This column is dedicated to all those single schmoes out there who plodded through Valentine’s Day in a stupor of depression.

Ninety percent of the male brain is devoted to thoughts of sex. The other 10 percent of our brains is divided between sports statistics and food. So we think about sex a lot. But that’s not the reason we want women. As fantastic as this may sound, men want women because women are beautiful.

In a poll I recently conducted, four out of 10 frat guys wanted women above all else. Even above beer, though they admitted they would prefer a woman who had beer in her possession. The other six of the 10 frat guys just kept yelling “let’s kick that freak” and trying to give me wedgies.

Women always want to know what men want from them. Well, our wants are actually quite simple. We want beer always within easy reach.

We want large piles of money falling on our heads. And honestly, we want women to wear those stretchy, black pants 24 hours a day.

We will not only buy you drinks for this, we will buy you trips to Europe, homes in Florida, etc. Men will never admit this, but they want this above all else.

The most common complaint among men, at least men in Ames, and specifically those men who hang out in bars a lot, is: “Where are all the women at?” And my answer is, I don’t know.

Statistically, women outnumber men on campus like two to one, but they are forever in absentia. Check out any bar along Welch Avenue, on any given Friday night.

The guy to girl ratio is like five to one. And to all you freshmen out there, a ratio is not a device that plays music.

To quote a fellow bar connoisseur, “it is a sausage party.” Granted that women entering a bar must feel like they’re diving into piranhas. And granted as well, men in bars have all the collective moral sense of a pack of jackals. But really, there is nothing to fear from men.

Now, I’m sure most of the women in Ames have better things to do with their time than watch men become drunken idiots: spending long hours at the library, catching up on all those psychological breakthroughs in recent times. And I’m sure there a lot of pajama parties and slumber parties and vodka binging parties you have to attend. But would it kill you to stop in for a drink?

Now for the baloney. It is not sex that compels men to seek out women. And this is blasphemy to say, but we are, in truth, compelled by a hunger for the aesthetic. We crave beauty above all things.

And what men find most beautiful, most aesthetically pleasing, is anything to do with sports. There is nothing better than to see Griffey slam a home run.

To see Kurt Warner hit his receivers with those laser beam guided passes.

Of course, to women, sports must seem very silly indeed. And they are, but they were all we could come up with to impress you.

But back to women. Men won’t admit this, either, but women inspire us. We create art for you. Look at “The Tempest” by Giorgione. And I mean the painter, not the spaghetti sauce.

Look at the marvelous nudes of Auguste Ingres. The glowing and lush water nymphs of Ruben. We idolize beauty. It confounds us as nothing else can.

Look at and read the love sonnets of Pablo Neruda or pretty much any of the poetry ever written. It is all written about women.

I don’t know if women feel this same compulsion for the aesthetic. Are women inspired by Brad Pitt to create great art?

It’s puzzling, in a way, that women have any interest at all in men. Men are crude, obnoxious, violent, amorphous creatures. If women didn’t exist, we would all be getting drunk and hitting each other over the head with reindeer femurs.

But women do exist, thankfully, and we will always be willing to put sports on hold for any women who happen to be around. But we need your help.

So to all the recalcitrant women out there, please go to the bars, because that’s where men think they can find you.

We will write poems for you, create paintings for you and, of course, try to have sex with you- but mostly those first two.

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Dan Johnson is graduate student in English from Davenport.