Weight and see

According to my two flatmates, Saffy and Amanda, guys have it easy. Too easy, in fact.
“It’s true!” Saffy said the other night at dinner as she picked miserably at her salad. “Look at me, I’m eating lettuce leaves while you!”, and here she pointed accusingly at my big plate of pasta, “you are inhaling an entire plate of carbs. Tomorrow, you’ll sit on the potty, and it’s all over! Meanwhile, it’s going to take me a week to digest this carrot stick!”
“We just have different metabolisms!”
“It’s not just that,” Amanda chimed in severely. “Guys have all sorts of advantages. You can roll out of bed and go out the front door looking like a real slob. It takes us hours to look this way!”
Saffy looked at Amanda sideways. “It takes me days to look this way!”
Amanda nodded. “Plus make-up is expensive! So are all our different outfits, handbags, shoes and accessories.”
“Guys think they’re accessorizing if they wear a stupid cheap watch!” Saffy said, her fabled breasts heaving at the injustice of it all.
“And the hair,” Amanda said, tossing her luxurious tresses. “Don’t forget the hair! It doesn’t look like this naturally, you know! I could have sent a child to Harvard with the money I’ve spend on my hair!”
Saffy later said privately that you could have done a lot of things with the money that Amanda has spent on her hair. “I’m sure they could have found a cure for diabetes with just the cost of her conditioner!”
A few days later, again at dinner – this time, in a fancy restaurant out on One Fullerton – we were busy gossiping about absent friends when Amanda choked on her soup.
“My nine o’clock! Nine o’clock!” she gasped discretely into her napkin. I turned to Amanda’s left and drew in a sharp breath.
Saffy immediately looked around wildly. “Where? Where?” she gurgled.
“My nine o’clock, you dumb blonde!” Amanda hissed. “Why do you still not understand directions?”
“That would be straight ahead for you, Saffy,” I murmured.
Saffy’s head swung back and she literally had to stuff her napkin into her mouth to stop from screaming.
It was the Cockroach, Amanda’s on-again, off-again insectile-looking boyfriend. They’ve been in the off-phase now for half a year but in that time, he must have put on at least 15 kilos. As Saffy later told all her friends on Facebook, the only reason she recognized the Cockroach was because of his super thin eyebrows and non-existent lips. “He looked like one of those before shots from Extreme Makeover!” read one of her posts.
Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, what had made us gasp was not so much that the Cockroach had morphed into a truck tyre, but that hanging off his arm was a pretty, little wisp of a girl who gazed up at him with the kind of adoration you only find at a Fann Wong appearance.
“You see, that just proves my point exactly!” Amanda said bravely trying not to look or to show that she cared as the Cockroach and his plaything sat in the far corner of the restaurant. “He looks like a tub of margarine and he’s dating another pretty girl! It’s just so effortless for guys, it’s not fair!”
“How did he get so fat though?” I wondered.
“Imagine if I put that much weight,” Amanda said. “Do you think I would ever find a date in this town?”
“Not unless the guy was blind!” Saffy said, getting into the spirit of the moment. She noticed our looks. “What?”
“There really are two sets of dating rules in this world,” Amanda said, stabbing viciously at her salad. “If you’re a straight and single man, you’re set. Doesn’t matter if you’re ugly and fat. With a woman, you’ve also got to be pretty and thin!”
“And stupid,” Saffy added. “If you’re pretty, thin and can’t string an intelligent sentence together, you’ll always have a date for Friday night! It’s why I’m still single. Men are intimidated by my intelligence! What? Stop giving me those dirty looks! It’s true!”
“Hmm, and his skin is not looking good at all!” I said, pretending to turn around to look for a waiter.
“Did you want me to go over there and accidently spill red wine all over her?” Saffy offered.
“No, we’re going home,” Amanda sniffed, signaling for the bill.
Saffy came straight home and immediately started a Facebook dialogue about ugly fat men and their pretty girlfriends. “Men are pigs!” read one of her posts. “Please tell everyone!”