Men only: The beauty and the briefcase

Saturday was February the 29th.

There will not be another date like this until the year 2024.

Who do you think will be president, of Kenya and America, on that Thursday?

How do you imagine your life will be then, just like today, or wildly different?

It doesn’t really matter, because what we are here to talk about today is women and briefcases.

Before we begin, let me tell you about how the average EPL blue/red blooded man’s Saturday afternoon looks like.

3.30 pm – Chelsea versus Tottenham. 5.30 pm – Brighton vs Sheffield United. 7.30 pm – Leicester versus Man City. That is how it was last Saturday. And this is something soccer always cast in hard stone.

Until last Saturday!

Okay, so I did watch the early (half three pm) Chelsea kick off.

But as I was about to order my second pint of the day at quarter past five pm at the popular local, it hit me that this was just the usual football macho thing to do.

It’s about time I got more in touch with the inner effete said of my masculinity, to avoid ever being called ‘chauv.’

So letting go of the Sheffield game – although deep sacrifice is more the word, like walking to work so you can save the cash to buy your child snacks – I walked across the road and up to my apartment.

Then sat on my couch with a chilled bottle of ‘Four Cousins’ from my refrigerator (instead of a cold can of Heineken) and flipped channels till I came across an inevitable chick flick called ‘Beauty and the Briefcase ...’

This was like a carnivore giving up meat for Lent.

The next 90 minutes were excruciating.

But I did learn a few things, watching this chick flick on Saturday.

First of all, there are young women (and even men) who think that working on a magazine is glamorous.

Trust me, as one of the most prolific magazine machine feeders around, it has its ‘fame’ and ‘name’ perks, but glam it isn’t. I know this now thirty something colleague who started off as a sex columnist for mags, but just ended up becoming a sex therapist to pay her bills.

Anyway, the plot of ‘Beauty and the Briefcases’ is simple – Beauty gets an assignment from Cosmo mag (now, that’s old skool) to go undercover in a financial firm, date ‘suits’ then do a tell-all about the experience (that’s a green card to become the office slut, but hey, Beauty is ready to take hits for The Team of ‘Feminism.’)

‘Black’ guy – I learned that when a woman dates someone for skin colour, hair-style, body-build, or even dates a lady, it’s often just out of curiousity! Be there, do that, coolly dump the dude/ woman.

The hot guy – Women often date good-looking men, whom they may have nothing in common with, just so they can get to show them off to friends, and sometimes even family. Others just want their babies.

Metrosexual – There’s a breed of men who are just too ‘body conscious’ to be real. These are the types who beyond barber, manicure and pedicure also do things like tweeze their eyebrows and do colourless lip-gloss, as well as mouth wash, cologne, wax, the works. Why would a woman want such a man?

Rock Jock – In the film, our heroine starts going out with an ‘artistic’ type, not a nerd but more a square jaw, wildish, guitar guy like. Of course musicians and other kinds of ‘outlaw’ or otherwise talented men are always going to have a genre of women.

The Boss – But I got the feeling that, all along, her chemistry was with her boss; the kind, in a suit and tie, with a high salary, and a horrible, selfish narcissist GF whose main role, one suspects, is to get sliced by our beautiful but girly heroine.

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