MANY university research papers have noted that women are complex and men are simple.

My own observations have just proven this theory of physiological phenomena beyond doubt.

It all started when I was peacefully reading the papers on Saturday afternoon.

The Gatekeeper had gone missing. I assumed she was shopping.

Suddenly, the chilling sound of stuff being smashed to pieces erupted somewhere near the King household.

It was an audio avalanche that sounded like a rabid tyrannosaurus rex devouring a truckload of shattered glass.

I leapt from the couch, ran to the balcony and looked down in dread.

With a sinister glint in her eye, the Gatekeeper held a plastic bag full of smashed stuff high above her head.

Rushing down to stop her, I wondered if she’d blown a fuse after discovering my secret stash of Bob Dylan albums, which she banished from the house in disgust a year ago.

What I discovered when I got down there was more dangerous and frightening than I could’ve imagined.

The Gatekeeper was making a mosaic table.

Those gut-wrenching sounds were the smashing and crashing of tiles on our cement driveway, a task she performed with just a little too much enthusiasm.

She was poised for another violent swing of the bag full of sharp tile shards, so I decided not to mention it would’ve been cheaper, easier, quicker and quieter to buy a bloody mosaic table.

The whole project has since turned into an operation of mammoth proportions, mainly because women are complex and men are simple.

Imagine my horror when a mate told me his missus once attempted to create a mosaic pot plant, only to give up quick smart because it was too hard.

The area of a pot plant is nothing compared to our table. It is a very, very big table.

Yes, mosaic making is an arduous task. After ferociously bashing the tiles into hundreds of little pieces, it takes hours of pain-staking gluing, grouting and cleaning to put the bits of tile into place.

By the time it’s all done you’ll be so old you won’t need a table to eat from because you’ll be sucking dinner through a straw.

I’ve never had my fingernails ripped off with rusty pliers but I imagine it is only slightly more painful than making a mosaic table, or watching your beloved attempt to make one.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd regularly writes with a feminist slant about the inferiority of the male species.

columnist Maureen Dowd regularly writes with a feminist slant about the inferiority of the male species.columnist Maureen Dowd regularly writes with a feminist slant about the inferiority of the male species.

"The journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear," she wrote with relish a few years ago.

Dowd quoted a Duke University genome expert whose research found men were simply predictable.

"Genetically speaking, if you’ve met one man, you’ve met them all," he said.

"We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can’t say that about women.

"Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew.

"It’s not Mars or Venus. It’s Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."

In the same article Dowd quoted science reporter Nicholas Wade, who in a stroke of masculine genius compared women to, you guessed it, mosaics.

"Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell," he said. "Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

I am not a religious man, but having witnessed a week of mosaic sessions with no end in sight I feel blessed to be born with dangly bits and a brain so simple it shuts down in its spare time.

Thank God for that.

 

Share this article