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Why Men Don’t Iron
The New Reality of
Gender Differences
ANNE AND BILL MOIR
William Collins
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Anne and Bill Moir
The Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780002570350
Ebook Edition © FREBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007468911 Version: 2015-12-17
To Bernard Cornwell
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: He’s Not Part One, Part Another
CHAPTER SEVEN: Extremes Are Not Rules
CHAPTER EIGHT: Painting Him Green
This is a book about men.
About what makes them different. So inevitably it is a book about women too.
A small box sits on Anne’s desk. The top reads: ‘All that men know about women’. Open it and there is nothing inside. Funny? Sad? Humbling? An innocent admission that men have tried to follow women’s pattern of thought and failed? Or is it an insult? The box could imply that a man is incapable of understanding a woman because her complexities are beyond his simplicities. That is to define him in her terms. Or perhaps it reflects the traditional male view that she is beyond understanding because she is silly – irrational? Which is to define her in relation to himself. We tend to see in the other sex a lesser version of our own. Yet the manner in which we describe another’s mind shows the limits of our own.
‘Why keep the box?’ asks Bill.
‘To turn it over,’ says Anne. ‘To puzzle out what it means.’
‘Isn’t it insulting?’
‘Didn’t you say that we often hide behind clichés?’
‘Did I?’
‘When you gave me the box.’
It is a cliché that men cannot fathom women. But what of her image of him?
Roseanne Barr, the weighty sitcom actress, summed up her view on men in the television programme Hollywood Men: Boys Will Be Boys: ‘The real Hollywood man,’ she said, ‘is a terrified little boy and wants his mommy.’1 Hers is the classic female caricature