Men Are From Mars, My Friend Is From Planet Psycho

I have this girlfriend, see. And normally, I wouldn't write this kind of dish about a friend, but she isn't normal. She's a luddite of the first water. She has an e-mail address, but no computer: she has someone pick up her mail, print it out, and fax it to her. I don't even want to contemplate how the reverse works. I know it involves a typewriter. A typewriter, which, in all due honesty, is, in fact, electric.
So this girlfriend has issues with men. Specifically, she is a man-hater. Except for their dicks. Those, she assures me, she likes. But I have to wonder, seeing as how she holds men in such low regard, why she just doesn't keep a vibrator around and save herself much aggravation.

Every time we talk about men, and let me assure you, I try not to, she ends up in this rant about "men retreat to caves when they are in relationships, because they can't handle intimacy."

She goes on and on and on and on and on, and did I say she goes on at great length? about how men can't communicate; how men are all dogs; how men can only exist in one of two planes: the vertical in which you can do business or converse, or the horizontal in which you can do the horizontal mambo. The two planes, she believes, are mutually exclusive.

She informed me during our last conversation, that every single man she has ever been involved with, has cheated on her. I should note that by single man we mean every individual, because she is not so refined in her sensibilities as to stick to the unmarried variety.

This led me to consider the possibility that A) she only chooses men who are emotionally unavailable because she herself is emotionally unavailable, or B) she is more of a psycho than she appears to me, and drives the men, screaming, into the arms of other women -- and let me say that she looks like a bona fide psycho to me, so being more of one is a frightening proposition, or C) she only thinks that they cheat on her (and where does the married guy doing his wife fall?) or D) all men are pigdogs and I should think about my own track record.

I did. And nobody (except the Antichrist, and of course he would) cheated on me in my grand single days. Or if they did, I didn't know or didn't care, seeing as how it was a matter of goose and gander.

In any event, she is currently embarking on a new, dysfunctional and long-distance romance with a man she can barely stand being with when they aren't between the sheets. At least, that was the gist that I gleaned from her last hour-long screed about what sacks of shit men are.

She allowed as how, despite his bad politics, his paternalistic pandering and his harping on her to quit (chain)smoking, she had no desire to change him, and that made him a first in her long line of rejects.

That was a telling sentence, huh? All these losers she's been keeping company with, all these dogs who had to go mark other territory, she's been trying to change them all. Into what? Sausages? Lawn jockeys?

The whole point of men, in my opinion, is that they are not women. They are different. They communicate differently, they hold their silverware differently, they channel surf differently. As the French would say "Vive la difference!" Sure, they're dogs. But hell, I love my dog, too.

But I digress. In fact, I've digressed so much I forgot what the point was that I was trying to make.

I guess it was that if you think the opposite sex is from another planet, maybe you should check your own home address first.