Something for the girls
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Interesting Concept.
Any ladies care to take the \"Many Faces of Men\"
quiz and see what type of \"face\" your
man has? Might be interesting for the guys to check out too.
I ran across this less than flattering
review:
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Fantasy fellas
Men and women are not
all that different. So who needs The Many Faces of Men, Stephen Whitehead\'s simplistic, cliche-ridden guide to
blokes?
Rachel Cooke
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer
The Many Faces of Men: The Definitive Guide to
the Male Species
by Stephen Whitehead
Arrow £6.99, pp242
As a child, I was keen on I Spy books. Of these, my
favourite was I Spy Trees. Oak, ash, sycamore, elder: you ticked them off one by one and then, the volume full of
dates and places, you sent it off to Big Chief I Spy to be stamped and authenticated.
Stephen Whitehead, senior
lecturer in sociology at the University of Keele and author of a new Spotter\'s Guide to Men, appears to fancy
himself as a kind of Big Chief I Spy (although one assumes he sports cords and knitted ties rather than a big,
feathery headdress). Apparently, there are 27 distinct \'types\' of bloke out there in \'the forest of men\'
and, with the help of his book, which is based on the latest academic research, we girls will be able to tell one
kind from another faster than you can say: \'I\'ll have a glass of dry white wine, please.\' Even better,
we\'ll also discover - cue cheesy drum-roll - which sort make the best husbands.
Trying hard to ignore the
sexism inherent in this premise - and from a sociologist, too! - I approached The Many Faces of Men with the same
girlish gusto as I used to attack my I Spy books. Adonis? Tick. Teddy bear? Tick. Neanderthal? Tick, Tick.
Thereafter, however, I found the chaps in question increasingly elusive. I have looked high and low, but I cannot
find a Jeffrey anywhere (Most Likely To Say: \'Not everyone knows this, but Diana and I were very close.\').
Neither have I ever knowingly stumbled on a Zebedee (this is a man who feels impotent and at sea and not, as you
might imagine, one with a red nose and outsized springs on his shoes) or a Wayne (a bandy-legged type who sounds
like he has strolled straight out of a Toffo ad). So much for my being a woman of the world.
The nub of the
problem here is that, for all his much-vaunted work in the field of \'masculinity\', Whitehead, just like John
(Men Are From Mars) Gray before him, has bought into the hoary idea that men and women inhabit different planets and
speak different languages - a conceit he is unable to render intellectually sound, no matter how much he peppers it
with Barthes and Baudrillard. Think of the sexes like this and all you end up with is a bunch of boring stereotypes.
Cliches exhausted, Whitehead is then reduced to scrabbling around for enough feeble chapter headings to plump out
his reedy and exceedingly stagnant thesis. Step forward Jeffrey: \'a man who does not exist except in his own
fevered imaginings\'.
Worse, while Whitehead pays lip service to the modern woman (she\'s a careerist with -
surprise, surprise - predatory instincts) he clearly considers most girls to be a bit daffy when it comes to the
opposite sex. Faced with one of these exotic and confusingly opaque creatures, our minds turn to meringue, our knees
to jelly. Why else would he resort to explaining, ever-so-slowly, that a Jester likes a woman who laughs at his
jokes, or that a man whose mates are \'shag-happy\' should set alarm bells ringing? Most of us worked out this
kind of stuff back when we were still frequenting the school disco.
This is such a futile, reductive way of
looking at human beings and it is one that most females out-grow at roughly the same time as they stop poring over a
battered copy of Women Who Love Too Much and get into Philip Roth instead. Personally, I am inclined to agree with
Ivy Compton-Burnett: there is more difference within the sexes than between them. Yes, some men are commitment-shy,
prone to making jokes during moments of high emotion, and strangely unmoved by the novels of Carol Shields; but so
are some women. Yes, some women are broody, marriage-oriented and likely to cry every time they see Jenny Agutter
reunited with her Daddy in The Railway Children; but so, strange as it may sound, are some men.
When it comes to
relationships, it is best to assume that both sexes want the same things (a little love, comfort and companionship,
plus a few good jokes) and that the rare exceptions who do not only go to prove the rule. Convince yourself that the
situation is otherwise - that weird, unfathomable stuff is going on inside your lover\'s head - and you will end
up bawling at one another in the rude and undignified manner of English tourists asking for directions in a souk.
Every conversation will be open to ceaseless translation; every phone call and email a minefield of misapprehension.
A relationship lived this way is not only exhausting; it is boring, too. And boredom, as surely everyone knows by
now (though not, it would seem, dear Big Chief Whitehead) is the sworn enemy of sex.
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