All women think about is good sex and bad hair, suggests a new survey.
BODY LANGUAGE
Kate Taylor
Asking your lover, “What are you thinking about?” has always been a one-stop route to getting dumped. That’s because you’re only ever prompted to ask it at inopportune moments, like when they’ve just watched you being sick, or you’ve caught your lover ogling someone younger and prettier than you eating a banana.
So it should have been good news when a United States survey definitively revealed what women think about most often. But the results were, in fact, spectacularly depressing it revealed that the top two subjects playing across the intriguing, challenging, mysterious female mind every day are: good sex and bad hair.
Am I the only woman who feels busted? And ashamed? Because those results are and it kills me to admit this quite true. They’re not 100% accurate (you’d have to include cuticles and “I really shouldn’t eat this”), but they’re a reasonably accurate map of where our brains will wander when left unchaperoned for 20 minutes.
Women are, really, a bit shallow. Before you start coming over all feminist and writing in, just think about it for a minute. What are you talking about when your face gets genuinely animated? What subjects do you run up huge phone bills agonising about? What keeps you awake at night? If it’s world peace or the economy, I applaud you. Go off and make the world a better place. But don’t come running to me when your fringe goes all frizzy.
When you trace our beginnings, it’s easy to see where we get these two obsessions from. It’s our mission to populate the species. To do that, we have to have sex and, to do that, we have to attract mates. Given that heritage, good sex and bad hair are inextricably linked and sadly, the first usually results in the second. Is it any wonder that women are constantly distracted by dating and fashion? I don’t think it’s that bad a thing, either.
The truth is, sex and beauty make us happy. When a woman feels attractive and loved, she is unstoppable. This might be why the highest incidents of depression are among married women. Sex invariably suffers in a long-term relationship and nothing says “scrape it back into a ponytail” faster than an impatient husband waiting to go to homebase.
But I am confused about the order. Good sex was first (taking up 48 minutes of our thoughts every day), while bad hair was second (43 minutes). Really? I’ve never known a female who spends that long thinking about sex. Hair mousse and curling tongs, maybe. Not even I spend that long thinking about sex and it forms the bulk of my career.
Truth is, if you catch me on the bus clutching a bulging Boots bag and letting out involuntary groans, I’m more likely to be holding a new straightening-iron than a batch of ribbed condoms. I think it would be more accurate to say that women think about bad sex and good hair. We can be hopelessly neurotic about our love lives and brilliantly supportive about our appearances.
But I do wish these results had never been made public. The best thing about being female is our mystique. We are unpredictable and irrational. We can be unbearably cruel, then heart-stoppingly kind. We cry, we bleed, we feel. We can make babies in the space where men only make gas.
So do we really want blokes knowing that, when we gaze wistfully out of the window on long car journeys, we are really thinking not of peace, or love, or revolution, but of whether highlights would make our hair look a bit more full? The only answer to “What are you thinking about?” is an enigmatic smile. For the sake of the future of the population, at least.