Boredom and Potato Cannons.

I arrived home on Thursday. At 9 AM: the flight to NZ had arrived at 5 AM in Auckland. When I got home, Son one talked to me for two hours. The pro photog — who is interested in most things — helped keep the conversation up, because I could not that well, but he wanted to go through his thoughts and check his numbers (the issue was the funding for DHBs per person: Otago is not paid as a rural board, or not at the same rate as the true rural boards, despite only a third of the catchment being in Dunedin, and the board having a geographic area about the same size as Belgium).

This is fairly common in our house. And not only our house. When the guys get together, the nerdy ones talk issues: if the group is not nerdy we talk hunting or sports. Some women enjoy these things… but a lot would rather discuss relationships (and if there are no local dramas, there are always the artificially gossip narratives, such as the Kardashians).

As Vanessa and I agreed in the old days, on her then hot blog, women are actually pretty dull in the main. Very few have anything genuinely interesting to say. I used to observe that in a group of 10 men and 10 women, about 8 of the men would have something worth saying, and maybe 2 of the women. It was not lack of intelligence. It was just that the women had no broader ideas and views. Whereas even ordinary men have ideas they want to discuss. (I was sitting near a group of three older blokes at a coffee shop today, and they were talking about high politics. I laughed to myself, there you go, men planning how to fix the world, with no power to make the slightest difference. But that is men for you. They never stop thinking about the bigger issues.)

(It is possible to find an interesting woman. I married one. But they are not as common as we are led to believe).

Men have been building better and better toys for decades now. And what do you do with toys? You play with them. I used to think that men would not want to have sex with a cybergirl. But men don’t need much. We are perfectly capable of having “sex” with a photograph on a page. Just wait til the Tyrell Corporaton create a slightly better doll. “More Human Than Human is Our Motto”. Rachael will do just fine.

In a sense, both sexes are living off their patrimony. After numerous generations of women bearing children, they have decided not to bother so much. And, they think, why should they? It was only ever a duty, and nobody holds them to it now. And the men are also living it up. Why should they not live off their patrimony? They are not going to starve if they only get some undemanding job. There are plenty of toys around these days. The slacker is not a peasant in a hovel. A woman is not the most interesting thing in his dwelling. Chances are she is only getting in the way of the screen anyway.

I agree with Julian that this is not really anything to do with intelligence, but seems to be something around social skills and social status. Most women conversations revolve around such issues — akin to the the school yard, where it matters for a little girl if she is bestest friends or not. Boys, generally, care less. They are too busy trying to hit each other with balls (Stingball — tag using a tennis ball, and extra points of you leave a bruse) or tackle each other (bullrush. enough said).

Give most guys a topic and they will talk for hours. But relationships (yes I know there are exceptions).

I would argue that this is one reason Paul told older women and not older men to teach younger women how to love their children and husbands. Firstly, men and women are different, and both need a space where they can be boys and girls. Secondly, loving your children and husband is not instinctual: it is a skill. We have to be taught such things (from how to breast feed and launder nappies to how to give each child their own time and their own space to how to care for yourself in the process). This requires that (women generally) are taught advanced parental skills and housekeeping skills — including the budgetl.

The guys are content discussion issues at the gate of the city. Or repairing said gate. or fixing the floods. It matters not that much. But guys are different.

And if we have to watch the Kardashians alone: boredom (and potato cannons) will happen. For better that than we go and hide in our rooms with our toys and go full Otaku: the nightmare that Julian worries about.