The ultimate truth about men and dating

We bring you an exclusive excerpt from Jose Covaco's hilarious book on dating: Ladies, Please!

Men, they say, are from Mars and women are from Venus.

So you can imagine how difficult it can get when the two meet (or erm... try to).

MTV VJ Jose Covaco takes a hilarious look at the complicated world of dating in his new book Ladies, Please!

Frank, honest, cheeky and (sometimes offensive), Ladies, Please! is a laugh riot.

We bring you this exclusive excerpt from the book with kind permission from Random House.

When someone said men are like dogs, they had no idea how right they were, because men will run amok unless trained.

The only people to blame are women.

Indian mothers have been pampering their sons for centuries.

Most of us don't have to lift even a finger to help at home. Keeping the house clean? Cooking the food? Washing the dishes? Putting the clothes out to dry? Not our problem.

This is actually a form of reverse training, due to which we've been trained not to help with things if we don't want to.

If you let the dog do whatever it wants it's going to do exactly that -- whatever it wants.

So much so that if a man is used to being served his food and suddenly one day there is no one to do this, he has no idea what to do.

Even if he's really hungry, he will try to wait it out in hope that the server of the food will show up.

A married man may even starve to death if his wife doesn't come home.

My theory is that while men were evolving only to procreate, women were evolving to think and be smarter so that they can, in turn, use their brains to seek out and procreate with only the 'best' of the men.

Clearly this plan hasn't worked out very well for a majority of the species, which is why we have books like this one on self-help, love, and dating.

I'm going to try and explain what we're going through. Yes, men are going through stuff as well. It's not all fun for us, so forgive me if you don't find cleverly constructed sentences or amazing wordplay in this book.

This book is about the truth, and the truth is we're going through a rough time too. Contrary to popular belief, we have feelings too.

Be that as it may, even the 'best' of men are victims of evolution.

We can't not look at other women. It doesn't matter what you look like. A man is wired to look at another woman the moment she steps into his field of view, which is approximately 210 degrees, the equivalent of two barn owls sitting with their backs to each other.

It has nothing to do with the woman we're with.

It's not like we love you any less or that we find another woman more attractive than you.

You could be the most beautiful woman in the world and your man could be head over heels in love with you.

But if another woman steps into his field of view, he will end up looking.

Sadly, even if we're aware of this and do everything we can to combat it, we will still fail from time to time.

It is incredibly foolish for women to accept this as it is, and worse still, for men to use this as an excuse to keep checking out women.

We don't know why we can't control this.

On behalf of all the men in the world I want to say that I'm so, so sorry (this does not include those shady men on the street who stare at you while scratching themselves. Like, what is that about? I mean, why don't they use some anti-bacterial powder or something?).

Most men won't admit to it, but we sometimes end up checking out another guy simply because he was wearing bright clothing and standing over in the distance where we couldn't see her, I mean him, clearly.

I believe it to be because of this damn biological wiring.

Life is like porn to us. Everything is an adventure and we hope it will end with sex. It's totally cool if it doesn't but we still hope, because without hope we have nothing.

Which brings me to why men love porn so much.

Porn is a sometimes-themed audio-visual replication of everything we hope will happen.

We know that it is also everything that's probably never going to happen in real life.

Of course, this excludes the people who write in to Dr Mahinder Watsa's sex column. Real life just isn't like porn where the pool cleaner cleans the pool for free after having sex with you.

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The 'aunty' on the fourth floor who called you for a little 'help' doesn't exist. Most of us don't even have a pool, forget about pool cleaners, and all the aunties who have invited me to their homes needed help with heavy suitcases.

If real life was like porn, what would people masturbate to?

It's not that we lack imagination; it's just so much easier to watch porn than to imagine it.

That's how lazy we are and that's probably why porn exists, because we are too lazy to imagine it.

Now if your boyfriend is trying to get in touch with porn stars, then he's obsessed and you might have a bit of a problem.

Science has proved that sex for women is much more than just sex.

Like they say, for men it's all between the eyes and for women, it's between the ears.

This particularly holds true for men, we are visual creatures; but with women, who knows what's going on between the ears?

It's a much larger distance than between the eyes.

Even if they manage to convince themselves otherwise, sex is a very emotional thing for women and it just can't be escaped.

For men, the emotional part is finding a woman who won't laugh whenever she sees us naked.

I hate to break this to you, ladies.

Sex, for men, is fairly devoid of emotion.

Women make the mistake of thinking that sex is a big deal to men.

Not that it isn't, it definitely is, heck, it's the biggest deal.

We process it differently. When it comes to women (of course, I'm speculating as one can never truly know) they seem to process sex very differently from us.

Men are perfectly capable of being completely in love with one person and having sex with another.

In fact, sometimes that seems to be the final goal.

Poof! A magic genie appears from the lamp and tells the man, 'You have freed me! I shall grant you three wishes.

Ask for whatever your heart desires, my friend.' The man thinks about it for a while and says, 'I love my girlfriend very much, but I can't stop checking out other women. Can you take away this problem?'

To which the genie replies, 'That's funny now, seriously, stop screwing around and wish for world peace or something like that.'

I'm not saying being like this is right or even OK.

In fact, it is what causes the most problems for us, but it is who we are on a very basic level.

We can overcome this but on a regular day, we are controlled by our penises.