Some of you had been touted as the next big thing on the modelling ramp when in actual fact you cannot even make the pages of an edition of The Weird and Wacky Creatures.
My mum one day inexplicably called me a prince. I am not exactly sure what I had done to get such praises but I believe it would have been something like voluntarily doing homework without a little civil war.
Now in the fairy tales we had read up to that point princes were supposed to be handsome. I started believing my mum’s deception until a girl I tried to hit on put me in my right place with a curt ‘Pick your level’ and dunked my ‘princely’ airs in a reality bucket. Despite this I always took my mother’s advice seriously. Like when I was growing up I asked her what girls/women want in a man. Her answer was ‘a man with a good sense of humour’. I knew I couldn’t change my looks much but I believed I could learn how to become funny and make everyone laugh. The issue of what women are interested in has always been a vexing one.
Like at high school when curls were in fashion, most guys would go to the hair salon and get the hair curled and look nice and beautiful. But our budgets were restricted to the visit to the hair salon. So after a while because we could not afford the sprays and activators that was maintenance fuel for the curls trouble started brewing on top of our heads. The hair eventually rolled into little balls and gave an impression of a free range sheep. What would have been a status-enhancing hairstyle quickly morphed into an embarrassing low-budget nightmare. So for most of us curls were a short-term (lasted just a week after the hair salon visit) attempt to win over the girls.
Eventually the girls would get tired of your uninspiring hairstyle and move on to the guys who were fresh from the hair salon with fresher curls. Towards the end of high school and the early college years, muscles became a thing. When the Gym and Muscle Bus came, it picked up most of my friends and left me by the bus stop. When it came back guys had sic packs and nicely formed bodies while I was the little scrawny guy with a promising pot belly. For me the weights were too heavy.
But guys who did not pump iron as it was called then were dismissed as dweebs. ‘Let him stay behind and study. The world needs more nerds’ was the usual line used to demean us and push us into Wackoland. Their voices were deeper and more guttural, which I suspect went with their all macho look and appearance.
My voice stayed in the Minnie Mouse range, something which the female side didn’t really want. I worked the humour side and tried to be the funniest guy in school but the dweeb tag never really left me. I would tell the best jokes but the girls would leave with the guys with muscles, tucked in between their bulging biceps and forearms.
They would later remember me as the guy that made everyone laugh but that is as good as it got. The formerly phantom men’s conference which now passes as a High Level Consultative Council for men will hopefully try to guess and establish what women really want in a man and come up with a manual, a guide of sorts.
The Men’s Conference has now lost its phantom status and has finally happened as it took its maiden voyage last month. Yes, some dismissed it as a ploy by males to extricate themselves from their Valentine’s Day commitments. But it doesn’t matter, does it. Fact is, the Men’s Conference happened. From this conference I hope they have drawn up a definitive list of what women actually want. And on the list could well be: muscles, style, curly hair, money, sense of humour, beautiful set of wheels.
No matter how much you try you cannot have all these converging on you if you are a man. A sad fact because that means most of the time women are getting less than what they really want. (For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected].
