OK, OK, that title is a bit misleading, I admit, because the winning entry has nothing to do with sex, which says (confirms?) something all by itself.
It has been fairly widely asserted that what porn is to men, romance novels (“bodice rippers”), with their discreet descriptions of passion and suggested- as opposed to blunt- physicality, are for women. I can see certain ways in which that might be the case for those females who are starry-eyed and thinking about men all the time. But if you are a more, er, “normal” woman, you don’t see the world that way. There are lots of higher priority thoughts regarding much different matters. Such as the kids, for example.
Let me explain. Men think of sex, conservatively, every eight seconds or so, unless something intervenes to increase the frequency, such as, for example, an attractive female walking by. Or a slightly less attractive female walking by. Or any female thinking of walking by. You get the idea.
What is the equivalent obsession for women? What will make them risk their reputations, lives, and careers because of its irresistible hold on their psyches and all waking thoughts? Not sex, that is certain. Fashion? For some, perhaps.
But the real winner is: home remodeling, as represented by HGTV. If I had football or basketball running on the television as much as my wife has HGTV going from the instant she arrives home after a long and stressful day at work, I would be the most expert data wonk in history, and ready for a prime-time job at ESPN. And look at the rise of first, Home Depot as the initial outlet for such impulses even as the high couture department stores fade away as major economic players. And what chain is now rising fast as the competitor to Home Depot? Lowe’s. Why? Because its store formats are more appealing to women. Home Depot has too many power tools and too much wood (men). Lowe’s is full of stainless steel appliances and window coverings.
Men, do this experiment. Next time your one-and-only is watching HGTV, stand in front of the television (if you dare), and wave a thousand dollar bill, all the while screaming “Free shopping spree! Here’s the cash! I’m watching the kids!” She will decapitate you as she responds, “Move, dumbbell, Candice Olson is describing why she stenciled a polar bear next to the fireplace!”
A woman can do a striptease in front of the Super Bowl on the TV screen. Or the NCAA championship game, and he will follow her to the next room, panting, having lost all curiosity about who might win. But if you interrupt or block “Designer’s Challenge”, God help you.
UPDATE: Welcome, all ye who observe and hallow the name of Instapundit. I always wondered how I might react to the ecstasy of an Instalanche(TM). Actually, I haven’t quite yet grasped the reality. I’ll go home tonight and ruminate on it as my lovely bride watches HGTV.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE (final version):
The New Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary defines “satire” as “n. biting wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose vice or folly…” I suspect that my unpardonable sin here was to treat the compulsive viewing of HGTV as “vice”. Excuse me, folks, gotta go add one more thing to the list of things that you aren’t allowed to say!
The reactions to this post, less here than at Michele Catalano’s “A Small Victory”, ranged from the Not Me refrain of “Well, I’m a woman and I LIKE porn-power tools-whatever”, to the Catherine MacKinnon radical feminist school of “You slimy men only think of one thing” to “I’m a man and I LIKE HGTV”. Forthe record, I know all kinds of women and men, and viva la differences both ways, as well as the similarities. My basic text is UVa Prof. Steven Rhoads’ book, a serious meta-analysis of the hundreds of studies on gender differences.
If Jonathan Swift were alive today, he would be a blogger. He would also post “A Modest Proposal”, and he would get reactions from:
PETA (If you are going to insist on hamburgers, at least be consistent and eat your own young)
Policy Wonks (Mr. Swift’s proposal appears to have merit on its surface, but he makes a mathematical error that defeats his entire thesis; the better solution is to raise taxes and set up collective farms)
Anti-abortion activists (This debauchery just goes to illustrate how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope…) (Disclaimer: I am pro-life, anti-Eric Rudolph)
Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome (If we had instituted universal population controls, this wouldn’t be necessary……)
I wonder how Scott Ott (Scrappleface.com) handles this. Of course, he is actually funny……
Mn Kurmudgeon 
December 14, 2004 at 2:29 pm |
I have a confession to make . . . I like HGTV, too.
December 14, 2004 at 2:54 pm |
HGTV should be labeled and televised crack for females. My wife is absoulutely addicted to HGTV. I have had to fight many a battle of “just because you saw it on HGTV does NOT mean we are doing that here.” The arguments that channel spawns are a pain.
December 14, 2004 at 2:55 pm |
I have actually thought about this idea ever since our cable package added HGTV two years ago. There are two connections between HGTV and porn that seem particularly salient to me:
* The effect that both porn and HGTV have on me, as a husband and father, is to make me utterly dissatisfied with what I already have. Suddenly, my wife is not nearly as attractive. Suddenly, I can’t live without a bigger kitchen. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my wife or my house. But how quickly I can think they are both inadequate.
* The special “super-sized” episodes of some shows like Trading Spaces (yeah, I know that’s on TLC, but there are similar things like it on HGTV) where instead of $1000 to remodel they get $100,000 or something, often had the appearance of an orgy. People squealing in delight as they bring out ANOTHER expensive upgrade to your house… “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” — otherwise a very interesting show about people making a difference in other people’s lives, often is guilty of this.
December 14, 2004 at 3:03 pm |
Reminds me of the joke about a man who goes to the doctor for treatment of impotence. The Dr. gives him two options: one is $12,000 and takes 6 months and painful treatments; the other is $18,000 takes 1 month and is painless. The man says he’ll have to talk it over with his wife and will let the Dr. know.
A few weeks later the man runs into the Dr. at a store and the doc asks whether he has made a decision. “Yes,” he says, “We decided to get a new kitchen.”
December 14, 2004 at 3:17 pm |
My goodness! Someone with the same first name and the same spelling! *faints*
December 14, 2004 at 3:33 pm |
Hm. Some of us just want him to fix the drip in the upstairs bathroom that is coming through the downstairs bathroom ceiling. Doesn’t seem too pornographic to me.
December 14, 2004 at 3:47 pm |
HGTV is quite simply one of the only reasons to get cable television. I have been living without it (in England of all places, where they could use some decent home improvement shows)for months and thus I have been forced to turn to the occassional romance novel. Pathetic I know but something must relieve the boredom.
December 14, 2004 at 4:07 pm |
I remember in high school church group a youth pastor claiming that we guys thought about sex every 8 seconds or so. I thought about this and came to the conclusion that if that were true, us guys only have about 1 and half hours of our waking day not devoted to thinking about sex. What scares me is I think about HGTV about every 8 seconds because its about the only cable station my wife watches. I hope this post was as good for you as it was for me. I need a smoke!
December 14, 2004 at 4:08 pm |
I actually did a study and wrote a paper on this subject once. My conclusions were that women are attracted to what in their opinion is a powerful male. Rich, famous, all that crap. BUT there are women who see the powerful male as one who is smart, a good painter, a guy who can score drugs, and so on.
This is a generalization, but I was involved in producing some porn and we all wondered how to make something women would just eat up. I consulted with two psych people and both told me in no uncertain terms that at least half the women in the world aren’t interested in sex. The proof is in the fact that there has been a drug on the market for at least ten years that IS an aphrodesiac for women. It’s called Wellbutrin (sic) and you can look it up. Women have every excuse in the world not to take it.
December 14, 2004 at 4:09 pm |
Beloved younger daughter (please go read her stuff at eastasiadiary.blogspot.com, much better than anything I have ever written) says that HGTV is not only as exciting as watching paint dry, it IS watching paint dry. But she does watch it with her mom when she gets back home from afar (China, these days).
December 14, 2004 at 7:32 pm |
Did you ever think that maybe she watches these programs in part because your house needs a lot of work?
December 14, 2004 at 9:01 pm |
I suppose I’m just lucky. I have a wife who enjoys HGTV every now and then and who enjoys porn and will even occasionally pick some out for purchase.
She does greatly prefer ComedyCentral, SciFi, and AdultSwim if the television is on, so I don’t have to endure much of the bloody remodeling fests.
December 15, 2004 at 5:23 am |
I don’t believe you! …she just hits the record button on the TiVo, grabs the “Cleveland” and out the door – feet never hitting the ground.
December 15, 2004 at 7:54 am |
Yeah…ahh, you see I have noticed this trend with my wife as well, and three years ago, well I bought this gnarly old USAF POWERWAGON truck (not to be outdone by sissies driving H2’s) hoping the rennovation fever would catch.
I’m still waiting.
We have re-modeled two houses in that time, but my tired old Air Force truck still awaits a v-8 transplant. -SpinDaddy
December 15, 2004 at 2:23 pm |
Just my two cents: I live in Europe and one of the symptoms of why I do so would have to be the way in which Americans act like men want sex more than women do…implying that men want relationships more as well.
Please note that this is *cultural* and not necessarily the way humans were supposed to think. I found it amusing (when I was young) the way Americans give their females so much power and respect with such mythology as the completely absurd “every 8 seconds” meme…but it gets old.
And it sets single men up for some pretty cruel and bizarre behavior. Examples:
1) The whole “stalker” myth. There is a reason why many advanced, first world, cultures don’t understand the concept of “stalker”. In America, wanting to get “closure” or ask a few educational questions about elements in a relationship gone sour…can be construed as the man obsessively wanting sex or feeling “entitled” to “ownership” or some such drivel. This even happens when it was the *male* who actually wanted to end the relationship in the first place.
Once, after a mutual break-up with a fundamentalist Christian girl in California, I sent an email asking for her critique about what went wrong. I had already admitted that I wanted the breakup because I found her religious beliefs to be non-scriptural and brainwashed. She wrote back in a feminist rant that it was supposed to be some kind of American principle that “a woman has the right not to explain the reason for a breakup.” The actual wording was more bizarre and “entitled” than that. It was clear that she just assumed that I wanted her back and that I probably wanted sex with her.
2) The idea of the “dirty old man”. Young women are supposed to look up to successful older males…not refuse all friendship with them. But you’ll find a lot of young women in America who want nothing to do with any male who is more than 5 years older. Forget that he may actually like conversation with intelligent young women…the culture says that men think about sex every 8 seconds.
Some might want to scorn what I just said, but males can and do vote with their feet and move to Europe. My European girlfriend is 20 years younger (a statuesque beauty) and she will never refuse a final conversation if we should break up for any reason. She only wishes that I thought about sex once per day.
Now specifically to the 8 second meme: I am a porn addict, but I often don’t think of sex for as much as three days in a row. In the three months after 9-11, I didn’t think about sex at all. Our troops in Iraq are probably not thinking about it at all when they are on patrol either.
December 15, 2004 at 3:18 pm |
You don’t think the soilders in Iraq are thinking about sex? If I go a couple days without sex, i start shaking. I cant imagine…years…
December 15, 2004 at 3:46 pm |
Hey, this posting is about HGTV and addiction, not sex. Or, actually, porn. No more! Go read romance novels!
Now, back to “Design on a Dime” (I SAID it was on all the time at home, didn’t I? I don’t memorize the shows deliberately…….) Didn’t you love the cordless drill he used last week, that ran for 59 hours on a charge?
December 16, 2004 at 1:32 pm |
Ever wonder WHY home shows remind you of porn? My theory is it’s the sound. Notice they use the same cheaply produced background music, alternating with dead silence and over-miked ambient noises. The bad camera work with indiscriminate special effects help, too.
December 16, 2004 at 5:41 pm |
I wonder if the progression of targeted prograsming and marketing will ever achieve such striking efficacy that it will have to be regulated, like drugs and alcohol.
Take a look at some peculiar animal behavior- there’s a particular kind of wasp which paralyzes a cricket, carries it to a burrow it has prepared, puts the cricket outside, goes in to inspect, comes out and gets the cricket and seals it away in the burrow. Experiments have shown that if the cricket is moved while the wasp is unawares in the burrow checking it out, when it comes out and finds the cricket not where it was left, it will without fail repeat the checking-of-the-burrow step. If the cricket is again moved, it will reset and check the borrow again. Perhaps endlessly.
Humans may not be that simple, but somewhere down in there are impulses and reactions that are already taken advantage of…
I think a lot of USA women are hapless victims of their own upbringing. Under-empowered and from birth programmed to be consumers, feeling dirty and bad about their own sexuality, pressures/needs are released/fulfilled in other ways. Men are encouraged to dominate, hunt down and enslave women. Not overtly, of course.
December 17, 2004 at 1:10 pm |
Will von Wizzlepig, if women were that helpless, no one with any brains himself would want to be around them. This post was originally inspired by an Instapundit post where the sainted Glenn described his very intelligent and accomplished Dr./author Instawife recovering from a virus by watching HGTV while he blogged. That got me to thinking about my own very lovely and accomplished Madame Kurmudge, who has similar HGTV interests and compulsions, along with boasting different but also significant accomplishments, both educationally and professionally.
Simply put, she can do more different things than anyone else I know. Our daughters are both also very accomplished- one loves to garden and do craft-type things, art photography, and such (which I don’t understand either) as she finishes her PhD in Physics and Biomaterials, and the other one reads “In Style” magazine when she is not reading Chinese documents in their original Mandarin characters while researching her own doctoral thesis.
This illustrates the way we all have very intellectual interests at the same time as we are captivated by some kinds of, well, fluff. In trying to measure the degree of compulsion, I used the biochemical/psychological erotic urges as a comparison. Probably a dumb choice, given how many commenters are fixated on everything other than the main point.
December 18, 2004 at 11:07 am |
I am a woman, and I never watch HGTV, or any other home improvement shows. What drives me nuts is that our local cable system moved several channels to ‘digital only’- including the SciFi Channel ! I can’t get my Stargate fix without paying extra ! (GRRRR!)
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In search of the best
Ask.com, Answers.com outperform more popular Web engines
Even as they become more savvy, the Internet’s leading search engines still sometimes bog down in befuddlement when a specific kernel of knowledge is sought.
Hoping to fill the gap, Answers.com (from GuruNet Corp.) and Ask.com (from Ask Jeeves Inc.) have pledged to provide more adept responses to vexing but straightforward questions about history, science, geography, pop culture and sports.
Both search engines aim to provide a correct answer explicitly at the top of a search’s first results page — or with a highly placed link to a Web page that contains the information.
Their mission raises a question: Just how knowledgeable are these search engines?
To find out, I staged a very unscientific test consisting of questions culled from a recent edition of Trivial Pursuit.
My mock game pitted the avowed prowess of Answers.com and Ask.com against the Internet’s most widely used search engines — Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.
The findings: Answers.com and Ask.com appear to be a small step ahead of Google and noticeably smarter than Yahoo and MSN when dealing with such esoteric questions as “What glass beads are created when a meteorite strikes the Earth’s surface?”
Both Answers.com and Ask.com guided me to the correct answer (tektites) with the first link on the results page — an aptitude that both sites displayed with 10 of the 20 questions posed in the theoretical game. When they didn’t get the answer with the very first link in response to some questions, both search engines generally came through within the next two links.
Although they performed similarly in our game,-Answers.com and Ask.com rely on different formulas.
Answers.com relies on a combination of Google’s search engine and human editors who have stoked its database with answers to frequently asked questions that they’ve obtained by poring through reference materials.
Ask.com, part of a Web family about to be acquired by e-commerce conglomerate InterActiveCorp for $2 billion, has devised a fully automated approach that fishes through the Internet’s sea of information.
Although they are superior to the other search engines at this task, Answers.com and Ask.com rarely realized their ultimate goal — making things as clear-cut as possible by summarizing the correct response at the very top of the results page so it wouldn’t be necessary to click on a link and peruse another Web site.
Ask.com spit out a concise “Web answer” in just two of the 20 questions, while the only time that Answers.com delivered was when I sought the definition of “googol.” (It’s the number one followed by 100 zeros.)
Google, which drew its name from that mathematical term, fared reasonably well in the competition. The Internet’s most popular search engine came up with the correct answer on the first link in eight of the 20 questions (including the one about tektites). That’s something Yahoo did just five times and MSN only twice.
None of the sites was omniscient. Answers.com, Ask.com and Google each drew blanks on three questions (I considered it a miss if a link to the correct answer didn’t appear within the first three pages of results). Yahoo and MSN each whiffed on six questions.
There was only one question that baffled all the search engines, “Who was the first Cuban defector to play in Major League Baseball?” Although they all contained references to him in their indexes, none of the search engines could figure out it was Rene Arocha, a pitcher who first signed with the St. Louis Cardinals in the early 1990s.
Though it lagged behind the other search engines in this competition, MSN looked brilliant on one question that stumped all the other search engines: What company was acquired in the biggest leveraged buy-out deal of all time? The first link on MSN’s results page took me to a site that correctly listed RJR Nabisco.
The test also revealed the disadvantage of depending on search engines — they sometimes point to sites with conflicting answers.
This occurred most frequently when I asked how many viewers watched the series finale of the TV show M*A*S*H. The search engines pointed to Web sites that variously listed the audience at anywhere from 105.9 million to nearly 125 million. Trivial Pursuit lists the answer as 121.6 million.
To paraphrase M*A*S*H’s theme song, searching for online answers still isn’t painless.
About the Author: Michael Liedtke
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