Mars and Venus? We're About As Bad As Each Other!
If George Clooney described your violet blouse as “purple”, would you care? Probably not. But what is it with men and colour?
I may be entering dangerously sexist territory here – but why is it that
the average human male can see only around a dozen colours? Where women
see emerald, jade and moss, men see only green. While we extol the
virtue of our new coral shirt, a bloke will insist that it’s orange.
When we want the dining room chimney-breast painted ochre, they hate the
idea of yellow. And I’ve learned that they’re not being awkward; they
actually do think that cobalt is … well, just blue.
But why? Little boys were just as exposed to boxes of Crayola Crayons as
us girls. Don’t they remember the sheer joy of all those gorgeous
colours like magenta, raw umber, sepia and carnation pink?
I admit I was a tad obsessive about my crayons – lining them up in order
according to the gradual change from one colour to the next, so
blue-violet was next to violet-blue, green-yellow beside yellow-green
and so on. But surely men must have learned a bit about colour back
then? So where did it all go? It might just be that precise colour designation is not important to
men. If he likes his new sweater, a fella doesn’t care whether it’s
charcoal or slate; to him it’s just grey and comfy.
But it might not all be their fault. While only a tiny proportion of
one per cent of women suffer from a form of colour blindness, as many as
eight per cent of the male species are similarly afflicted.
Which admittedly doesn’t explain the remaining 92 per cent, but there
might be a legitimate medical answer here too. Some scientists believe
that men’s brains may be less efficient at processing and understanding
colours. Most women apparently see colours in the red-orange range much
better than men – which might account for the female love affair with
pink.
Women may have to accept that colour is just not as important to men. So
it must be pretty annoying being subjected to that much detail when all
you want is a basic description. And let’s be honest: does anyone
actually know what “taupe” is?
But it’s not just our appreciation of colour that is so different. Take
our approaches to shopping. I’m going to make sweeping generalisations
here, so apologies in advance for those exceptions to my rule. For most
men, a shopping expedition, when it cannot be avoided, is a matter of
military precision: identify, locate, acquire, and retreat. But for
women shopping is a more holistic experience. Yes, gentlemen, I know we
drive you mad with our browsing and comparing, our coffee breaks and yet
more browsing. Especially when we invariably return to the first item
we tried in the first shop. It’s a girl thing and for that we’re sorry.
But for us, shopping is an emotional issue. In order to buy something,
we have to love it. We can’t just make do.
To balance things out, it’s time to admit to some genetic mutations in
most of the females of my acquaintance. There is a little known, but
highly evolved, area of the female brain that perfectly deducts 10 per
cent from the cost of any item of clothing when required to announce it
to a member of the opposite sex. And another that instantly recognises any outfit previously worn by
another woman. So you see we aren’t just being greedy when we want
another new dress – it’s a genetic necessity.
If all this were not enough, there’s also a language barrier that exists
between the sexes. Take that horrible and contentious word “fine”. When
a man describes something as fine, he means that it’s perfectly
acceptable, that it fits the bill precisely. The frock that looks “fine”
is “just right”. But to a woman, the word is poison. It represents the barely acceptable;
it’s part of the “if that’s all you’ve got it’ll do” range of
adjectives. So menfolk, if a woman tells you that your suit is fine, it
probably isn’t.
It’s like a man’s reaction to the word “cute”. To women there is nothing
disparaging in describing something or someone as cute; quite the
opposite actually. But we’ve noticed that it’s not always a concept with
which men are comfortable.
We do understand there are language difficulties and we don’t want you
to panic when we ask you if we look “OK”. What we want is an honest
answer. All right, absolute honesty should probably be reserved for the
times you think we look fabulous. But please don’t say we look fine. Of
course, if we’ve spent four hours getting ready and still look like a
dog’s dinner, then a lie will be – just fine.