Bro-etry: A Man Tells Us How To Fix Our Lives In Verse

The Times of London has a somewhat irritating series titled “The Trouble With Women,” which gives a platform to a new dude each week so he can complain about the lady-folk. This week, we have a “poet” named Andy.

If you read the Times column each week, you’ll note that there’s a ton of trouble with women, crew! Every dumb stereotype ever written about the ladies surfaces in these dude-penned pieces: women are pushovers! Women make men clean the house! Women always want to talk and talk and talk! And then there’s today’s column, a poem penned by a self-proclaimed 35-year-old “vagabond” named Andy, who just wants women to stop living in their fairytale worlds. And don’t we all just live in a fairytale world, ladies? It’s hard not to, what with all of these douchebag princes running around, am I right? Shoes and yogurt, girlfriend!

I have avoided writing about the “Trouble With Women” series because ultimately, it’s so dumb that it doesn’t really warrant any further discussion. It is truly like a copy of The Berenstain Bears and TOO MUCH Male Privilege that has no foreseeable end: Papa Bear and Brother Bear learn no lessons and instead spend 8,000 pages bitching about the fact that Mama Bear took away their junk food. Women! Am I right?!

Today, however, I found it impossible to stay away from the column, as Vagabond Andy presented us with a poem, and I’m a sucker for poetry, even if it’s written by a Bro version of Dr. Seuss. So let’s take a look at a few of Andy’s verses, shall we?

Her diet starts the moment she wakes.
Of Prince Charming fairy tales and Diet Coke breaks,
Her head full of fantasies, of meeting “The One”,
A life of perfection and buckets of sun.

Ladies, why can’t you stop dieting to fit societal standards of beauty perpetrated mostly by the Patriarchy and having high expectations about your own potential partners? What gives!?

High expectations, from an early age,
Tall, dark and handsome, plus a good wage.
Funny too, and amazing in bed,
Completely faithful and ready to wed.

Uh-oh! Self-esteem alert! Our poet seems to be one of those bitter nice guys who feels he deserves the Natalie Portmans of the world, though the Natalie Portmans of the world are total bitches for going after the Gael Garcia Bernals, no?

She embarks on her quest to find her hero,
But first she needs to visit size zero,
Slim-fast plans and self-help books,
A mortgage of cosmetics to help her looks.

“I’m not as slim … I’m not as pretty”,
Comparing herself makes her feel shitty,
But she doesn’t stop, likes her fantasy,
Yep, she loves to live vicariously,

It’s her fantasy, right? To be a size-zero with perfect looks in a society that demands that women be a size-zero with perfect looks? Surely this kind of mentality and insane pressure to conform to rigid standards of beauty has nothing to do with male fantasies, does it, Poet Bro?

And finally, we have this:

The trouble with women?” Well since you inquire
You may be relieved to hear it’s not dire,
My answer is she does too much gazing,
If she ditched her fantasy, her reality would be amazing.

Translation: ladies, please lower your standards and date “nice guys” like me. Otherwise, you’re just going to suffer. And you deserve it!

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty touched. I only wish this poem had been around during my high school days, so I could have scrawled the lines all over my notebooks instead of wasting my time with Dorothy Parker, you know?

In any case, to honor Vagabond Bro-Poet Andy, I thought perhaps you all could come up with some response poetry of your own. Feel free to post them in the comments, and I’ll post a few later today.

The Trouble With Women: Forget The Fairytales [TimesOnline]
The Trouble With Women: They Always Want To Talk [TimesOnline]
The Trouble With Women: They Roll Over Far Too Easily [TimesOnline]