One of the greatest challenges men face as they grow up lies in attempting to understand the female mind. You can study it all you want — as you might the power and grace of a top athlete — but you’ll never fully grasp how it functions, and may finally conclude you don’t always need to figure out how a beautiful thing works to appreciate it.
You can also get by without total comprehension, so long as you can react in a way that suits your relationship and keeps you out of trouble as much as humanly possible. (And so long as you learn to apologize, quickly and sincerely, whether you’re guilty of an offence or not.)
I recently caught a sneak preview of the new Sex And The City film and was reminded that the series made such an impact when it debuted in 1998 in part because it realistically depicted how women talk about their lives.
More importantly, the show’s four key characters discussed sex openly and frankly. Even in the late 1990s, this was a bit of a revelation — women going out to score and have meaningless one-night-stand sex? They don’t do that, or so we’d been told.
Men connected to the show in part because it validated the view that women talk as bluntly — and often as crudely —about sex as we do. Sometimes even more so.
It also offered up greater insight into the female mind, and highlighted the fact that women and men do think alike. “People say to me, what are men going to think when they see girls talking in this movie?” said Michael Patrick King, the film’s writer-director-producer and the TV series’ executive producer, during an interview with Metro.
“I say every time a guy is watching this movie and those girls are talking, just imagine that’s their version of them playing hoops with their friends. Men work it out through (playing sports), pounding stuff and running and being quiet and drinking. Women go and talk about it. It’s a game of pick-up, no pun intended, for women.”
The film might have its flaws, but, like the series, it can help men understand how women think — and vice versa. That’s a gift more valuable than any pair of Manolo Blahniks.
