What Women Want

Here are the closing thoughts from last night's Film Club Extra:

What Women Want

Our eyes meet across a crowded room. There is a sparkle. We engage each other in conversation. I hear, you say, ‘I like your shirt.’ In fact you are thinking, ‘I’m not sure I could live with a nose that long.’ Which of the two sentences is likely to prolong the relationship?

Movies don’t necessarily answer questions correctly but they do get to ask some good ones.

· What would it be like if we could tell who would commit the crimes?

· What would it be like if a modern teenager lived in the 1950s?

Two questions recent movies we have watched here have posed, and attempted to answer.

And so to the question many men, no, make that all men surely, have asked since, ooh for ever. What do women really want?

Writer and director Nancy Meyers (yes this film has a strong female hand behind it) uses the simple narrative device of an accident to enable Nick Marshall to hear the thoughts of the women all around him. And they aren’t always that complimentary.

He discovers that people he thought liked him are tolerant at best. He discovers that those he thought doted on him never think about him at all. He discovers that during love-making his partner is thinking about what’s on TV.

Bit of a jolt. Is this a skill that is as helpful as you might have thought?

A survey published in the Independent recently concluded that ‘Bad boys, it seems, really do get all the girls.

‘Women might claim they want caring, thoughtful types’ the accompanying article went on to say, ‘...but scientists have discovered what they really want – self-obsessed, lying psychopaths.

‘A study has found that men with the ‘dark triad’ of traits – narcissism, thrill-seeking and deceitfulness – are likely to have a larger number of sexual affairs.’

Now I can see a slight flaw in the logic there. Whilst such men may have more sexual relationships that is not the same as saying that they are doing what women want. They may be employing a succesful, evolutionary strategy, but the strategy of leaving, bonding and sticking seems to produce succesful offspring too.

Further more, in the chilling world of the Film Club Extra speaker’s research, I also found articles that suggested that my chances of getting a date improve if I touch a woman gently on the arm for a couple of seconds when engaging her in conversation, that women want less judgementalism about their looks, especially in the media, that women want their views listened to on national issues and, well guess what, to be listened to more.

I wouldn’t dare suggest that I knew what the truth was.

Perhaps one general answer might be that there is no more one answer to the question ‘What do women want’ than there is one answer to the question, ‘How do we run the economy?’

In the complex world of relationships a rash generalisation might be that men share too little. Men bottle it up. What Women Want tells us that whilst women are free with their emotional sharing and, if anything, do the opposite of bottling, they are not telling the world the truth. Not the whole truth anyway.

Trying to get to know someone when one partner keeps their thoughts bottled up and the other shares less than the full truth is the way soap operas have worked for years.

In reality a gentle move towards each other might be helpful, is helpful, but the gift of telepathy might stop a lot of potential partnerships at the outset and might cause untold damage to some long-standing ones.

‘Does my bum look big in this?’

‘Darling your bum looks big in ... everything.’

To quote another movie. ‘Truth. You can’t handle the truth.’ Can we?

Maybe we should reflect on the fact that tact, diplomacy and sensitivity are all loosely related to lies.

I was given a prayer once which a woman in a previous church I worked at saw on the wall of another church whilst on holiday.

It was by the pulpit. ‘May I open my mouth and speak the truth. If it is the truth may it be the whole truth. If it is the whole truth may it not be merciless.’

There’s the rub. We live our lives with more principles than simply, ‘Truth at all costs.’ Mercy, grace, loyalty and honour are also in there somewhere. We need to weigh them up too.

Oh and by the way... What do men want? That might be quite a short film.

Please don’t argue on the way home. Month off next.

See you in September.