done, then!’
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Convince him that you use your smoke alarm as a timer.
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Tell him you don’t cook. You burn. And what you don’t burn, you thaw. If charred black you simply call it Cajun. (A new taste sensation – Cordon Noir.) And if it’s undercooked – sushi.
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Tell him that to you, cuisine really means ‘quizz-ine’ – you’re never quite sure how the recipe will turn out.
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Cooking for his parents can be more gruelling than a samurai initiation. It’s a form of S&M (Sado-Mastication). Assure him that your only recipe for a dinner party is to drive over to a girlfriend’s house around suppertime. Tell him that your idea of interior decorating is to line tummies with fish fingers and creamed regurgitated-from-the-can corn. When he asks why you never cook for his family, just reply it’s because you don’t want to go down for manslaughter.
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Let him know early that you can’t even do the gravy . . . or you’ll be arrested for carrying a congealed weapon.
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Tell him that your recipe for dinner party success is to leave get-well cards all over the mantelpiece so that people will imagine you’ve been too ill to cook, which is why you’re ordering takeaway. (If you can’t stand the heat . . . order Chinese.)
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Do all this and he’ll be domesticated in no time . . . but be careful. If your husband says he likes to help with the ‘domestics’, make sure he doesn’t mean that he likes to do them. Jude Law and Robin Williams both had affairs with their nannies. Men are so lazy. They just use anything that’s lying around the home.
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If a man ever says to you that the only difference between his wife and his job is that after five years his job still sucks, simply explain that it is scientifically proven that no woman ever shot her hubby while he was vacuuming. Now that really is the ultimate blowjob.
CHAPTER 7
Parenthood
The only thing worse than getting your period is not getting it. A pregnancy test is the one test you can’t cheat in. It’s also the time you find out that when it comes to parenthood, men are about as useful, well, as a father in a delivery room.
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It is Stone Age, what happens to women during childbirth. Completely prehistoric. As you lie with your feet up in stirrups, adoption starts to look like a very attractive alternative. If you ever had any doubt about the gender of God, you now know that he’s a bloke. But the blokes are no help . . .
Insignificant other
My husband didn’t want to be there at the birth. But, hey, I didn’t want to be there! If he was there when it went in, he should be there when it comes out!
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He’s supposed to wipe your fevered brow. It’s in the Husband Handbook. But little did I know that he was going to completely take over . . .
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When the guru sat at the front of the birthing class and said, ‘So, who’s having a natural childbirth?’ all the men put their hands up. You know what men are like with pain? They need an epidural to get their ingrown toenails cut!
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Natural childbirth is a case of stiff upper labia. You’ve done drugs all your life, why stop now?
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The cognoscenti may be big on Leboyer, but I’m an advocate of unnatural childbirth. The only natural thing about my births is that I didn’t get time to bikini wax first. The only way I could be talked into childbirth again would be with a promise of daily epidurals from the moment of conception till the child reaches twenty.
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If a man were asked to grow an alien in his belly for forty weeks, causing varicose veins, wind, amnesia and halitosis, followed by thirty-six hours of intense agony culminating in a cut from testes to anus – even James Bond would decline on the grounds that it was too damn dangerous.
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I think of natural childbirth the way I think of natural leg amputation or appendectomy. Just aim for the ‘Full-Anaesthetic-Elective-Caesarean-Wake-Me-When-It’s-Over-and-the-Hairdresser’s-Here’ approach.
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If the father of your child doesn’t turn up to the labour ward, don’t contract pre-natal depression (the first case known to medical science). Just realize that he’s your insignificant other and unsettle him by saying, with a smile, that the only good thing about being a woman is never having to worry about who the mother is.
Childbirth
In the labour ward, the mother’s heart soars in her body. As the baby crowns she smiles a smile big enough to admit a banana sideways – while the average father is thinking footage. When he appears with a video camera trained between your legs squish his head with your knees and explain that it would have been more interesting to film the conception.
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The only reason to have the man there at the birth is that it’s the one time to get anything you’ve ever, ever wanted. While you’re groaning and moaning and he’s saying, ‘Is there anything I can get you, darling?’ answer, ‘New car, new carpet, holiday in the Caribbean.’ They’re the pregnancy cravings I got.
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The only other advice you need is:
1) Don’t have the enema, because crapping on the man who knocked you up in the first place will be the most satisfying revenge.
2)When the doctor is sewing you up after the episiotomy, just tell him to keep on sewing. You don’t want anything going in or coming out of there ever again.
The baby
The real sexist joke is that the birth is a doddle compared to what comes next – cracked nipples, constipation, mountains of haemorrhoids – Edmund Hillary couldn’t scale those bastards. And it’s so boring. Sometimes a mother is so bored she can see her plants engaging in photosynthesis. I once grew a yeast infection as a change of pace.
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But no matter how bad it gets, you can’t escape. Your bloke can nip off down the pub, but you are tethered by the tit. You are a 24-hour catering service – Meals on Heels.
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And even when your bloke’s at home he’s no help. He’s conveniently developed selective aural and olfactory tendencies. Even though he can still smell a baked dinner being cooked in the Outer Hebrides, he’s suddenly unable to whiff a filthy nappy on the child in his lap. This sudden nasal congestion is only matched by his sporadic deafness. While he can hear a beer can being pulled open at an Arctic base camp, his erratic hearing means he can’t detect a squealing baby in the cot by his head. ‘Oh, sorry, love, was the baby crying?’ It’s learned helplessness, a special talent perfected by generations of fathers.
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Dad (nose pinched between fingers): ‘I think the baby needs changing.’
Mum: ‘Yes . . . preferably for the heir to an oil fortune.’
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Perhaps dads are so reluctant to change nappies because they can’t understand why their baby sons don’t just disappear into the lavatory for hours on end with a copy of Sporting Life.
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Parenting manuals warn that, after the birth, some men may feel usurped, rejected and neglected. What such books should say is that men like this . . . should be strung up by their testicles immediately.
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Wife (kissing her beautiful newborn’s cheek): ‘Who’s Mummy’s lovely baby boy?’
Husband (sulkily): ‘I am, actually.”
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The only way to get fathers involved in their babies is to explain things in terms of football or automobiles. With any luck, he’ll think that ‘gross motor skills’ mean driving a tacky car.
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If you want the father of your children to be involved, then invest in gadgets. While new mothers acquire the ability to discuss their baby’s bowel movements long after the listener’s own interest has waned, Dads become Cecil B. DeMilles, videoing every nanosecond of the child’s life for the archives, then immediately viewing the footage. ‘Brings back memories, doesn’t it?’ he’ll sob.
Designer genes
Over half of all marriages end in divorce, so before having unprotected sex ask yourself, is this the man whose name you want your baby to see on the child maintenance cheques every month?
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The only thing worse than taking the consequences is giving birth to one of them.
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Unplanned pregnancy: there’s a baby in my bathwater!
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Men sow wild oats while praying for a crop failure.
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Most men test positive to allergies to nappies, Lego, broken sleep, having little gates all over the house and only buying food which harmonizes with animated cooking utensils on daytime TV. ‘My fridge is too small,’ he’ll say. ‘I’ve got nowhere to put those awful finger paintings. I told you not to fall pregnant.’
But you didn’t ‘fall’ pregnant. You were bloody well pushed.
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It doesn’t require a mathematical genius to work out that it takes two to make a baby. It’s a foetal attraction.
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What’s the difference between a pregnant woman and a light bulb? You can unscrew a light bulb.
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A man should have a bumper sticker on his penis saying, ‘Caution: Baby on Board’.
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Be warned – even older men can still fire live ammunition. He may tell you that you’re his sexual swan song, but there could be a cygnature tune.
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And there really is nothing more pathetic than a geriatric father taking a nap at the same time as his teething toddler: one in a nappy and one in incontinence pants.
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On becoming a father: at least most men are programmed to the baby’s schedule – up all night, drinking.
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Many blokes think Ovulation is a warm milk drink before beddy-byes.
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Some men think a paternity suit is the latest look in men’s leisurewear.
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Some fathers chicken out of their obligation to their eggs.
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What a sham. What a Havisham. But Miss Havisham was better off. At least she wasn’t up the duff when he ditched her. Even Mary and Joseph had a stable relationship.
Custody
The reason most mums get custody is that fathers just don’t have the right qualifications; he hasn’t a bloody clue how to make models of space stations using old shoeboxes, at short notice on a school night.
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Most men only know how to look after dogs. The child will be cocking its leg on trees within days. Next time you see your son, he’ll come to heel when called and catch a Frisbee between his teeth.
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If the footie’s on, the baby monitor will say, ‘Sorry, but the father you are trying to reach is temporarily disconnected. Please try again.’
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Leave a father alone with the kids for a weekend and he’ll shove them back into the condom-vending machine for a refund.
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Crisp jeans and spotless jumper, no doubt hand-knitted by Peruvian lesbians, is a sign he’s a Gentleman Father: the type who holds forth at every opportunity about the joys of fatherhood . . . but farms his kids out to a nanny at the drop of a small turd.
Exes
An ex may state that he should be able to see his kids when he has time and not just when you do. If he whines, ‘My access should be when it’s convenient for us both,’ simply reply, ‘Well, it wasn’t particularly convenient for me when you started shagging my best friend and moved out, now was it, you dingo-dicked bastard.’
Upper-class English men
Do you know how the upper-class bloke breaks the news of his impending fatherhood? ‘Dah-ling, we’re going to have a nanny!’ The reason upper-class English men are so flawed as human beings is because their mothers left them with the nanny, who left them at the bottom of the garden and fed them by the clock. That was the doctrine of the baby guru Truby King. Well, not only did Truby turn out to be a New Zealander, and a man, but his whole philosophy was based on the scientific rearing of bucket-fed calves on an asylum farm. Need I say more?
Circumcision
The only possible reply to a man who insists that his son be circumcised because he was is ‘Yeah, and they threw away the wrong part.’
Hypocrisy in the workplace
Mums must pretend to have an allergy to children. Male bosses frisk you upon arrival for finger paintings or photographs, whereas when a man with a framed baby photo on his desk takes time off for sports days he’s praised for his sensitivity and well-roundedness.
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A dad like this will soon be writing articles on the importance of quality time with one’s children . . . while ignoring plaintive pleas from his own offspring to come and lose at Monopoly.
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Even though mothers butter 4,000 acres of toast, roast hundreds of flocks of lambs and herds of cows and schools of salmon; even though we run trays up to a child’s room for nothing more serious than a stubbed toe; even though we unpick our kids’ pee-stained shoelaces with our teeth – your baby’s first word will be ‘Dad’.
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And when you eventually divorce him for taking all the credit but not doing any of the work, your teenagers will blame you. ‘Yeah, right, I was married to a bloody saint. I’ll send away for the necessary paperwork to have the bloke canonized the second I get the chance,’ you want to flippantly reply – although, of course, you don’t, as you don’t want to psychologically scar the little poppets.
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Dignity is a superfluous emotion for mothers. Like styling mousse for bald men.
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Which is why you won’t even break down when your teenage daughter screams, ‘This divorce is all your fault. I hate you! I wish you’d just die!’
Simply have another swig of wine, take a drag on one of the cigarettes you stopped smoking ten years ago and reply, ‘I’m doing my best, darling.’
CHAPTER 8
Infidelity
Fifty per cent of married people are having affairs and the other 50 per cent will no doubt be looking for one as soon as they read that statistic.
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Husbands and wives no longer separate after dinner. No, they separate at the end of the evening to go to their respective lovers.
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But the question on the minds of most women is, how can a husband have a midlife crisis when he’s never left puberty?
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Many men go straight from puberty to adultery.
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But to be an adulterer, surely you have to be an actual adult first?
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An adulterer is a bloke who helps himself because he can’t help himself.
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Boys will be boys . . . and so will a lot of octogenarian businessmen who should know better.
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Philandering is a disease of male nymph glands. He is sexually incontinent.
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A new invention is required. The monogamous husband. Patent pending.
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‘Devoted husband’ is oxymoronic.
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When the right man comes along, most women have the strength of character to say, ‘No, thank you – I’m already married.’
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There are always going to be things about which one can do nothing: the supermarket express checkout queue moving more slowly than the other lanes, freak asteroids . . . and husbands being unfaithful.
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Behind every successful man is a wife . . . Under every successful man is a mistress. (Otherwise known as a mattress.)
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Around middle age, your previously strait-laced spouse will become a heat-seeking moisture missile.
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But if he’s going to have a midlife crisis, couldn’t he just, I dunno, buy an impractical car? Or cross the Channel on a homemade raft? I mean, isn’t that ridiculous motorbike enough?
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When your husband says he’s leaving you for a younger woman because he ‘needs more space’, retort: ‘Space? Well, may I suggest that you look between the ears of your pubescent princess?’
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By the time a husband ‘finds himself’, there’ll be nobody home.
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To stop him getting lost, install a psychological sat nav. ‘You have taken a wrong turn. Go back to your wife. Cerebral cul-de-sac.’
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Women like a man who is in touch with his feminine side – but not on another woman.
How to tell if your husband is having an affair
Has your sex life become like trying to thread a needle with spaghetti? Is he flossing during foreplay? Is he smoking during sex? Does he drape his arm limply across the back of your shoulders with all the passion of a beach towel? A very good guage that your marriage is going stale is if the last time you tongue-kissed was when he’d spent too long underneath a wave in the Caribbean.
