On T.V and finding a husband!

Watching television depresses me. The TV and everything on it is designed to make you feel really bad about yourself, one way or the other.

Like the ads that show women with lustrous, beautiful hair that bounce more than their boobs do when they walk or run. (Majority hair ads have women playing, jumping, running, why?) Or ads where men are ALWAYS gifting expensive jewellery to their girls and looking happy about it, ads where Papas have loads of time to sit and chill with the family or ads that show how women with pimples/acne don’t get boyfriends. Or stupider TV shows…

I just got up after watching this series on Discovery Travel & Living called, How To Find A Husband.It’s a pre-recorded show about Sally Gray (reporter and TV presenter for last 15 years) who dates 50 men in 10 weeks to find herself a husband. The promo for the show goes, “I am 37 and still single. There is nothing wrong with being single…but now I want a husband…blah…and I don’t want to be stuck wearing this frickin SINGLE ring for the rest of my life.” She wears a silver ring with SINGLE engraved on it. Nice start to finding The One.

I was watching the original 1978 Don when a young Amitabh Bachchan’s collagen injected lips and Zeenat Aman’s pointy bras (why did women in the 70s think that boobs were supposed to be conical?) got to me and I switched channels to end up on Sally’s show where the first thing I heard was, “If you want a husband, don’t sleep with a man on the first date, or the second or the third.” (How about fixing the hymen instead so that each prospective husband-material thinks you’re a virgin, eh?)

Then the various date gurus go on to tell Sally that she should be “demure” with her dates and not be hyperactive. Then she was advised to keep the first date a coffee-date and not a drinking one and if at all there was to be drinking to keep it to two glasses of champagne. “Remember, less is more” advised the guru. Funnily enough the same dating guru who had so far advocated ‘demure’ advised Sally to be sassy and bold with her online profile, even if it meant fabricating stuff.

As an example the dating guru said how her profile said she liked wearing men’s shirts (how chweet no?) and at the same time was open for a threesome. Sally’s response was a shocked, “But that’s not true…” The dating guru responded with a quick, “How do you know?” Basically Sally is an honest person while the dating guru is a fraud. And that’s what finding a husband is all about isn’t it? Making the guy believe he is getting himself a wife while you hide your true self – could be hideous, hyperactive, bold, fun-loving, smart, witty, whatever – behind this mask of what is supposed to be Acceptable Behaviour for Marriageable Girls.

Of course that rule applies to women like Sally – and an increasing number of you girls out there – who are smart, sassy, independent, usually smarter than the dumb jocks around and DON’T want to settle for just anyone with . Strangely there is no Acceptable Behaviour list for what makes a man ‘marriageable’. All it takes for a guy – even if he’s passably ‘good’ – to classify as marriage material is “He should want to marry”.

A guy can drink on the first date because testosterone and caffeine don’t go together, do they? A guy doesn’t have to be ‘demure’ and can laugh loudly and crack the funnies because if a woman does that, frankly the man will be threatened by her wit. A guy can spill his drink, burp, fart and be a clumsy clod and everything is acceptable because of course his mommy cleaned up after him. But a woman doing any of that is not-marriage-material because honey, you are showing that you will not be the Perfect Wife. Because only women want marriage, right? Urghh!

PS: IF there are men out there who don’t believe in a woman following a list of Acceptable Behaviour, don’t frickin fight with me and write in saying I am man-bashing; write in to show you DO exist!