I told Stuart today about the panel show I watched on TV last night on which a lot of women were very intelligently, I thought, analysing the reasons why there is such a housing shortage in Australia at present and what they thought should be done about it. I felt they acquitted themselves very well and I told Stuart so.
Stuart, of course, took a different tack, and said that was because women like to talk about things while men like to do things. This put me back on my heels a bit, and I told him I disagreed. He then asked me how many houses in my neighbourhood were built by women, none of course, and that maybe, instead of talking about the housing shortage, those chatting women should do an apprenticeship for three or four years, doing crap work for crap pay, and then contribute to building houses by shovelling concrete in the hot sun, laying bricks in the rain or crawling around in confined ceiling spaces for twenty or thirty years because, guess what, that’s what a lot of men do. This, Stuart considered, would empower them. He reckons that if men behaved like these women, we’d all be living in caves, enthusiastically discussing the cave shortage problem and how are we going to get more of them dug. He says he gets that women don’t want to build homes for people, as neither does he, but, hey, the Fun Fems could add that that to their list of often quoted statistics.
I was thinking he’s full of manspeak, but I couldn’t say it.
He thinks he has an answer for everything.