The new Cock Com: Rex and the City

Apparently this is the summer of the male romcom. Our screens will be filled with male lead characters exposing their emotions, as they navigate their way through the perils of love, dating and relationships.

Dick Flick or Cock Com, it will still show men behaving like men, albeit with a softness that will endear them to women. But that's just playing at it. Ms R thinks we should go the whole way with this process of feminisation, beyond the metrosexual and way beyond the moisturising man.

Rex and the City will feature four ordinary men – Rex the plumber, Kevin the electrician, Dave the carpenter and Tim the guy who fixes air conditioning. They hang around together in their overalls and carry their little toolbags.

They all long for love and affection but typically they have issues that they have to resolve by meeting up every single night and most other times as well. You’re thinking they meet up in a bar or maybe a blokey steakhouse? No, that would just be playing at it. They meet regularly at chi-chi bars where they order white wine. They worry about sex a lot and whether it’s right to allow a girl to give them a blow-job. Rex is always thinking about relationships and never actually at work and we wonder how he can afford all those shifting spanners that are quite expensive. He has closets full of them.

He is going out with Mrs Big who is actually big since we are apparently in an era where fat and obesity have become fashionable and desirable. But she plays with his heart and sometimes at night, alone in his thoughtfully decorated apartment, he sits on the bed in his boxers hugging his knees dreaming of what might be.

One night he can’t take it anymore and bursts into tears. He calls Kevin who comes rushing over and sits with him all night, comforting him. They laugh and cry together and give each other a facial and we feel good for them.

There will be dream sequences where Tim stops grappling with a particularly difficult air conditioning problem, to drift off into the future where he has two gorgeous boys, both mini air conditioning engineers. He is brought down to earth abruptly when a pipe bursts and he squeals because now he is covered in water.

Dave calls Rex one night because he is totally shocked that he saw a naked woman by mistake at the gym. He is not sure if he can go to the gym again. One day Rex is lying in bed (he always is) and he sees a spider. He gets scared and so calls Mrs Big who comes over and squashes it for him. They kiss and Rex thinks it is alright again. But the next day Mrs Big gets engaged to someone else and he is devastated. The four men decide to take an holistic yoga break where they can comfort Rex and laugh, cry, laugh, cry and maybe laugh again. Tim announces he will adopt. They hug him for being so brave and cry some more.

Not surprisingly men will organise group outings to go and see Rex and The City, the Cock Com of the season, which will be advertised with the line "You'll bust your balls laughing." Women of course will not understand what they see in such nonsense. After all, nobody acts like that, do they?

Here is where I'm serialising my novel. Thank you to all who have donated, some beyond the call of duty. I appreciate it hugely. Sometime next week the first chapter will pop into your inbox. You can still sign up so go now. You won't get anymore on the website as we have reached the first threshold for writing.

Ms R

Reply to reader in mild distress

Stop Blog: Here is where I'll be serializing novel. Credit crunch, sex, wealth, hubris and just a bit of a moral tale. Prologue up now!

Ms R doesn't normally reply to readers on blog, however, this question relates to one of WOE'S most read posts (and most searched for terms) so we are making an exception. The reader below actually left this comment on the post "Technology is not your friend" (see sidebar) where very early on in this blog's history Ms R looked at reasons as to why men don't call. Reader, whatever else happens, know that Ms R has known your pain.

"I dont know whats going on!!! we went out on two dates he said he likes me a lot and at the last date we got kinda intimate today he said he was gonna call to meet up but he didn't. I don't know what's happening is he into me or not? or is it too early to tell?"

First of all anon, who the fuck knows? It's easy for Ms R to write witty and clever pieces about why he might not call, however that won't stop you staring at your phone and your email hoping that they produce the result you want. Nothing Ms R says will prevent you ringing your girlfriends at midnight seeking reassurance and then ignoring them if they can't provide it. Let's see, it's been a few days since you wrote so by now his silence will have become a deafening roar, one that is all consuming. You've mentally gone over every detail of that last date, wondering what the trigger point was. And having done a forensic examination that would easily rival anything on CSI you are still baffled. Then there are the famous parting words: "I'll call you and we'll meet up." I bet you've rearranged those hundreds of times. Did he mean straight away? Next week? Next year? Did he forget to tell you he was leaving town on vacation? Or forever. Yes, maybe that just slipped his mind. Or did he just tell you that to make you feel better because he had no intention of following up?

Has his mother died? Is he really married? Does he have a dark secret? You've gone through it all and you're no closer to figuring it out. Then one of your girlfriends says the very thing you didn't want to think about. "You got kindda intimate on the second date. Maybe you shouldn't have?" So now you're back to dissecting that fateful evening when you were both feeling good and you did what adults who are enjoying each other's company frequently do. Except now you're thinking that maybe he's thinking you were easy. Maybe that's all he wanted? Maybe, mabye, maybe..

The truth is dear anon reader and others like you, human beings change their minds. Today Ms R chopped up the ingredients to make soup and got very excited about it. Then she got bored and ate pasta. Because she changed her mind. It just felt right. She feels a bit guilty about not making the soup but she's not too worried. It's not like she made the soup and then tipped it all out. That would have been pretty bad.

You see where I'm going? A couple of dates is really too early to be worrying about this. At this stage it's not about you. Or him. Because you don't really know each other. Of course as women we're a bit screwed since kissing and a bit of skin to skin action is likely to result in some sort of attachment (or what we think is one). Men take a bit longer. He hasn't done anything wrong. But most importantly neither have you. If he calls, remember you still haven't made the soup. And if he doesn't, the same applies. If this were several dates down the line, I think he might owe you an explanation but right now, he probably doesn't even know himself.

Porn and men are not to blame for love's loss

Stop Blog: www.toxicpeoplenovel.wordpress.com is where I'll be serializing novel. Credit crunch, sex, wealth, hubris and just a bit of a moral tale. More to come very soon.


Regular readers (if there are any left) will know that Ms R does not subscribe to what she terms 'unreasonable feminism' where everything bad that has happened to women is ascribed to an action by men. This point of view is not only unreasonable but incredibly stupid. Nonetheless it is convenient and in a world that needs answers for everything that happens, it's handy.

Older readers - those of you aged between say 30 and around 1000 years old - will know that porn has always been with us in some form or another. In magazines, in ancient carvings, in art - it has always existed and the human body has been used in one form or another to tantalize and shock. What is different today? Apparently there is more of it and worse still it's easy to find on the internet. The argument by many of the Unreasonables goes that this male driven activity (we'll get back to that one) is responsible for everything from the way women dress today to the way they shave their pubic area to the fact that they are not respected by men and hence loving relationships don't exist anymore. Because apparently porn has stopped men wanting loving relationships with real women. That's right, the reasons we can't find The Ones are because men are watching porn and believing everything they see. And when they get out into the real world they can't find anyone like that. All of them.

That the majority of men are driven by porn is as silly as suggesting women are not complicit in any of this. Even the porn thing is muddy territory. Those women who advertise on Readers Wives' websites, on adult 'affair' sites and on casual, no strings dating sites, what are they doing if not complying in their own objectification as a purely sexual object who wants little else - their own personal pornification? Ok maybe the odd husband is egging on his wife to have a go with another bloke but in the main, it is women who are volunteering their bodies as commodities on these sites.

And what of all those articles in the past fifteen years that suggested women could go out and fuck a different bloke every night and do so with impunity. Were they written by men? Nope. They were written by women who thought this was what equality should be; sex without love or even like. Because, they said, if men can do it, so can you. Ignore biology because that's just a male construct. And so you did and you set about creating the illusion that you were happy to be whatever they wanted you to be.And you convinced yourself that it was good to be this free, this nihilistic, this whatever. Except the important things hadn't really changed. The bit where women want to be looked after, chased after and treated as special. The bit where they want the phone to ring (so many emails on this one...). Except the men aren't doing it and it's not because of porn. Sometimes it's because they think women don't want them to. And often it's because with all this noise going on men, who need clear signposts, don't know what women want. Signals. Crossed. Badly.

And now we're all a bit stuck and from what Ms R can see, very little of it has to do with porn creating unrealistic expectations. It is far more complex and twisted than that. How do we get back to something where nakedness and sex were pure joy, a result of a connection and not simply a commodity to be traded? Because I can bet you now if you eliminated porn, the problem would still be there.