Men now know stuff they didn’t know about women and they are LOVING IT

Women are mysterious. We’re elusive Sphinxes with enigmatic smiles. We always have PMS. And we’re always doing something borderline irrational, or whatever. It is fair that guys get a bit confused.

By the way, blokes confuse us just as much as we do them. But women prefer to talk about their feelings – if someone is going to debunk this whole gender thing, it’s probably going to be a woman. And this afternoon, journalist Caitlin Moran made a bid for gender peace, delivering a guide for Esquire, titled 12 Things Men Don’t Know About Women.

And 20-something blokes are loving it. All over Facebook, they’re posting the link with captions like “This is excellent” and “Caitlin Moran is a godsend”.

Moran introduces her commandments with an equanimous analysis of male-female relations. She concedes that many underestimate the modern man (“you’re not hanging out the back of a bus shouting CLUNGE! at a bunch of terrified 15-year olds”) but that the modern man must observe that “while society’s happy for a famous man to age, the women generally still seem to be 20 years younger, and standing there on the cover of magazines, all like, ‘Oh! My clothes… they fell off!'”

Our clothes – while typically more expensive than yours – rarely fall off. She then chats a bit about pay disparity, vaginas (obviously), waxing (“basically VAT on your minge”) and periods (they happen). And then she launches into her illuminating gospel. This is a crib sheet on Moran’s crib sheet to understanding women.

The notion of “The Man” is hurting us both.

“Remember that patriarchy’s bumming you as hard as it’s bumming us,” she writes. “We’re bulimic, objectified and under-promoted. You, meanwhile, are unable to talk about your feelings lest you get punched in the nuts by ‘a lad’ telling you not to be ‘a bender’.”

Periods? It’s just logistics.

“We’re just people with a whole load more laundry issues than you,” she points out. “Have you ever tried to scrub blood out of a Premier Inn sheet at 6am, using just travel shampoo and your toothbrush?” Yes, it is logistics. But, as she also notes, “it’s one of the defining aspects of being a woman”. (Additional note: cut us some slack if we don’t feel like going down on you to make up for the fact we can’t shag you for the next four days.)

The abortion debate needs some male voices.

“Here’s another thing we’re too embarrassed to say: we’d love it if a big bunch of pro-choice men turned up at these clinics, and helped escort the scared women in. That would be some top bro solidarity.”

But all the other debates need some female voices. She points to a study conducted in the US last year, that discovered “in a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25 per cent of the time or less, it’s seen as being “equally balanced”. And if women talk 25–50 per cent of the time, they’re seen as “dominating the conversation”.

Also:

• Women still have a lot to be frightened of and sometimes walk down the street at night “with our keys clutched between our fingers, as a weapon.” This is not irrational.
• Sexual harassment is exhausting.
• “We masturbate as much as you do”. Don’t start masturbating about that.
• We want you to be feminists too. Please don’t be afraid of using the word – as Moran observes, “feminism can only work if men are feminists, too”.

So there you have it.