that age-old mystery, what women want

Back when I was single which seems like a world away now, I was often flabbergasted by what men would do to attempt to attract me. There was the old "have you been saved in Jesus" routine (funny how no one tries to check on my soul's status now that I'm middle-aged; when I was a young hottie, it was practically a daily occurrence). There were the chronic liars, who would go on about their cutting edge martial arts achievements and knowledge of dead languages (strange how those two seem to go together). In general, men tried to act like some fount of wisdom, dispensing the knowledge of the ages. And when it came down to their penises, they truly were at their most clueless, presenting them as though they were expecting the beholder to faint with ecstatic joy, and -- at the very worst -- introducing these rather ordinary organs by name. My God, how pathetic do you have to be to name your genitals?

I recently ran across a website run by a man who devotes himself to ridiculing men's attempts to woo women on the internet. Weasel, the foulmouthed proprietor of that site, has it down exactly when he muses that most men seem to view themselves as accessories to their penises, which they are eager to introduce to women. Weasel has an even better, but smaller, site, where he runs pathetic letters written by men to women(don't worry, fellows; he's intending to branch out and is actively soliciting insane notes from women to men, acknowledging that women can stalk just as well as men).

Over in Weasel's little corner of the web devoted to man at his most loseriest, I found an unintentionally hilarious gem, a film made by a man hoping to use it to win back his ex-fiance, whom he had not seen in two years:

This would make a great commercial for selling four-wheelers, but it is a loser as marketing the man as husband material. Evidently this young man thinks that women love carrying rocks and hay bales around in their spare time and building obstacle courses out of tractor tires. Who wouldn't sign up for a life of that? I'm particularly stymied as to why he would show his vehicles having trouble -- an unreliable car is not exactly sexy. There's nothing, in my experience, like a highway breakdown to bring a person to near-psychotic crankiness unless it is, say, a passive aggressive mother-in-law.

After making this little classic, the four-wheeling bachelor spammed forums all over the internet to get it as widely seen as possible. However, besides lacking an understanding for what women want, the video's star and auteur lacks a sense of humor. The posters at Cracked.com's bulletin boards saw the video and promptly dubbed its star "Douchebag Quadbike." One of them, Sanchez, wrote a parody song, "The Ballad of Douche Quadbike" and put that up on Youtube. After our lonely fourwheeler found that, he sent a series of threatening emails to Sanchez, including references to teams of lawyers winging their way to him on an airplane that very moment, years in jail, being reported as a terrorist and put on the no-fly list, etc.., etc.. (It can all be read here, if you have plenty of time). In response, the Cracked.com regulars made more videos, songs, and lots of T-shirts mocking the fourwheeling stud-wannabe. My favorite is Drizzt's techo remix of Sanchez's song, which is truly hilarious:

I suspect that the lonely four-wheeling guy's life would be easier if he were gay. Then he would understand the mind and desires of his love object; they could tone their dorsals and pecs together and hop through those tractor tires side by side. But sadly the hours of work put into his video paean to his four-wheeler and his muscles are not going to win his fiance back or earn him much more than the derision of the Cracked.com wits.