Man and superman

Men, poor pets, throw them a bone now and then and you'll have them eating out of your hand," Samira was sharing her views with her monthly support group. It would have been easy to dismiss her prognosis if she'd been a society matron, but Samira is a senior associate and has risen in her career, she likes to boast, at the expense of the men she is so casually scornful of. "She said they have no imagination," my wife recounted later to me, on which count, at least, I begged to differ.

It is my experience that what men lack by way of actual achievement, they make up in imagination. They're delusional fools who look into mirrors not to see themselves, but who they imagine themselves to be - George Clooney, Richard Gere, Hrithik Roshan, Irrfan Khan… Where Samira might point out an insecure, vulnerable creature looking into the mirror, the men will see a reflection of invincibility, not a loser but a feisty chooser, a nobody that's actually Brad Pitt in disguise, a genius in the making. If there's a thin body struggling to get out of every fat woman, inside every unshapely man is a dude - problem is, women aren't as delusional as men and can tell the real from the fake. Men don't really see their image in the mirror as much as an ego that blindspots them to their faults.

But all it needs is a beaker of alcohol to bring those secret caprices bubbling to the fore, as I discovered to the women's amusement on a recent rafting trip. With enough shots hastily downed in a game of one-man-upmanship, the bunch of mostly reticent, well-brought up, usually conservative gentlemen turned into testosterone tigers to compete for a silly title made up on the spur of a moment. They preened and they pranced; they showed off their biceps; they stripped off their shirts to reveal flabby bellies that they imagined as six-packs in their drunken state. They flashed their briefs and danced with boa feathers, making you wonder what sites they had been visiting on the internet. They strutted and they gyrated. Did they really mistake their beer bellies for chiselled abs? Or imagine a fake fedora made them look like Humphrey Bogart?

It was enough to set you thinking about the fictions the nerd sitting across from you in office might clandestinely be nursing? Is there a secret formula that makes the quiet colleague you've hardly noticed morph into some fantastical creature with a cloak-and-dagger life? You'd hardly credit men - particularly Indian men, as some ungallant women friends have on occasion pointed out - of imagining themselves in the M&B mould, but here they were, crooning ballads of unrequited love. Admittedly, they sang better than they danced, but it was still more Comedy Circus than Coronation Street.

That they were putty in the women's hands was more than apparent. "Belly dance," they roared, so, of course, the men did. "Shake your booty," the women shouted, and got a response that would have been thrilling if it wasn't also funny. "Look seductive," they suggested, at which the pouting men looked pathetic. Samira would probably have laughed at it all, but it took courage to let it all hang out, even if it was the whisky doing the talking. And it had been a lesson in how easy it is for women to commodify men - now, if only they had been flesh and blood creatures instead of the outcome of the men's own imaginations.