Where I grew up women described men in simple terms.
He was a dickhead, a total dork, up himself or absolutely f-ing gorgeous.
Those were simple times, when a man was considered by most women as a necessity.
So we made up our own classifications, which seemed to work before we grew up and realised men were only really necessary for two things: sex and ... I forget what the other thing is.
These days the common or garden male must slot himself into one or more of a myriad of marketing terms, invented not so much to give women a reason to let them hang around, but to give men a clue about who they are.
Which seems to come down to questions like: Should he moisturise or not? Is manscaping something he should consider and is cashmere really worth the effort?
The Sensitive New Age Guy or SNAG turned up at the same time Friends came on the telly, and suddenly we found ourselves at parties with men staring into our eyes, holding our hands and telling us the plans Mars had in Mercury for our weekend.
I quite liked SNAGs because they never played rugby, meaning Mars and Mercury usually had quite hot plans for the weekend never involving mud, rain and beer drinking.
Then came the metrosexual, a man in touch not so much with his sensitive side, but with the girl inside. He appeared around the same time as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and suddenly I could never find my eyebrow tweezers.
If I want to share my tweezers, my eyeliner, my leg wax and my nail polish, I'll move in with a transvestite. At least she might teach me something I didn't already know about tweezing and we could have some fun nights together lip synching to It's Raining Men.
And then there was the retrosexual with his plaid shirts, mahogany-laced odour and manly pursuits involving chopping firewood and lighting fires. We let him take us to one Stomp show, watched all the boys in jeans and plaid shirts tap dancing on bits of metal and decided that sharing our tweezers wasn't so bad after all.
And now we have, according to a survey conducted by a deodorant company, the neosexual - someone with traditional masculine qualities who is also sensitive and emotional. As one commentator observed, that's not a man, that's a lesbian.
Men interested in morphing into a neosexual will need to combine the "manliness of a James Bond, the looks of Hugh Jackman, the humour of Jim Carrey and the youth of Zac Efron".
An expectation quite impossible to fill unless perhaps you took Willie Apiata and crossed him with Jason Gunn then raised him in a circus under the tutelage of Michael Hurst.
The survey, which polled almost 3000 women from 14 countries, found 81 per cent of women wanted men to man up without losing their sensitive side.
Which really only proves almost 2430 women are fantasist nutbars who should spend less time worrying about Mr Right and more about Mr Realistic and leave the deodorant companies to con men into believing masculine identity can be packaged into cute names ending in "sexual".
Meanwhile women receive no such attention. We're never described in positive terms of grooming, fashion sense, emotions or abilities.
Instead we are "branded" with slutty descriptions such as MILF (mother I'd like to, err, have sex with), GILF (grandmother I'd like to etc), or a cougar, who seeks out her prey of younger men to drag back to her dusty boudoir. Younger women are either a "bitch on heat" or "whoreish".
A deodorant survey of men would reveal the perfect woman would have the "femininity of Scarlett Johansen, the looks of Angelina Jolie, the humour of Tina Fey and the youth of Myley Cyrus".
In defence of both sexes it's time we returned to the ways of old where working out if someone was right for us came down to simple chemistry and spark, not marketing categories.
They're either hot or they're not, and we'll be deeply satisfied with him as long as he can do those two things for us: sex and... oh, that's right, put out the rubbish.
<i>Wendyl Nissen</i>: Life simpler when men weren't just catchphrases
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