What Men Want

Today, I finally figured out what men want.  It came from such an unlikely place. I was half watching this movie out of the corner of my eye today while I was doing some work, and it seemed pretty terrible. It was made in the 70s and it was like Red Tide set on a German U-Boat during World War II. You know, I’m taking the ship, no this is my ship, wait now it’s my ship. Well that’s the first hour of the movie, and then I decide that is plenty. So I hit the menu button. And the title is “The Land that Time Forgot.” And I think, wrong movie? 

Nope. This movie, after an hour on a uboat, puts these people on an island with dinosaurs. And it being the seventies, within one minute they have killed one of these dinosaurs. And I think. I’ve got it. I’ve cracked the code. I know what men want.

Men want to fight a dinosaur. 

There is no way this movie was originally about dinosaurs. Literally half of the movie is a standard war flick. But somewhere, some man was like, you know what would be better than submarines? Dinosaurs on a submarine. 

Humans are at the absolute top of the food chain. We can pretty much live anywhere we want. I mean, maybe don’t go swimming in shark-infested waters without a taser, but generally things are fine. We love stories where people get eaten by an alligator or their cat or whatever, but that is not the norm anymore. But somewhere, in the back of their minds, I imagine men feeling just a little cheated. Cause the biggest, baddest opponent they could take out, has been dead like 2 million years (or you know 65 million years ago when you check wikipedia. Damn, that’s a long time ago). 

very realistic dinosaur used in The Land that Time Forgot

So, there are a billion movies and TV shows where the whole point is to outsmart, outshoot, outrun, outwhatever a dinosaur. Jurassic Park? Get away from that dinosaur. Terra Nova? Let’s time travel so we have to fight dinosaurs. Godzilla? Man that looks like a dinosaur. And then of course there’s The Butterfly Effect (the Ray Bradbury one not that thing with Ashton Kutcher) where a man time travels with his elephant gun just to shoot a dinosaur. Great. You killed a dinosaur, now the whole world is messed up and we have a dictatorship, are you happy, now? (The answer to that is of course, well duh. I killed a dinosaur). 

 

I don’t know if I speak for all women, but I think that most women probably don’t have a need to try and kill a dinosaur. I want to travel the world and have a maid and eat magic chocolate, but if someone was like “come on, we’re going to go fight a dinosaur,” I’d be like “that’s great, but did you have any vampires I could hang out with?”