It’s Okay If You Don’t Understand Women

This week, to much eyebrow raising in the press, one of the world’s greatest living scientists revealed that he finds women “a complete mystery.”

Stephen Hawking, famous across the planet for his work in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity, made the comment recently when he was interviewed by New Scientist for his 70th birthday.

The press seemed to take the angle that we men should take some kind of consolation from the fact that someone who has spent his entire adult life in university maths departments has trouble understanding the opposite sex. I found this idea a little baffling.

What perhaps would be surprising would be if someone who had achieved renown for his efforts in the seduction of women – one of the world’s great shaggers, like Warren Beatty or Errol Flynn or Tom Jones – said that he found women “a complete mystery.” But then that wouldn’t be a consolation for the rest of us; that would just be depressing.

I’m not saying that the Russell Brands of this world are heroes to the rest of us – but it would aggravate their already irritating success with women further still if it turned out that they didn’t even have to work for it.

What keeps the rest of us regular guys going (to the extent that this sort of thing actually takes up our thoughts to any degree, of course) is that we believe people like him must try it on with pretty much every single woman they meet. Call them ardent enthusiasts, call them compulsive sex pests, men like these let men like us paper over our feelings of wonder, envy and inadequacy with the thought that at least we don’t try that hard.

If it turned out that these blokes just found women there every time they closed the door on an airplane toilet or went into their hotel rooms, and had no idea what they’d done to deserve it, then that might just be a little bit too hard to take.

But work hard at it they undoubtedly do – and that’s a great service to us all. Yes, those of us destined to blunder through life with sporadic, variable and fundamentally unpredictable success with women need supershaggers with the baffling success of Mick Jagger so that we can get on with working on our boring old normal, everyday, functioning relationships without feeling we should be out there in the bars, cafes, galleries, supermarkets and libraries of our towns, trying to chat up anything in a skirt, smock or slacks to justify our existence as men.

So I’m quite glad, and not at all surprised, that Stephen Hawking finds women perplexing. It means he’s been doing his job properly, thinking about the mysteries of the universe rather than universal mysteries. I’m glad the universe seems to have some sort of order, at least some of the time. After all, you wouldn’t want Rod Stewart teaching your daughter about the Big Bang, would you?

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