Guy TV

What do men really want? Or, more importantly, what do men really want to watch?

This question has been on my mind since our cable provider, Destiny, stopped carrying Star TV programming. Before, we were treated to Star Movies (which butchers the hell out of its films most of the time, but still), Star World (Tonight’s lineup: Friends, Friends, Friends, Friends, That ’70s Show and Friends), and of course, Star Sports and ESPN.

It was the loss of the last two that really upset male viewers hooked on Star. No more Formula One, no more World Series, no more NCAA or NBA playoffs, no more World Cup Soccer...

For the ladies, though, things seemed much brighter: less channels to interfere with Hallmark. More hours devoted to Fashion Emergency and cooking shows.

It’s common knowledge that, when flipping through channels, women tend to seek out comforting-sounding names like Hallmark, Lifestyle, and Fashion TV. Men, meanwhile, are busy hunting for short, blunt acronyms – AXN, ESPN, CNBC, CNN and such. And women tend to be less picky with the TV remote. I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who noted: "When watching TV, women want to know what’s on; men want to know what else is on."

This is even more true now that we’re in TV off-season, with shows like Sex And The City and C.S.I. on hiatus or into reruns. For myself, once Star was kaput, I simply found fewer channels to skip over. There was now even less of nothing to watch.

It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke. Wife complains to her husband: "The food in this restaurant is terrible!" The husband shrugs and says, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"

That’s kind of how I feel about watching TV these days. There’s nothing but crap on, usually. And so little of it!

Generally, I tend to navigate from E! upward, stopping on sports channels only briefly (to see if any Boston teams are playing). I’ll stop on CNBC to find out who’s on Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien. I manage to restrain my thumb from zapping HBO for about 12 seconds, by the time I’ve figured out the unrecognizable movie being shown is not a "guaranteed blockbuster," but something starring Billy Baldwin or Keifer Sutherland. I stop at AXN, to see if something lurid is going on; but it’s usually just bad acting in bad alien makeup – some unknown spinoff from Star Trek.

CNN holds me for a few lingering moments, though only if the world is on the brink of disaster again. There’s FOX News, which is a kind of vox populi haven for wacko right-wing thinking. In any case, it’s the most jingoistic "news" station I’ve come across. BBC is, of course, the more reasonable, sensible place to get your news, and if I could only keep my eyes open long enough, I might actually learn something...

Once you get past the 30s (with the TV remote, I mean), there’s really less and less to hold an average male viewer’s attention span. Sure, the music channels (Channel V, MTV) display lots of writhing, scantily-clad young women. But their proximity to a clump of Christian channels (the Destiny Bible Belt: channels 47-53) always produces involuntary feelings of guilt. UN-TV is always good for an obscure music video or two, but beyond the 60s, you’re really taking your thumb for an unrewarding ride, unless you happen to enjoy Japanese game shows, Sahara TV or the Local Horse Racing Channel.

In truth, I don’t share the average male’s addiction to sports television. I watch a little tennis, a little basketball, a little American football here and there. But I’m no fanatic, and you won’t catch me glued to the TV around NBA playoff season. The World Series, if it doesn’t include the Red Sox, holds no special interest for me.

I found myself fascinated by European rugby for a while, but that was because I could not, for the life of me, figure out what the the hell was going on. There seemed to be no rules in rugby, to my untrained eye – just men in knee-length socks trying to kick, throw, pass and otherwise move an inflated ball around a grass field. No goals were scored that I could detect, nobody ever blew a whistle, and you could pretty much inflict whatever physical damage on your opponent that you could get away with. But then someone started explaining the rules to me, and I began to lose interest. So much for rugby.

I’m more interested in oddball sports, like cockfighting, which usually has a solid block of local TV time devoted to it on Sunday mornings. The best parts are the commercials which advertise cock shampoo ("More Luster and Shine!") and special grain pellets guaranteed to turn your cock into a killing machine.

Then of course there’s billiards, which has the same kind of hypnotic appeal for me that golf holds for other males. There’s something very zen about a straight run of nine-ball.

I’ll be honest and say that, contrary to perceptions, women can be as big (even bigger) sports fans than men. I’m embarrassed to admit many of them know more about Formula One than I ever will. And they seem to get quite emotional about basketball. The female screaming I heard accompanying the recent Ateneo-La Salle game sounded like something out of a Wes Craven movie. Truth is, men only get that excited about sports when there’s money on the line.

And women like the lurid and creepy shows as much as men do. My wife and I are hooked on C.S.I. (before, it was The X-Files), and she’s the first to pause the remote on a particularly gross bit of human behavior on AXN or animal behavior on Animal Planet. And, though she won’t admit it, she enjoys counting the fake boobs on Wild On as much as I do.

When you come right down to it, men do enjoy watching some of the same things women do, and vice versa. Maybe television’s a kind of equalizer in the battle of the sexes. But with fewer and fewer viewing options out there, television has become something even more useful: it’s become a great argument for putting down the remote and picking up a book instead.