QI (2003) s07e07 Episode Script
Girls and Boys
APPLAUSE Go-o-o-o-o-od evening.
Good evening, good evening and welcome to QI where, tonight, it's a battle of the sexes as QI looks at girls and boys and gender.
Let's hear itfor the girls! CHEERING And huddled under the glass ceiling we have sugar and spice, Ronni Ancona.
CHEERING And all things nice, Sandi Toksvig.
CHEERING But what about a big hand for the boys.
MANLY CHEERING Slugs and snails, Jack Dee.
CHEERING And a puppy dog's tail, Alan Davis.
CHEERING Vive, of course, la difference.
Let's here our gender-specific buzzers.
Sandi goes OPERATIC SINGING Ronni goes HARP PLAYS Jack goes WOLF WHISTLE And Alan goes BUZZER: 'Ello, darlin'! AUDIENCE LAUGH Well, tonight we are on the lookout for outrageous sexism, so if any of you spot an example of it, you can pull me up short by using your buzzer or ask one of the boys to do it for you, if you'd like.
HARP PLAYS Yes, that's an example.
You've started.
You get points for that.
And, if you're right, you also might get a cuddle.
OPERATIC SINGING Boys, obviously.
All right.
Damn, that was an example, too.
Anyway, seconds out, round one.
Who was traditionally dressed in pink and called a girl? Was it Gok Wan? LAUGHTER No, not Gok Wan.
Is it Liberace? A person from history? No, traditionally a whole class of people.
A whole class of people? Are the lower classes always dressed in pink so you can spot them? I don't mean class in that sense.
A group of people who were dressed in pink and called a girl.
A girl as in a girl describing a group of people? No.
But babies.
Which babies would you dress in pink? Female babies.
Though boys used to be.
Boys were.
Until the 20th century, the colours were pink for a baby boy and blue for a baby girl.
How could they be wrong for so long? Or maybe we took a wrong turn.
But I'll give you an example of Dressmaker Magazine from 1900.
"The preferred colour to dress young boys is in pink.
"Blue is reserved for girls as it is presumed paler and the more dainty of the two colours.
"And pink is thought to be stronger.
" And as late as 1927, there was a report about Princess Astrid of Belgium who had been caught out when she gave birth to a girl because, "the cradle had been optimistically outfitted in pink", the colour for boys.
Isn't that strange when, now, every shop has a whole pink corner devoted to girls? When did this happen? When did we turn around the other way? Well, that's what I'm saying.
In 1927 they were still talking about pink for boys.
Was it really? Is it something to do with blue being considered quite serene and it's the colour of the Virgin Mary? I think that's all part of it.
They just thought blue was a natural, pale and female colour.
But even more extraordinary is the word 'girl'.
Right up until mid-15th century Boys were called girls? Yes.
They were? LAUGHTER Well, all children You're having to rethink everything, aren't you? Yes.
This is the most extraordinary episode yet.
All children were called girls.
Come on, girls.
Boy children were called knave girls and, this is even more confusing for us today, girl children were called gay girls.
Yes.
So you have I have no problem with that whatsoever.
Gay girls and knave girls.
The word boy was only lately applied to a male child.
Before, it just meant 'servant'.
So you would say, "Boy!" meaning waiter or servant.
Oh, what the hell went wrong? It's a very strange thing, isn't it? Things do change.
And the colour pink, everything has to have a pink version, mobile phones But is there anything to do with the fact that red used to be the colour for men? It was a strong Christian colour.
So I wonder if pink is like a sibling.
I think it is a mixture of that, yes, that pink was considered strong and reddish and male and, as you said, blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary and so on.
I read somewhere that monkeys are attracted to pink.
The females are attracted to pink because the infant primates have little pink faces.
Oh, that's very good.
Did you read that or just see it on a children's television programme? It's certainly true that, if you dress a baby in pink, mothers, when picking them up, if it's not their own child, will tend to have a pink-dressed baby facing them when they hug it and a blue-dressed baby facing outwards.
Thrown out the window.
Or just facing outwards.
All that information you've got, Stephen, and you're so unlikely to use it.
I saw a thing that said they'd tried an experiment with chimps, I think.
And they gave them dolls and trucks or engines to play with and the boy ones all wanted to play with the trucks and engines and the girl ones played with the dolls.
How weird's that? That is odd.
It is very strange.
I've got two daughters and a son.
My son's the last one and, when he was born, I thought, "There are going to be no guns whatsoever.
" So we had no horrible toys and, honestly, he was about two, and a toilet roll immediately became a machine gun.
It is the most You can't fight it, can you? No.
And he likes blue.
Not with toilet rolls, no.
Depends on the war.
Don't hold out for much hope.
But pink, do you know what the traje de luces is? The what? The traje de luces.
I thought you'd been unwell.
The suit of lights.
A South American thing, is it? No.
It's a thing a matador wears that is often pink.
The matador's suit, the suit of light.
And the lining of his cape is pink.
AUDIENCE GROAN That's a painful moment.
Something's going to be pink in a minute.
LAUGHTER Tear me a new one.
AUDIENCE: OOOH! Yes, pink is a strange colour, too, because it doesn't exist on the spectrum, so it's an extra-spectral colour.
Aren't girls more inclined towards the red end of the spectrum? I think that's true.
Berries, foraging.
Yes, having a little look on the savannah and boys running off towards the blue sky.
Is that not some reason why? Yes, I've heard something similar.
Foraging for lipsticks.
On trees in primal times.
Do you know that they've done studies of the hunter-gatherer societies and 9/10's of the food is provided by the women and 1/10 is provided by the men? So the women go, "Oh, we'll get some berries.
" And the men come back, "Honestly, that bison was this close.
" "Yeah, yeah, have your berry dinner.
" Well, we saw one, so It sort of counts.
We'll get him.
You got any berries? Well, the truth is that pink used to be the colour for boys and boys used to be called girls anyway.
So, with all this confusion, what's the best way to get a girl? 'ALLO DARLIN'! Usually works.
LAUGHTER V.
G.
V.
G.
If you need any more than that, they're not interested.
There are lots of theories about it.
Is it something to do with diet? Diet is the current one, yes.
For example, calories.
If you had a higher calorie intake before being impregnated, out of 100, 56 had boys.
So you don't want to have cream cakes just before? If you want a girl, no.
Also, women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal a day were 87% more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowl a week, which is quite Oh, darling, that's tosh! That's put out by Kellogg's.
What do they know? It does look rather extraordinary.
Ridiculous! Women who had boys ate about 400 calories more daily than those who had girls on average.
But those people who had Coco Pops had chimpanzees.
I don't LAUGHTER A very bizarre one.
I do not know whom this would benefit commercially.
Women infected with hepatitis B virus are 1.
5 times more likely to give birth to a male.
It's not a good reason to get it.
No.
We're certainly not encouraging it.
But there is one certain way, which is embryo selection, which in America and Thailand, in particular, is very popular.
It costs about US18,000.
Wow.
A friend of ours had a baby in Thailand - an English couple.
And the Thai women said to her, "If you look lovely when you're pregnant, you have girl.
"If you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you will have boy.
" She said, "What do you think I'm going to have?" "Boy.
" That's outrageous! And she did.
Oh, my God, it works! They are a different species, boys and girls.
I was walking down the road with my two girls and my son, and my son suddenly went "Hah!" for no reason.
And the girls and I turned to him and went, "What?!" There was probably a secret agent round the corner.
I don't know.
Is that puzzling? Ronni and I were talking about how wonderful boys are cos they live in this very clear world about themselves.
When my son was about six, he had a friend over and his friend said, "What's it like having two mummies?" He said, "It's marvellous.
If one of them's poorly, you've still got one to do for you.
" LAUGHTER Excellent child! Excellent child.
I like.
"Do for you"! They're gloriously self-centred, aren't they? There are other theories.
Aristotle thought the diet of the mother and the sexual position used at conception made a difference.
He was half right, it seems, with the diet.
Anaxagoras thought boys and girls come out of different testicles.
So you would tie off the testicle you didn't want the gender.
They're just making it up as they go along.
Based on nothing at all.
The Talmud suggests aligning the bed north-south before sex and then you get a boy.
Why don't they just all wait and see? That's the best way, you're right.
The French thought wearing boots to bed might help having a boy.
What have the boots got to do with it? I've no idea.
It does seem most strange.
Sex selection is a tricky business.
Why don't we have more women as guests on QI, you may well ask? I know this.
Oh, sorry.
No, no, after you.
Is it because women are just not funny? Ohh! IN DEEP SOUTH ACCENT: Now, that's right.
But we're good at other things.
We're good at raising kittens and knitting cakes.
I've heard this a lot.
I've heard that women aren't funny and I think there's a truth in this.
I think that there is a scientific, possibly, relationship between a sense of humour and the male sex organ.
People are always laughing at mine.
Well, there you are, you see! LAUGHTER Is this to do with the fact that people always say there aren't as many female comedians as there are men? Because you know what? There are loads of female comedians.
It's just that we don't see them, because they're systematically rounded up and kept in a pen just outside Harwich.
Harwich? Yes, Harwich.
But you can go and see them and adopt them online.
You can go and visit them, and you can feed them lines, and you might get a joke back sometimes.
And then sometimes some of them escape and they disguise themselves as male comedians.
But you can always tell which ones are the male comedians - the ones with the beards.
Just like Life Of Brian.
Bill Bailey.
Nearly a woman.
But you know, it's really rare to be allowed to sit next to a female comedian.
Are they worried that our cycles will suddenly synchronise or something? I'm in disguise.
I'm Rory Bremner.
WOLF WHISTLE Is it cos once you get them started they don't shut up? LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Whoa.
What do we do about it?! I say! But recent studies appear to have shown an interesting thing, which is that women laugh more but they laugh less at women.
Women laugh more at men.
Audiences generally laugh more at men.
But women themselves do more laughing.
I don't know.
I suppose men are more willing to make prats of themselves.
Yes.
The really, truly great female comedians do make prats of themselves.
Lucille Ball, people like that.
And there's a strange division that girls have either got to be fey and look slightly stupid or they can be, like myself, not terribly attractive, wear a pink jacket Now stop it.
There's an interesting thing if you think about Goldie Hawn, for example.
Played ditzy and is one of the most successful Hollywood producers of all time.
Yes, very smart but played stupid.
But, just as Sandi says, as a woman, they want to categorise you more.
Yes.
What is she doing here? Is she doing the fat, man-hater thing? Is she doing the fey? In the early days of modern stand-up in the '80s, almost all female comedians, the subject was being a woman.
Whereas male comedians, their subject was not being a man.
In other words, women were treating themselves as if they were a minority when, in fact, they're 51% of the population.
Women don't have the history in comedy.
In the era of the great silent comics, we were all being tied to railway tracks while they were all being Happy days.
LAUGHTER I think it was Germaine Greer who said, "There are only two things "that women don't do as well as men, and that's design dresses and cook.
" Which is kind of an amusing thing.
Actually, almost all the great chefs are men and all the great couturiers are men, and yet one thing we used to think about women is, "Put them in the kitchen and make them design dresses.
" According to the American study, if we had more women on the show, the panel would laugh more but the audience would laugh less, perversely.
Now we're off to China.
What does "Nushu" mean to Chinese women? Well, nun shu is writing.
Is it something to do with writing? It is.
Nushu is a very particular kind of writing.
It's from Jiangyong County in Hunan province.
It was invented entirely by women for women.
Lady writing? It's lady writing.
Only ladies can understand it.
Women were not educated formally at all.
Over centuries, they developed a secret code, which was actually a phonetic writing, unlike Chinese characters.
They uncovered all these books, How To Poison Your Man.
Well, kind of.
When one of them married, they would be given a book by these secret female friendship groups and they would each write in the book and leave a lot of blank pages so that they could write their secret thoughts down.
The men could never read it, only other women would.
Very sly, isn't it? That's like our culture, really.
There's loads of words that women know that men don't have a clue about, like "sorry".
I "Fidelity".
Ohh! "Responsibility".
"Commitment".
We have a secret language in this country.
It's called an instruction manual.
Ah, yes.
If you want to hide something on your computer from a man, put it in a folder marked "instructions" and he will never open it.
It's like a secret language.
APPLAUSE 'ALLO DARLIN'! Sexist! Sexist, you're right.
So, points against.
They would send them, because they couldn't take them to their women friends very often, for what reason? Horrible gruesome reason.
Because of their feet.
Their bound feet.
Yes, tell me about foot binding.
Were they called lotus flowers? When they were very young.
Five years old.
They used to break all the bones in the foot, and they would bend it right round underneath the foot Three inches was the ideal.
They'd be like little They'd become stumps like hooves.
They'd be jammed into this, and many of them would rot, die of gangrene.
This went on for almost 1,000 years.
How ironic to come up with a writing system called "New Shoe"! It was a bit.
APPLAUSE It was a bit grim.
They would write in tapestry, messages to each other.
That's right.
The Bayeux Tapestry is actually not about the Battle of Hastings at all.
It's a complex soup recipe.
There are other separate languages, aren't there? In Africa I'm trying to think whether it's the Bantu or the Zigua people.
When women go to Say you and I got married, Stephen.
Yes.
The contingency is a remote one.
I would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in your name.
It's the language of respect that women have to use.
Wow.
So, say I wanted a stevedore over for a fry-up.
Hey! You couldn't say Just to please you.
You'd have to say "edore" and "up".
You couldn't say I'd have to say a docker coming over for breakfast.
I couldn't use any of the syllables that are in your Is that how Ronnie Barker got started? Of course, there was Pig Latin as a secret language, where you take the first syllable and put it at the end with an "ay" on the end.
Yes, I remember.
So "quite interesting" would be whitekay Itequay interestingay.
Yes, exactly.
Esyay.
Yes.
Oh, you scholar! LAUGHTER Plenty more where that came from.
LAUGHTER The Germans have something called Loffelsprache, which I think is something like "spoon speak".
And the French have Louchebem.
And there's Pileshki.
And the Japanese have Ba Bi Bu Be Bo, which is their amusing nonsense language.
But those are nonsense languages where you apply a very simple rule and it sounds very quickly nonsense.
There's a very camp sort of High Church one where they call Holy Communion haggers commagers and that sort of thing.
And they go, "Ooh, Jessica Christ!" LAUGHTER Teenagers sound the same in every language, I have noticed.
Teenagers? Yeah.
You could say "uegh".
In any language, that means "yes".
"Uegh," "Oui".
"Would you like some more croissant?" "Ouegh.
" Uegh.
It's always the same.
If you ever say to a teenager, "Look at me," they can look everywhere else apart from at your face.
And then when they do eventually concede to look at you they go LAUGHTER That's very true indeed.
Now, what's going on here? Oh WOLF WHISTLE Yay.
Is it half hen, half cock? It is exactly half cock, yeah.
It is exactly that.
It is half hen, half cock.
Is it a freakish accident? It is a freakish accident.
Or done by design? No, it's not done by any kind of scientist.
It's a rare I literally guessed that because of the theme of the programme.
There, you see? Using your male intelligence, for once.
Thank you.
Oh, I feel so foolish now.
It's called bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism.
I was going to say that.
Yeah.
We are dealing with chromosomes again.
All cells on one side of the animal, male, all cells on the right, female.
Doesn't happen in humans.
I don't know how that would work.
Quite good fun, though, wouldn't it? It would be fun, yes.
If you were at a party, you could stand that way.
But a clown fish, did you ever see the film Finding Nemo? Yes.
They're fierce.
I know a bit about them.
They have a relationship with that anemone.
That anemone is normally poisonous to other fish but they are immune to it and they have their babies in there.
And if you try to get near them, they come at you.
They're quite fierce.
They are.
Do you know about their gender assignations? Is it variable? It's up to them.
It is sort of up to them, yes.
What happens is you have one female and one dominant male and the rest are all rather weakly and not very fit or sexually active males.
And if the female dies, the active male then becomes female and one of the weakling males becomes the alpha male.
I like it.
It's sort of really weird.
Isn't that extraordinary? They are very unusual like that.
Rather splendid.
So the story of Finding Nemo and his father would have been very different.
His father would have been his mother by the time he'd got to him.
The whole thing would have been very odd.
"Where've you been?" "Huh?" LAUGHTER Do you think these animals know that's what's going to happen to them or is it just instinct? Do they actually Does he know? "I hope you don't die because, if you die, "then I have to have it off with all the other blokes.
"And I'm not into that.
" They wake up one morning and go, "Oh no, what's happened to me? "I've changed.
" The change.
It is a very strange thought.
Yes, bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodites are male on one side and female on the other.
Now, to break down the walls of mutual misunderstanding with a look at general ignorance.
So, dainty fingers and great big mitts on buzzers, if you please.
You are sitting in a dimly-lit bar, girls and boys, with a saucy little poppet.
How can you be sure she's not a bloke? 'ALLO, DARLIN'! You ask her a question.
If she asks you a question back, it's a woman.
No, as in, if you say to a bloke, "Do you know where the post office is?" He will say, "It's down there.
" If you say to a woman, "Do you know where the post office is?" She'll say, "Do you want to buy a stamp?" Trying to be helpful but asking you a question.
That's true.
Boys sit with their legs apart, don't they, on bar stools? There are things like that.
We were wondering whether you might say Adam's apple and we would have forfeited you because women do have Adam's apples.
You probably know you have an Adam's apple.
It's not as big.
But on some women it can be quite pronounced.
There's a woman, a girl, a lady person with quite an Adam's apple there.
It's called a prominentia laryngea, that the medical name for it and it's around the larynx.
So that's what you look at if you think someone's in drag? But it's no proof, is the point.
Basically, a good lady boy can imitate almost anything female in terms of how they hold their legs and, you know, everything like that.
Not hands or feet.
Well, some women, as you say, have large hands and large feet.
A dainty lady boy can easily fool and often has.
LAUGHTER As you know to your cost.
An expensive night, that one! Moving on, the truth is that without undressing them or testing their DNA, you can't be sure what sex someone is so be careful out there.
Why are men better than women at reading maps? WOLF WHISTLE They're not, I would say.
They are not better.
Oddly enough.
I was so trying Your one attempt to be decent backfired horribly.
Is it to do with the brain, spatial awareness.
Testosterone.
Isn't it? It's to do with the grey matter and white matter in the brain.
MRI equipment has shown, oddly enough, that in a test group of men and women with average IQ scores amongst the two genders roughly equal.
Don't be absurd! Hey! LAUGHTER How on earth are they finding When given intelligence tests, men use 6.
5 times more grey matter than women.
Women used nine times as much white matter.
Grey matter is central to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map reading, intellectual thought.
White matter connects the brain's processing centres central to emotional thinking, use of language, the ability to do more than one thing at once.
I know they're all cliches, you know, words, emotional thinking, multi-tasking, women are better at, but it does seem that the evidence indicates that this is the case.
I'm so sorry.
Is it the white matter that makes you think it's OK to wind the window down and ask the way? Yes, because that's also the superiority in language, which seems to be a female thing.
You prefer to ask, where a man would prefer to look at visual cues, spatial cues.
The only reason I don't ask is because you always get the idiot, don't you? When you stop and ask, "Do you know the way to Tesco?" "Uuuuhhhh" And they say, "In two miles you come to a bridge, a mile before that turn left.
" LAUGHTER I once stopped in Ireland, I stopped an elderly man.
I was lost and asked him the way and I said, I can't remember the names of the places, I said, "Do you know the way to Duncannon?" And he said, "Did you not want to go to Castlereagh?" "No, I want to go to Duncannon.
" He said, "It's a pity because I know the way to Castlereagh.
" LAUGHTER That is very Eccles, isn't it? Superb.
It does seem that men are better at spatial awareness problems and women are better at vocabulary problems.
And finally, one last fanfare to unfairness.
What is unfair about the prize money at Wimbledon? WOLF WHISTLE They only give it to you if you are really, really good at tennis.
APPLAUSE Very damnably unfair.
Nothing.
Not any more.
CLAXON SOUNDS No, it's very unfair.
Is it still unfair? Women get more money for playing than men.
Per set, you mean.
Yes, the men play a lot more tennis and get less money, When it started in 1884, the ladies' champion won a 20 guinea silver flower basket.
Aah! While the men got a 30 guinea gold trophy.
By 2006, 625,000 for Amelie Mauresmo who played 142 games, versus just £30,000 more for Roger Federer who played 202 games.
The best women were earning more than the best men because their shorter matches allowed them to compete in both doubles tournaments as well as the singles.
The rate per game told the story.
earned an average of £1,432 per game against the men's £993.
How much do they win now if they win? It is equal for first prize.
The women's champion gets the same prize as the men's champion but the men's champion plays a lot more tennis.
But, to be fair, the women have got to come off and make the tea as well.
You women get more from sponsorship, oddly enough.
And also, half a million, that's not that much when you think then they've got to buy all their balls and they've got to buy the sticky stuff to wrap round the racket, that's very expensive.
So do the men.
They've also got to get a travel card to zone six.
They're left with about £1.
50 after all that.
Anyway, now that male and female tennis players get the same prize money, it is arguably unfair to men who work harder and longer for less money over all.
Which brings us to the end of our hard work and the gleanings of our genders.
Oh, my goodness me.
Let's discover who's wearing the trousers here.
Well, my heavens, the winners are the ladies team with, between them, plus eight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It breaks down as three for Ronni and five for Sandi.
But the boys, I'm afraid have come last with minus five.
APPLAUSE That's all from this edition of QI, so it's good night from Ronni, Sandi, Jack, Alan and me.
Hopefully the real winner tonight has been mutual understanding and respect.
I leave you with this thought from Canadian feminist Charlotte Whitton.
"Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
"Luckily, that isn't difficult.
" Goodnight.
APPLAUSE
Good evening, good evening and welcome to QI where, tonight, it's a battle of the sexes as QI looks at girls and boys and gender.
Let's hear itfor the girls! CHEERING And huddled under the glass ceiling we have sugar and spice, Ronni Ancona.
CHEERING And all things nice, Sandi Toksvig.
CHEERING But what about a big hand for the boys.
MANLY CHEERING Slugs and snails, Jack Dee.
CHEERING And a puppy dog's tail, Alan Davis.
CHEERING Vive, of course, la difference.
Let's here our gender-specific buzzers.
Sandi goes OPERATIC SINGING Ronni goes HARP PLAYS Jack goes WOLF WHISTLE And Alan goes BUZZER: 'Ello, darlin'! AUDIENCE LAUGH Well, tonight we are on the lookout for outrageous sexism, so if any of you spot an example of it, you can pull me up short by using your buzzer or ask one of the boys to do it for you, if you'd like.
HARP PLAYS Yes, that's an example.
You've started.
You get points for that.
And, if you're right, you also might get a cuddle.
OPERATIC SINGING Boys, obviously.
All right.
Damn, that was an example, too.
Anyway, seconds out, round one.
Who was traditionally dressed in pink and called a girl? Was it Gok Wan? LAUGHTER No, not Gok Wan.
Is it Liberace? A person from history? No, traditionally a whole class of people.
A whole class of people? Are the lower classes always dressed in pink so you can spot them? I don't mean class in that sense.
A group of people who were dressed in pink and called a girl.
A girl as in a girl describing a group of people? No.
But babies.
Which babies would you dress in pink? Female babies.
Though boys used to be.
Boys were.
Until the 20th century, the colours were pink for a baby boy and blue for a baby girl.
How could they be wrong for so long? Or maybe we took a wrong turn.
But I'll give you an example of Dressmaker Magazine from 1900.
"The preferred colour to dress young boys is in pink.
"Blue is reserved for girls as it is presumed paler and the more dainty of the two colours.
"And pink is thought to be stronger.
" And as late as 1927, there was a report about Princess Astrid of Belgium who had been caught out when she gave birth to a girl because, "the cradle had been optimistically outfitted in pink", the colour for boys.
Isn't that strange when, now, every shop has a whole pink corner devoted to girls? When did this happen? When did we turn around the other way? Well, that's what I'm saying.
In 1927 they were still talking about pink for boys.
Was it really? Is it something to do with blue being considered quite serene and it's the colour of the Virgin Mary? I think that's all part of it.
They just thought blue was a natural, pale and female colour.
But even more extraordinary is the word 'girl'.
Right up until mid-15th century Boys were called girls? Yes.
They were? LAUGHTER Well, all children You're having to rethink everything, aren't you? Yes.
This is the most extraordinary episode yet.
All children were called girls.
Come on, girls.
Boy children were called knave girls and, this is even more confusing for us today, girl children were called gay girls.
Yes.
So you have I have no problem with that whatsoever.
Gay girls and knave girls.
The word boy was only lately applied to a male child.
Before, it just meant 'servant'.
So you would say, "Boy!" meaning waiter or servant.
Oh, what the hell went wrong? It's a very strange thing, isn't it? Things do change.
And the colour pink, everything has to have a pink version, mobile phones But is there anything to do with the fact that red used to be the colour for men? It was a strong Christian colour.
So I wonder if pink is like a sibling.
I think it is a mixture of that, yes, that pink was considered strong and reddish and male and, as you said, blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary and so on.
I read somewhere that monkeys are attracted to pink.
The females are attracted to pink because the infant primates have little pink faces.
Oh, that's very good.
Did you read that or just see it on a children's television programme? It's certainly true that, if you dress a baby in pink, mothers, when picking them up, if it's not their own child, will tend to have a pink-dressed baby facing them when they hug it and a blue-dressed baby facing outwards.
Thrown out the window.
Or just facing outwards.
All that information you've got, Stephen, and you're so unlikely to use it.
I saw a thing that said they'd tried an experiment with chimps, I think.
And they gave them dolls and trucks or engines to play with and the boy ones all wanted to play with the trucks and engines and the girl ones played with the dolls.
How weird's that? That is odd.
It is very strange.
I've got two daughters and a son.
My son's the last one and, when he was born, I thought, "There are going to be no guns whatsoever.
" So we had no horrible toys and, honestly, he was about two, and a toilet roll immediately became a machine gun.
It is the most You can't fight it, can you? No.
And he likes blue.
Not with toilet rolls, no.
Depends on the war.
Don't hold out for much hope.
But pink, do you know what the traje de luces is? The what? The traje de luces.
I thought you'd been unwell.
The suit of lights.
A South American thing, is it? No.
It's a thing a matador wears that is often pink.
The matador's suit, the suit of light.
And the lining of his cape is pink.
AUDIENCE GROAN That's a painful moment.
Something's going to be pink in a minute.
LAUGHTER Tear me a new one.
AUDIENCE: OOOH! Yes, pink is a strange colour, too, because it doesn't exist on the spectrum, so it's an extra-spectral colour.
Aren't girls more inclined towards the red end of the spectrum? I think that's true.
Berries, foraging.
Yes, having a little look on the savannah and boys running off towards the blue sky.
Is that not some reason why? Yes, I've heard something similar.
Foraging for lipsticks.
On trees in primal times.
Do you know that they've done studies of the hunter-gatherer societies and 9/10's of the food is provided by the women and 1/10 is provided by the men? So the women go, "Oh, we'll get some berries.
" And the men come back, "Honestly, that bison was this close.
" "Yeah, yeah, have your berry dinner.
" Well, we saw one, so It sort of counts.
We'll get him.
You got any berries? Well, the truth is that pink used to be the colour for boys and boys used to be called girls anyway.
So, with all this confusion, what's the best way to get a girl? 'ALLO DARLIN'! Usually works.
LAUGHTER V.
G.
V.
G.
If you need any more than that, they're not interested.
There are lots of theories about it.
Is it something to do with diet? Diet is the current one, yes.
For example, calories.
If you had a higher calorie intake before being impregnated, out of 100, 56 had boys.
So you don't want to have cream cakes just before? If you want a girl, no.
Also, women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal a day were 87% more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowl a week, which is quite Oh, darling, that's tosh! That's put out by Kellogg's.
What do they know? It does look rather extraordinary.
Ridiculous! Women who had boys ate about 400 calories more daily than those who had girls on average.
But those people who had Coco Pops had chimpanzees.
I don't LAUGHTER A very bizarre one.
I do not know whom this would benefit commercially.
Women infected with hepatitis B virus are 1.
5 times more likely to give birth to a male.
It's not a good reason to get it.
No.
We're certainly not encouraging it.
But there is one certain way, which is embryo selection, which in America and Thailand, in particular, is very popular.
It costs about US18,000.
Wow.
A friend of ours had a baby in Thailand - an English couple.
And the Thai women said to her, "If you look lovely when you're pregnant, you have girl.
"If you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you will have boy.
" She said, "What do you think I'm going to have?" "Boy.
" That's outrageous! And she did.
Oh, my God, it works! They are a different species, boys and girls.
I was walking down the road with my two girls and my son, and my son suddenly went "Hah!" for no reason.
And the girls and I turned to him and went, "What?!" There was probably a secret agent round the corner.
I don't know.
Is that puzzling? Ronni and I were talking about how wonderful boys are cos they live in this very clear world about themselves.
When my son was about six, he had a friend over and his friend said, "What's it like having two mummies?" He said, "It's marvellous.
If one of them's poorly, you've still got one to do for you.
" LAUGHTER Excellent child! Excellent child.
I like.
"Do for you"! They're gloriously self-centred, aren't they? There are other theories.
Aristotle thought the diet of the mother and the sexual position used at conception made a difference.
He was half right, it seems, with the diet.
Anaxagoras thought boys and girls come out of different testicles.
So you would tie off the testicle you didn't want the gender.
They're just making it up as they go along.
Based on nothing at all.
The Talmud suggests aligning the bed north-south before sex and then you get a boy.
Why don't they just all wait and see? That's the best way, you're right.
The French thought wearing boots to bed might help having a boy.
What have the boots got to do with it? I've no idea.
It does seem most strange.
Sex selection is a tricky business.
Why don't we have more women as guests on QI, you may well ask? I know this.
Oh, sorry.
No, no, after you.
Is it because women are just not funny? Ohh! IN DEEP SOUTH ACCENT: Now, that's right.
But we're good at other things.
We're good at raising kittens and knitting cakes.
I've heard this a lot.
I've heard that women aren't funny and I think there's a truth in this.
I think that there is a scientific, possibly, relationship between a sense of humour and the male sex organ.
People are always laughing at mine.
Well, there you are, you see! LAUGHTER Is this to do with the fact that people always say there aren't as many female comedians as there are men? Because you know what? There are loads of female comedians.
It's just that we don't see them, because they're systematically rounded up and kept in a pen just outside Harwich.
Harwich? Yes, Harwich.
But you can go and see them and adopt them online.
You can go and visit them, and you can feed them lines, and you might get a joke back sometimes.
And then sometimes some of them escape and they disguise themselves as male comedians.
But you can always tell which ones are the male comedians - the ones with the beards.
Just like Life Of Brian.
Bill Bailey.
Nearly a woman.
But you know, it's really rare to be allowed to sit next to a female comedian.
Are they worried that our cycles will suddenly synchronise or something? I'm in disguise.
I'm Rory Bremner.
WOLF WHISTLE Is it cos once you get them started they don't shut up? LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Whoa.
What do we do about it?! I say! But recent studies appear to have shown an interesting thing, which is that women laugh more but they laugh less at women.
Women laugh more at men.
Audiences generally laugh more at men.
But women themselves do more laughing.
I don't know.
I suppose men are more willing to make prats of themselves.
Yes.
The really, truly great female comedians do make prats of themselves.
Lucille Ball, people like that.
And there's a strange division that girls have either got to be fey and look slightly stupid or they can be, like myself, not terribly attractive, wear a pink jacket Now stop it.
There's an interesting thing if you think about Goldie Hawn, for example.
Played ditzy and is one of the most successful Hollywood producers of all time.
Yes, very smart but played stupid.
But, just as Sandi says, as a woman, they want to categorise you more.
Yes.
What is she doing here? Is she doing the fat, man-hater thing? Is she doing the fey? In the early days of modern stand-up in the '80s, almost all female comedians, the subject was being a woman.
Whereas male comedians, their subject was not being a man.
In other words, women were treating themselves as if they were a minority when, in fact, they're 51% of the population.
Women don't have the history in comedy.
In the era of the great silent comics, we were all being tied to railway tracks while they were all being Happy days.
LAUGHTER I think it was Germaine Greer who said, "There are only two things "that women don't do as well as men, and that's design dresses and cook.
" Which is kind of an amusing thing.
Actually, almost all the great chefs are men and all the great couturiers are men, and yet one thing we used to think about women is, "Put them in the kitchen and make them design dresses.
" According to the American study, if we had more women on the show, the panel would laugh more but the audience would laugh less, perversely.
Now we're off to China.
What does "Nushu" mean to Chinese women? Well, nun shu is writing.
Is it something to do with writing? It is.
Nushu is a very particular kind of writing.
It's from Jiangyong County in Hunan province.
It was invented entirely by women for women.
Lady writing? It's lady writing.
Only ladies can understand it.
Women were not educated formally at all.
Over centuries, they developed a secret code, which was actually a phonetic writing, unlike Chinese characters.
They uncovered all these books, How To Poison Your Man.
Well, kind of.
When one of them married, they would be given a book by these secret female friendship groups and they would each write in the book and leave a lot of blank pages so that they could write their secret thoughts down.
The men could never read it, only other women would.
Very sly, isn't it? That's like our culture, really.
There's loads of words that women know that men don't have a clue about, like "sorry".
I "Fidelity".
Ohh! "Responsibility".
"Commitment".
We have a secret language in this country.
It's called an instruction manual.
Ah, yes.
If you want to hide something on your computer from a man, put it in a folder marked "instructions" and he will never open it.
It's like a secret language.
APPLAUSE 'ALLO DARLIN'! Sexist! Sexist, you're right.
So, points against.
They would send them, because they couldn't take them to their women friends very often, for what reason? Horrible gruesome reason.
Because of their feet.
Their bound feet.
Yes, tell me about foot binding.
Were they called lotus flowers? When they were very young.
Five years old.
They used to break all the bones in the foot, and they would bend it right round underneath the foot Three inches was the ideal.
They'd be like little They'd become stumps like hooves.
They'd be jammed into this, and many of them would rot, die of gangrene.
This went on for almost 1,000 years.
How ironic to come up with a writing system called "New Shoe"! It was a bit.
APPLAUSE It was a bit grim.
They would write in tapestry, messages to each other.
That's right.
The Bayeux Tapestry is actually not about the Battle of Hastings at all.
It's a complex soup recipe.
There are other separate languages, aren't there? In Africa I'm trying to think whether it's the Bantu or the Zigua people.
When women go to Say you and I got married, Stephen.
Yes.
The contingency is a remote one.
I would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in your name.
It's the language of respect that women have to use.
Wow.
So, say I wanted a stevedore over for a fry-up.
Hey! You couldn't say Just to please you.
You'd have to say "edore" and "up".
You couldn't say I'd have to say a docker coming over for breakfast.
I couldn't use any of the syllables that are in your Is that how Ronnie Barker got started? Of course, there was Pig Latin as a secret language, where you take the first syllable and put it at the end with an "ay" on the end.
Yes, I remember.
So "quite interesting" would be whitekay Itequay interestingay.
Yes, exactly.
Esyay.
Yes.
Oh, you scholar! LAUGHTER Plenty more where that came from.
LAUGHTER The Germans have something called Loffelsprache, which I think is something like "spoon speak".
And the French have Louchebem.
And there's Pileshki.
And the Japanese have Ba Bi Bu Be Bo, which is their amusing nonsense language.
But those are nonsense languages where you apply a very simple rule and it sounds very quickly nonsense.
There's a very camp sort of High Church one where they call Holy Communion haggers commagers and that sort of thing.
And they go, "Ooh, Jessica Christ!" LAUGHTER Teenagers sound the same in every language, I have noticed.
Teenagers? Yeah.
You could say "uegh".
In any language, that means "yes".
"Uegh," "Oui".
"Would you like some more croissant?" "Ouegh.
" Uegh.
It's always the same.
If you ever say to a teenager, "Look at me," they can look everywhere else apart from at your face.
And then when they do eventually concede to look at you they go LAUGHTER That's very true indeed.
Now, what's going on here? Oh WOLF WHISTLE Yay.
Is it half hen, half cock? It is exactly half cock, yeah.
It is exactly that.
It is half hen, half cock.
Is it a freakish accident? It is a freakish accident.
Or done by design? No, it's not done by any kind of scientist.
It's a rare I literally guessed that because of the theme of the programme.
There, you see? Using your male intelligence, for once.
Thank you.
Oh, I feel so foolish now.
It's called bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism.
I was going to say that.
Yeah.
We are dealing with chromosomes again.
All cells on one side of the animal, male, all cells on the right, female.
Doesn't happen in humans.
I don't know how that would work.
Quite good fun, though, wouldn't it? It would be fun, yes.
If you were at a party, you could stand that way.
But a clown fish, did you ever see the film Finding Nemo? Yes.
They're fierce.
I know a bit about them.
They have a relationship with that anemone.
That anemone is normally poisonous to other fish but they are immune to it and they have their babies in there.
And if you try to get near them, they come at you.
They're quite fierce.
They are.
Do you know about their gender assignations? Is it variable? It's up to them.
It is sort of up to them, yes.
What happens is you have one female and one dominant male and the rest are all rather weakly and not very fit or sexually active males.
And if the female dies, the active male then becomes female and one of the weakling males becomes the alpha male.
I like it.
It's sort of really weird.
Isn't that extraordinary? They are very unusual like that.
Rather splendid.
So the story of Finding Nemo and his father would have been very different.
His father would have been his mother by the time he'd got to him.
The whole thing would have been very odd.
"Where've you been?" "Huh?" LAUGHTER Do you think these animals know that's what's going to happen to them or is it just instinct? Do they actually Does he know? "I hope you don't die because, if you die, "then I have to have it off with all the other blokes.
"And I'm not into that.
" They wake up one morning and go, "Oh no, what's happened to me? "I've changed.
" The change.
It is a very strange thought.
Yes, bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodites are male on one side and female on the other.
Now, to break down the walls of mutual misunderstanding with a look at general ignorance.
So, dainty fingers and great big mitts on buzzers, if you please.
You are sitting in a dimly-lit bar, girls and boys, with a saucy little poppet.
How can you be sure she's not a bloke? 'ALLO, DARLIN'! You ask her a question.
If she asks you a question back, it's a woman.
No, as in, if you say to a bloke, "Do you know where the post office is?" He will say, "It's down there.
" If you say to a woman, "Do you know where the post office is?" She'll say, "Do you want to buy a stamp?" Trying to be helpful but asking you a question.
That's true.
Boys sit with their legs apart, don't they, on bar stools? There are things like that.
We were wondering whether you might say Adam's apple and we would have forfeited you because women do have Adam's apples.
You probably know you have an Adam's apple.
It's not as big.
But on some women it can be quite pronounced.
There's a woman, a girl, a lady person with quite an Adam's apple there.
It's called a prominentia laryngea, that the medical name for it and it's around the larynx.
So that's what you look at if you think someone's in drag? But it's no proof, is the point.
Basically, a good lady boy can imitate almost anything female in terms of how they hold their legs and, you know, everything like that.
Not hands or feet.
Well, some women, as you say, have large hands and large feet.
A dainty lady boy can easily fool and often has.
LAUGHTER As you know to your cost.
An expensive night, that one! Moving on, the truth is that without undressing them or testing their DNA, you can't be sure what sex someone is so be careful out there.
Why are men better than women at reading maps? WOLF WHISTLE They're not, I would say.
They are not better.
Oddly enough.
I was so trying Your one attempt to be decent backfired horribly.
Is it to do with the brain, spatial awareness.
Testosterone.
Isn't it? It's to do with the grey matter and white matter in the brain.
MRI equipment has shown, oddly enough, that in a test group of men and women with average IQ scores amongst the two genders roughly equal.
Don't be absurd! Hey! LAUGHTER How on earth are they finding When given intelligence tests, men use 6.
5 times more grey matter than women.
Women used nine times as much white matter.
Grey matter is central to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map reading, intellectual thought.
White matter connects the brain's processing centres central to emotional thinking, use of language, the ability to do more than one thing at once.
I know they're all cliches, you know, words, emotional thinking, multi-tasking, women are better at, but it does seem that the evidence indicates that this is the case.
I'm so sorry.
Is it the white matter that makes you think it's OK to wind the window down and ask the way? Yes, because that's also the superiority in language, which seems to be a female thing.
You prefer to ask, where a man would prefer to look at visual cues, spatial cues.
The only reason I don't ask is because you always get the idiot, don't you? When you stop and ask, "Do you know the way to Tesco?" "Uuuuhhhh" And they say, "In two miles you come to a bridge, a mile before that turn left.
" LAUGHTER I once stopped in Ireland, I stopped an elderly man.
I was lost and asked him the way and I said, I can't remember the names of the places, I said, "Do you know the way to Duncannon?" And he said, "Did you not want to go to Castlereagh?" "No, I want to go to Duncannon.
" He said, "It's a pity because I know the way to Castlereagh.
" LAUGHTER That is very Eccles, isn't it? Superb.
It does seem that men are better at spatial awareness problems and women are better at vocabulary problems.
And finally, one last fanfare to unfairness.
What is unfair about the prize money at Wimbledon? WOLF WHISTLE They only give it to you if you are really, really good at tennis.
APPLAUSE Very damnably unfair.
Nothing.
Not any more.
CLAXON SOUNDS No, it's very unfair.
Is it still unfair? Women get more money for playing than men.
Per set, you mean.
Yes, the men play a lot more tennis and get less money, When it started in 1884, the ladies' champion won a 20 guinea silver flower basket.
Aah! While the men got a 30 guinea gold trophy.
By 2006, 625,000 for Amelie Mauresmo who played 142 games, versus just £30,000 more for Roger Federer who played 202 games.
The best women were earning more than the best men because their shorter matches allowed them to compete in both doubles tournaments as well as the singles.
The rate per game told the story.
earned an average of £1,432 per game against the men's £993.
How much do they win now if they win? It is equal for first prize.
The women's champion gets the same prize as the men's champion but the men's champion plays a lot more tennis.
But, to be fair, the women have got to come off and make the tea as well.
You women get more from sponsorship, oddly enough.
And also, half a million, that's not that much when you think then they've got to buy all their balls and they've got to buy the sticky stuff to wrap round the racket, that's very expensive.
So do the men.
They've also got to get a travel card to zone six.
They're left with about £1.
50 after all that.
Anyway, now that male and female tennis players get the same prize money, it is arguably unfair to men who work harder and longer for less money over all.
Which brings us to the end of our hard work and the gleanings of our genders.
Oh, my goodness me.
Let's discover who's wearing the trousers here.
Well, my heavens, the winners are the ladies team with, between them, plus eight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It breaks down as three for Ronni and five for Sandi.
But the boys, I'm afraid have come last with minus five.
APPLAUSE That's all from this edition of QI, so it's good night from Ronni, Sandi, Jack, Alan and me.
Hopefully the real winner tonight has been mutual understanding and respect.
I leave you with this thought from Canadian feminist Charlotte Whitton.
"Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
"Luckily, that isn't difficult.
" Goodnight.
APPLAUSE