Today's topic is: Men are now obselete

Bad news, boys. We are obselete. Finished, kaputt. How did this happen? I hear you ask, we know that over recent times women have become more economically independent and we didn't do very well at hiding the fact that they can think for themselves and live lives that aren’t purely about supplication to our every wish, but obselescence? That’s pretty extreme. Well, it happened. And the final nail in the coffin of masculinity is…shampoo.

I don't have much to do with shampoo these days. What little hair I have left tends to be kept very short and consequently can be treated as if it is merely skin. Most of the time I simply run soapy water over my head and bingo, in a triumph of multi-tasking, both skin and hair become cleansed. This has been going on for several years and, as such, I am aware that I am well behind the curve when it comes to shampoo development. I do, however, know from my keen powers of observation, that many women are obsessed about shampoo and spend up to three quarters of their income on it, and other bathroom related products.

I also realise that this is extremely important and not in any way a frivolous waste of money. I can’t say that I have ever suffered the nightmare of dry and damaged hair, lack of colour sheen, nor the trauma of split ends. But it is serious. I once knew a young woman who would actually set fire to her hair to purge her split ends. If you are willing to flambe your own head in order to deal with split ends then they must be a pretty drastic problem.

But I never realised that shampoo technology had moved on so far in recent times. Settling down to watch Tyra yesterday (a show where Tyra and her many sponsors did what the DHS and the combined forces of the United States government are struggling to do ie. with the help of a 6 foot 4 high-heel wearing transvestite and a marketing representative from Rimmel, rebuild the whole of the Gulf Coast, and give tips on disguising cellulite) I was presented with the awful truth. I, and my gender, are now obselete.

Y’see, it appears that shampoo technology has moved beyond the simple cleaning and conditioning of hair, repair of dry/damaged/treated hair, the provision of extra lustre and shine and a noticeable increase in the vibrancy of colour (according to 74 of the 98 women asked). Apparently Herbal Essences shampoo can now provide women with instant multiple orgasms.

For reasons which I forget, I own some of this shampoo. I hardly ever use it, mainly because the consistency of it means it takes quite an effort of co-ordination to actually get it out of the bottle. A split second mismatch between the bottle squeezing hand and the receiving hand means that before you can get it to your head, with a quiet farting noise, the blob of shampoo that has emerged from the nozzle is slurped back up into the bottle. It seems that Herbal Essences shampoo has fallen prey to the cult of thickness. This covers lots of products that were perfectly serviceable for many decades but have since been thickened, mainly because of the pressure to come up with a ‘new improved’ version every so often to boost sales and the manufacturers ran out of new flavours to add to them. Heinz Cream of Chicken soup was thickened so much that they should have renamed it Heinz Chicken Non-drip Emulsion Paint. HP sauce was thickened to the point where it simply refused to come out the bottle, like a sulking teenager refusing to come out of their room.

Anyway, back to the issue in hand. An advert came on the TV. It featured a pretty young woman washing her hair in a hotel bathroom and, due to the fact that they have reached their dotage without ever encountering, practising, or even knowing about the existence of sex, an elderly couple in the next door room showing outrage at the sheer immoral debauchery of what was happening through the wall. The poor girl couldn’t help it. It seems that, not only did she have the independent income to pay for a hotel room and such tremendous co-ordination that she could extract the shampoo from the bottle without assistance, but the instant it touched her head she was thrown into an uncontrollable earth-shattering orgasmic rapture.

Extensive research by me (well, a visit to ASDA) has shown that Herbal Essences isn’t even very expensive. It’s actually one of the cheaper shampoos available. The Lord only knows what the 9.99 a bottle stuff does.

So, boys, we may as well give up. We can not even pretend anymore that we are even mechanically useful. That trusty old line “I may be five feet two balding, overweight, drive a rusty ten year old Nissan and have few prospects, but I know a few, ahem, tricks,” is as useless and out of date as we are.

It’s not like we can even claim to smell lightly of Rosemary and Camomile.