Why Do Women Take So Long To Get Ready? People Ask, And No One Answers

This weekend, The Times Of London pitted married couple Philip Clothier and Rosie Millard against one another in order to answer one of "life's great mysteries": Why it takes women so fucking long to get ready to leave the house. We've never understood this either: Although most women we know can get ready in a reasonable amount of time (20-30 minutes), we know many women for whom 60-90 minutes -- if not more -- are required just to prepare for a casual dinner at the corner trattoria. Anyway, The Times didn't end up answering its own question, but no matter: The wife, Rosie, was declared the winner at the end of the experiment by an editor from UK Elle, who said her end result "was not a bad effort for someone who has had only an hour to get it together, with a household of kids and dogs to distract her." So, did Rosie disprove the theory that women take longer to get ready than men? Not quite!

Today, another Times paper -- the one from New York, naturally -- reports on Lian Amaris Sifuentes, a performance-artist and Colorado College professor who is spending 72 hours on a traffic island in NYC's Union Square "preparing" for a date. Ms. Sifuentes, 26, calls her piece "Fashionably Late For The Relationship", and is being filmed by a small crew who will eventually turn her 3-day ordeal into 72 minutes of, well, watching a woman get ready. (72 minutes: Still not that fast!)

On a set resembling an old-fashioned boudoir, containing a chaise and a vanity and strewn with dresses and shoes, Ms. Sifuentes is going through the predate exercises, only she is stretching them out, by moving very, very slowly, which is to say not moving much at all. To prepare for a date it will take her 72 hours, from midnight Friday to midnight tonight. On Saturday afternoon she had a single glass of wine. It took seven hours.

Seven hours? For one glass of wine? How is this woman supposed to get an actual date after all of this? Oh, wait, she lives in Colorado; maybe the thinner air gets a girl drunk faster there!