A kind reader e-mailed a joke that spawned this article. It goes like this:
A lady was walking down the street after leaving the nail salon when she was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless woman who asked her for a couple of dollars for dinner.
She took out her wallet, got out a 10-dollar bill and asked, “If I give you this money, will you buy wine with it instead of dinner?”
“No, I had to stop drinking years ago,” the homeless woman told her.
“Will you use it to go shopping instead of buying food?” she asked.
“No, I don’t waste time shopping,” the homeless woman said. “I need to spend all my time trying to stay alive.”
“Will you spend this at a beauty salon instead of on food?” she asked.
“Are you nuts?” replied the homeless woman. “I haven’t had my hair done in 20 years!”
“Well,” she said, “I’m not going to give you the money. Instead, I’m going to take you out for dinner with my husband and me tonight.”
The homeless woman was shocked. “Won’t your husband be furious with you for doing that? I know I’m dirty, and I probably smell pretty disgusting.”
She said, “That’s okay. It’s important for him to see what a woman looks like after she has given up shopping, hair appointments and wine.”
Yes, few jokes are universal — most of them are culture-specific. But this male puzzlement over why women need all the help they can get to stay gorgeous just might be one heck of an exception.
I bet you this: just as there is a couple slugging it out in their bedroom in suburban Manila as you read this, somewhere in the salt basins of East Africa there is a parallel couple from the Maasai tribe who have no access to running water, nor electricity, much less education or media, but are still arguing about the same thing: the high maintenance lifestyle of women. The husband from Manila may be chastising his wife for spending a bundle on Pierre Hardy shoes and salon hair color touch-ups, while the Maasai husband might be berating his wife for her insistence on a new stretched earlobe or her stacks of arm and neck bangles, but the bottom line is both women, as with all the women the world over, need such accoutrements of beauty.
What on earth for, you might ask? For their sanity! And why is that? Because men were put on this earth to drive women crazy and vice versa — plain and simple. I knew you would agree.
Let’s travel back in time and revisit where this all started. You remember your courtship, right? You remember the reason why you pursued her — and no, it wasn’t because she was rich; I don’t think you’ll ever admit that, in public at least — it was because of her beauty. Ten or 20 years down the line, when everything in her physique starts pointing due south and her girth expands further east and west, your eye starts to wander off to fresher, younger landscapes. You stop looking her in the eye when you speak to her; you just sort of throw your words over your shoulder when you walk out the door. While engaged in your favorite sport — surfing through channels as you watch TV — you pause at the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special and drool. While window-shopping in the mall with her, your head almost detaches from your neck as you snap it to ogle a young, slender beauty that just whizzed past you.
She notices all that, Einstein! And you wonder why she rallies the best hairdresser, colorist, couturier, stylist, dermatologist, facialist, cosmetic surgeon, dietician, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in town over to her side for a monumental makeover and a lifetime of maintenance thereafter. This project requires NASA-caliber engineering and strategy; it calls for the best in every field.
If you haven’t heard what Julia Roberts had to say about her lead role in the movie Erin Brockovich, you’re missing the whole point. Erin Brockovich, a real life character, was known for her cups-runneth-over attributes and her décolletage-revealing tops. On playing this role, Roberts, who isn’t quite as well endowed, announced, “It took a village to raise my cleavage for that movie.”
Told you. We need all the help we can get. And guess what? We bear your babies and raise them well, we cook your food, we manage your home, we massage your ego, we endure your snoring and your stinky socks, so you’ve earned the honor and the privilege of being business manager cum account officer of our beautification and youth preservation drive. Translation: you foot the bills — all of them. And no, you’re not aloud not feel bad about it; no grumbling, frowning, mumbling, whining, foot stomping, and definitely no full on temper tantrums. After all, it doesn’t require much effort on your part, just some slight wrist movements as you sign the checks or a single word of approval when the bank calls for credit card purchase confirmation — nothing much.
Really, you should be nice, otherwise you just might experience the full meaning of this other joke and please be warned: it is not going to be pleasant. It goes like this:
Man better be nice to his woman because if he gives her sperm, she gives him a baby; if he gives her groceries, she cooks him a meal; if he gives her a house she turns it into a home; so he better not give her s*** because if he does, he has a ton of it coming right back at him!
I couldn’t have said it better.
Hollywood actor, Michael Douglas, in a pre-Oscar Awards red carpet interview, when asked of how his wife, Catherine Zeta Jones, keeps herself gorgeous, said, “We have separate bath and dressing rooms. It’s like sausages, you know, they’re delicious but do you really want to know what goes in there and how it’s done?”
When I was a child my favorite sitcom was Three’s Company, and my favorite character was Mr. Roper played by dopey-looking actor Norman Fell. In one episode, Mr. Roper is doing the accounting — balancing the books for their apartment complex — while the always gaudily dressed Mrs. Roper is lying supine on their couch with cream on her face and cucumber slices on her eyes.
The doorbell rings. Mr. Roper is about to stand up but he sees his wife splayed out on the couch, so he changes his mind and tells her, “Could you get the door? I’m in the middle of balancing these numbers and I’m having a hell of a time.”
Mrs. Roper shoots back, “No, you get it! Can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m making myself pretty. I have cream on my face and cucumbers on my eyes. You get it!”
Mr. Roper takes another look at her and, with a hearty chuckle, gets up to walk to the door saying, “Right, dear, you’ve got a much tougher job to do.”
I didn’t get the joke then, but boy, do I get it now.
So what’s a man to do if his woman is not blessed with a body that is impervious to the ravages of time and gravity or if she didn’t come with a dowry the size of Texas to support her own caprices? What is he to do with increasing female awareness of beauty trends and beautification options, with constant media bombardment of new cosmetic procedures, and with escalating youth preservation related bills? He has two options: One is to grin and bear it; the other, to try them out himself. To twist the cliché, if you can’t beat them… a facial here, a diet there never hurt anyone.
* * *
Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.