What do women <i>really</i> want?

When Oedipus was en route to Thebes and met the sphinx who asked him: "What do women want?" he apparently was the first male to give the reply - "They want their own way" - that the sphinx had been waiting for.

But there are too many reasons for classifying Oedipus as a man who lacked that crucial lightness of touch with the fair sex, which is why his later Viennese promoter said that it was the decisive unanswered question, and was never able to answer it himself.

"Man's love is to his life a thing apart," wrote Byron in musing, aptly enough, on Don Juan. "'Tis woman's whole existence." This was rephrased by Kingsley Amis who simply replaced the second line by the remark: "Women aren't like that." Again, close but no cigar. Kipling in The Female of the Species - which he wrote to tease his pro-suffragette daughter - located the whole thing in the womb, if you will overlook the expression. To him it was perfectly obvious that women needed men to give them children and then, this job done, to make themselves useful about the place.

The moral superiority of motherhood would easily outgun any likely mutiny. (And the strategic superiority too; only women know who the father is.) This was actually quite close to the mark for an imperial misogynist, and surpasses Bernard Shaw's clever but weak riposte to a clever but tough woman that the difference between them was that "I cannot bear children".

Cyndi Lauper's contribution - just wanna have fun - isn't sufficiently gender specific. And anyway, men are producing testosterone and related materials round the clock, while women are in fully receptive mode for only a few days of each month and, as Annette Bening shrewdly observed when she took on Warren Beatty, an understanding of this key difference is - or can be - the beginning of wisdom.

Women want what they want when they want it; men want it whether they want it or not; the stupidest moment in Mel's movie is the repetition of the old cliché that women are the only ones to develop tactical headaches as a result of this asymmetry.

In the foyer of the cinema was a poster of a man and a women rushing towards a screening. She is saying "Honey, what about the snack bar?" He is saying: "Forget it. I don't want to miss the trailers." A typically feeble caricature of the situation, like the sitcom about men and women driving cars in different ways. You can bet money that, on the night he proposed chocolates and popcorn, she really wanted not to miss the trailer for the new submarine thriller. Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is the way it is.

In a few days, those Republican ladies I met are going to be swooning over Charlton Heston, and forgetting that they ever saw Mel Gibson being so "sensitive". They can pick and choose.

It's their revenge for centuries of being subordinated and possessed. They can be kittens one moment and pumas or lynxes the next. They want power, but they don't want it all the time. They want love and, er, affection, but not just like that, or any old way. They want it both ways, and that's the fact of the matter, and smart is the man who realises that this is their privilege and that he can have his own reward in bestowing it.

That's why men spend such little real time answering the question, because if they have to ask, they either don't know or - which can be a temptation - don't care. By the time this reviewer found out, it was jolly nearly too late.