I’ve always been fascinated by gender differences. Which I’m not even sure is an allowable phrase to employ now. Between equality laws, diversity rules and anti-discrimination policies, merely observing any action within a gender context is totally unacceptable. Then you need to add in the 47 new ‘genders’ currently on offer and suddenly, former universals like ‘if its got a nob its prob’ly a geezer’ are deeply offensive to at least 43 of those genders and illegal under 739 statutes written by civil servants at a cost to the nation of £786,442, after ‘consultations’ which cost a further £2.7mil. I would accuse someone, possibly everyone involved, of being ‘tossers’ but I’m not sure that even such a nice, expressive term can be used within contemporary constraints as the ‘woke world’ veers ever closer to total insanity.

And yet I was sitting in the bath the other evening (as I do. No fennel and rosemary candles or jojoba and ginseng bath oils, just me and the Kindle. Add hot water. Stir.) and this is what I saw. You see a few bottles on the side of the bath. I see a metaphor for LIFE! My life, anyway.

On the right is my shower gel. Its blue. I like blue. And when I’ve finished the chapter I’ll use it. It makes me clean. But it wouldn’t make Mel clean. No. Not because she’s any dirtier, she doesn’t wrestle in mud. Like she used to. But because she has to have four different cleansers for different ‘parts’. She would no more wash her face in anything vaguely ‘soapy’ than I would read a label of what any of these bottles claim.

And that’s a gender difference. Well, it is in my house, where such things are allowed because attitudes are generally mired in about 1953 anyway. I know, it’s making genderalisations (oooohhh) from very small sample sizes, but Mel’s not that small. She’s bigger than Lila. Just.

We won’t talk about moisturisers. Because we’d need about 6 photos for that. Not including my bottle (singular). Yes, I have a bottle of moisturiser. Which is not exactly a new gender designation, but I’m trying.

The point is (is there a point? Really??) that there are gender differences. You could call it a type of cleanliness perfectionism to use one ‘soap’ for your feet but a ‘totally different’ one for your legs. Or you could call it a hyper-susceptibility to toiletry marketing. Which only affects those of the penis-free type genders. Yet its not like, say football, where having possession of a penis does guarantee better football, however you may ‘identify’, but I must maintain that I don’t know any man worthy of the name who could really be bothered to even look for 4 different shower gels for the same body.

Happy Sunday, other than the football

A xxxx