Angela Mollard: Why everyone – even a High Effort Chick – loves a Low Effort Guy
Her low effort guy’s view is that there’s little disparity between men and women in terms of domestic duties, just a different standard as to how often they are done. Here’s how high effort chick Angela Mollard gets her revenge.
Lifestyle
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I have nothing against lentils. Perfectly decent foodstuff if you soak them for 400 hours, cook them for what seems like the same, then mix them with 12 other ingredients to make them palatable.
Dahl, for instance, is delicious. Lentils are also good in that popular Cypriot salad recipe which also includes freekeh. Together, these superfoods are so full of health-enhancing properties they’re likely to push out your life expectancy to 110.
It’s fortuitous because you lose valuable days of your life preparing and cooking the sodding stuff.
Which is why I have never heard a man utter the phrase: “Darling, shall I make that lentil pilaf for our guests on Saturday night?”
It is also the reason why I am calling BS on research out this week that found men eat red meat because it makes them feel stronger, sexier and more powerful.
Whatever the research from Victoria University states – and it would be Victoria wouldn’t it? – men do not eat steak because it makes them more virile. Rather, men eat steak because it tastes good and it’s the lowest effort meal they can get away with.
I say this not with criticism but with envy. “Low effort”, I’ve realised, is the male superpower.
Getting dressed, grooming, food preparation, linen changing, holiday planning – it’s all banal stuff approached with minimal effort so that energy can be preserved for far more interesting pursuits such as golf, footy and fishing.
Grilling a hunk of meat in three minutes is simply the Low Effort Guy’s (LEGs) most-efficient means of refuelling.
Yet according to the study, which I hope was not publicly funded, there is a meat-masculinity link which results in Australian men eating around 50 per cent more red and processed meat than women.
To encourage men to reduce their intake we would apparently need “cultural change”. Seriously? Surely we could just make a biscuit that tastes like steak and the low-effort lads would flock to that instead.
What’s irksome for us HECs (High Effort Chicks) is that everyone loves a LEG.
We adore their ease, the insouciant manner they watch TV with one leg slung over the arm rest, their ability to twist the cap off a beer and lob it into the bin, basketball style, from five metres away.
Even when they miss they’re unbothered, leaving the pesky thing to lie on the floor for days. Not for them the huffy martyred rise from the couch to pick up the errant item and place it in the bin.
Low Effort Guys eat steak and drink beer to their heart’s content unbothered by artery clog or liver damage. They reason that they’re mitigating any damage by remaining unstressed.
It’s why the “dad bod” was so celebrated a few years back.
It’s not that untoned arms or padding over the abs is hot but that it signifies a languid ease that to date has largely bypassed the female DNA.
There is no biological reason why men don’t fret over their outfits, enhance their eyes with five different eyeshadow shades, catastrophise about their weight, regard “bringing a salad” as a performance sport and dress their children as if they’re a calculable measure of their own self-worth. They just don’t.
Instead, like Sean Penn, who dresses like a vagrant, treats haircuts as optional and genuinely considered calling his son “Steak” because he likes meat so much (vetoed by his then wife Robin Wright), these LEGs are seen as the hottest men on the planet.
How else to explain that the permanently untucked Boris Johnson has sired multiple children with various women, Ed Sheeran is a global superstar despite looking like a scruffy roadie, and Jeff Bridges can headline a movie with three lines of dialogue and a beard that looks like it might harbour a week’s worth of groceries?
Were it not for his camera-friendly mug and penchant for Birkenstocks, Karl Stefanovic might also be a LEG on account of wearing the same suit for a year.
It’s their grudging admiration for LEGs that leads women to befriend gay men because they, at least, respect each other’s efforts.
Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City may have adored low-effort Aidan but she needed pink-kerchiefed Stanford to appreciate her tulle skirts, heels and neuroticism.
My bloke is the poster boy of LEGs.
While I waste my life away rinsing, drying and dressing kale (and doing the same with my hair), he lounges around waiting for his three-minute star act with a frypan.
Recently he bought a slow cooker, presumably because it would do the work for him, and his shaved head is not an attempt to look like Jason Statham but a means of shortcutting daily grooming.
It’s his view that there is little disparity between men and women in terms of domestic duties, just a different standard as to how often they are done.
As for steak, we’re both fans. But it’s my revenge on low-effort men everywhere, that I leave him to clean the barbecue. If he ever gets around to doing it.
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Originally published as Angela Mollard: Why everyone – even a High Effort Chick – loves a Low Effort Guy
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