This is why I shun educational programming

I spent Saturday night sitting at home alone on the couch watching television. The sad-sack is not my typical routine -- my sitting alone is usually a result of the social incapacitation of being buried under mountains of case law and the fear of failure. However, this weekend, I was recovering from a bout of Hantavirus, or bird flu, or SARS and my friends were not done shunning my contagious ass like the Amish kid who refused to come home from Rumpspringa.

As if I didn't feel bad enough about myself, what with the shunning and Saturday night loneliness, the Discovery Channel was there to gut-punch me with a two hour program titled "The Science of Sex Appeal."

NOTE: Science has not yet found a cure for cancer or solved the world hunger crisis, but it has pinpointed the essence of sexiness. Science has shit for priorities.

Since I'm always up for activities that will subtly chip away at the fragile self-esteem I spent two years in the gym building up, I sat down with a bottle of wine and a jar of Nutella and said, "Bring on the pain."

After telling me that my Yeti-like gait and husky alto are not at all attractive, and that my above-average height will cause men to question my estrogen count (I have assholes for genes), the very feminine-sounding and thereby likely skinny narrator told me that none of this matters...once every month.

Twat kind of fuckery do you speak of, Discovery Channel?

The pixie-like Austrian scientist eagerly told of these magic "copulants" that a woman gives off during ovulation that cause men who get a whiff to be rendered incapable of distinguishing the relative physical attractiveness of a large spectrum of women. That's right. For about two days out of the month, women are the walking equivalent of a dark bar, a rockin' jukebox, and free-flowing tequila.

Why hasn't The Vagina Monologues jumped on this? I can hear it now. Scripted between the group chant of words to which I've always been ambivalent and the horrifying soliloquy of the woman who accidentally impaled herself on a bedpost could be this masterpiece:

MY VAGINA IS A HOMING BEACON! It lures you in with my siren song. Breathe deep my seduction and perish upon my supple cliffs.

Oh My Jewish Carpenter! I was ready to forward this information and a few spontaneous girl-power haikus to my feminist friends (all two of them), but then I realized that this was not news worthy of celebration. This was one big cosmic joke on the female sex.

God the Father, who created mitochondria, who knows the square root of Pi, who designed the platypus, and who paints in TrueColor rather than 256 bit, couldn't make us all look like Angelina Jolie, so He decided to make men blind?

That's some bullshit right there!

After that, I decided to forgo the next Discovery Channel program -- and probably every other show on the Discovery Channel hereafter -- when the teaser promised to explore the anatomy of sex by voyeuristically watching two people doin' it in an MRI machine. For the sake of science, of course.

Fuck you, science!

I may now return to my regularly scheduled programming...B