Why I prefer English newspapers:
This is the problem. I am designed to kill foxes, bend every woman I meet over the nearest piece of furniture and give her a damn good seeing-to. But in an evolutionary nanosecond, it’s all changed. After several million years of programming we’ve been told that what women really want is a husband who leaves his colleagues in the lurch at 7pm and comes home to make a delicious quiche.
That’s like telling your faithful family toaster after a lifetime spent making toast that you want it to become a washing machine. And it’s not just a bunch of baggy-breasted feminists making the point either. It’s every single girl from the age of puberty to the menopause.
Last weekend my colleague James May hurt his wrist while performing a stunt at the MPH show in London. Being male, mostly, he shrugged it off and kept going, which caused all the backstage women to treat him like a leper. If he’d wanted to impress them he should have abandoned the show, gone home, sold his heartwarming story to OK! magazine, and spent the next six weeks watching Love Actually with his cat.
I’m trying to imagine this being published in the Washington Times, let alone the New York Times. And you know, I just can’t. Even the writers with whom I disagree vociferously at least don’t write that stultifyingly milksop politically-correct prose that so many products of American J-schools produce by the quart.
But underneath the slashing sarcasm is much the same point that the Pan-Gargler often makes, which is that it is ridiculous and counterproductive for men to look to women to tell them what it is that makes a man.