My cat is in your garden

I haven't been watching TV lately, but last night I did some catching up (if you can call enjoying a trifecta of CSI re-runs catching up). They were all good, but the CSI:New York episode I saw was particularly interesting.

It went something like this. There was a woman working as a hostess in an upscale restaurant. She'd get the calling cards that male guests would leave in the restaurant's card bowl. Then she'd call them up anonymously and start the conversation with the line "My cat is in your garden." Many of the guys were intrigued by her approach and several of them ended up having phone sex with her. She never told them who she was or where she got their numbers; she'd call them a number of times over a span of weeks until they became obsessed with those calls. She agrees to meet one of them for some nookie -- and is found dead shortly after.

Some of this sounds strange to me. I do understand that a guy who has anonymous phone sex over a period of time might want to take it a step further, to meet his phone lover personally and have honest to goodness, real sex with her. But what if when he meets her for the first time he sees that she's actually butt-ugly, or that she has halitosis, or that she bears a strong resemblance to a purple female dinosaur? Would the fantasy that he's built up in his head about her over the weeks be strong enough to override her faults -- would he still go ahead and screw her?

The idea that men can get turned on by anonymous conversations (even if it's sex talk) with women about whom they know nothing seems strange to me too. If I answer the phone and some male stranger feeds me a line like "My cat is in your garden," I'd hang up pronto. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus indeed.



I think I'll go ask Andrew what he thinks about this aspect of the difference between men and women. He's kinda like the Gil Grissom of interpersonal relations. I will update this post once I get his expert opinion.