Gramsci peeked out from behind the PC speakers nervously. "What now?" he asked, "Did someone hold the door open for you again?"
Carnivorous Cow snorted. They'd been through that countiess times. But she wasn't about to become distracted now. "Men are such, such... girls! Honestly! They hit middle age, and they go rushing off to the gym to develop six packs, and put themselves on diets, and spend their lives on bicycles trying to develop desirable bodies, and for what? They're too tired to put those bodies to good use with their wives or their girlfriends or both, and their conversation skills evaporate in a cloud of kilojoule counts and next they start using words like 'ecru' and 'cigar smoke' - referring to colours - and their reading matter shrinks to Cosmopolitan and Men's Health!"
Gramsci looked perplexed. Surely men reading women's magazines was a good thing? Wouldn't they now have something in common to discuss? Perhaps even a common discourse?
Carnivorous Cow threw her head back dismissively. "The trouble is, she continued, they don't read these things with the remotest trace of irony. They _believe_ that women *enjoy* shopping, and that it's every woman's dream to be reincarnated as Imelda Marcos - or at least to own her shoe collection! They _believe_ that women aspire to deep, meaningful relationships with men, based on equality and shared domestic responsibilities. They _believe_ that women believe the stuff they read about themselves in women's magazines! They haven't yet decoded the practice of 'ruling from below' or manipulation through faking it!"
She snorted derisively again. "It's only a matter of time before _The Lancet_ reports its first study of middle-aged male anorexia. They've *become* the teenage girls they should be bedding!"
Gramsci felt rather ill. It may have had something to do with the cockroach he'd just consumed - he suspected from its radioactive glow that it had achieved its great size feasting on slapchips from the Leslie - but he thought it was more likely due to a realisation that Carnivorous Cow had a point. Instead of last-gasp-of-testosterone Porsches and Lamborghinis lining University Avenue, there was a disconcerting array of Mini Coopers... and bicycles.
"Perhaps," he ventured, "if they took their cycling less seriously, and stopped shaving their legs.....?"