When it comes to the differences between men and women, I’ve never been one to evoke the Men-are-from-Mars-Women-from-Venus thesis. This isn’t because I know or care one whit about the differences between the sexes.It’s just that these Venus and Mars books never seem to tell you what planet the slackers and the slobs are from. (Slackers are from Neptune; Slobs are from Uranus? Tell me for heaven’s sake. I want to know!)
Sorry, but if these people who write these books aren’t going to have the decency to include me and those who surround me in their fashionable theories, then I’m probably not going to pay much attention to their books. Simple as that.
That said, there are moments when you have to wonder if there isn’t a smidgen of truth this Venus and Mars business. This occurs to me whenever I’m in the presence of a man, a woman and a widescreen plasma TV.
In case you haven’t noticed, they’re all the rage these days, these supersized television sets. Forget the old rabbit ears and the floor-model cabinet
ry from the seventies. We’ve entered the era of the plasma, the LCD and a rear-projection wide-screen. It’s all so twenty-first century.But what interests me about these modern widescreen TVs is the way they seem to divide us along the fault-lines of gender. It’s not as simple as saying men like widescreen TVs and women don’t.
Women, once they’ve seen them, like their widescreen plasmas as much as men do. No, the differences I’ve observed appear more in the way men and women perceive their widescreen TV. It’s almost like they’re talking two different languages.
Women, upon seeing a widescreen for the first time, will likely comment on something simple like picture quality. “My,” you might hear a woman say. “What a clear picture.”
If she wanted to be macho about it, she might remark on the screen’s dpi count. But women, being women, don’t need macho acronyms to make their point.
Women will also be interested in the thinness of these screens. Again, being women, they’ll be thinking about where in the room the thing will fit and how heavy it will be to lug into the house. Practical concerns for such a sexy toy, I hear you muse, but this is a woman’s way.
Men, on the other hand, focus on very different questions. I wouldn’t want to be accused of double entendre here, but has anyone else noticed how men tend to obsess over the number of, ahem, inches on the widescreens?
Just go into a widescreen showroom and listen to them talking about these TVs. Men are obsessed with the size. And they aren’t talking feet or centimeters, either. It’s all about the inches.
A real man wants to know is whether it’s a thirty six inch, forty two inch or – saints preserve us - a seventy-four inch rear projection. And once they’ve got their many-inched widescreen, it’s a rite of passage to compare notes with other men. You know the sort of thing: “Hey buddy, how many inches is yours?”
So, ladies and gentlemen, I guess we have incontrovertible evidence that size does matter, at least to men. Now, if we could just get them to let go of the remote control.
