When men get soppy about women, they do it with appalling style. It's as though every ounce of testosterone and good judgment abandons body and soul, leaving in their wake the kind of sentimentality that makes Danielle Steele look like Mike Tyson on a good day.
The best example of how soppy some men get is a song about lost love and pale moons which tends to be sung by bad tenors after a good amount of drink has been consumed. With one exception. And it is that exception that is set to entertain us for two long nights on RTE this week. The Rose of Tralee is the longest-running beauty pageant in this country. It is the pageant where "Hello, boys" becomes "Hello, Daddy", where grown women may sing Galway Bay with real tears in their eyes and be cheered by a packed house of mammies, daddies, long-lost relatives and that unique phenomenon, the official escort.
You can be a fine big lump of an agricultural Irish girl or a gorgeous, gifted woman like the 1998 Rose, Luceminda O'Sullivan, and still have a chance at winning. "Oh no, 'twas the truth in her eyes' sings the bad tenor. President McAleese calls it "a celebration of Irish femininity". In fact, the Rose of Tralee Festival is nothing of the sort. It is certainly ideologically closer to the Kennedys of Castleross than to the advertising ethos of In Dublin, but femininity is not what it is about.
The Rose is Ireland's answer to the perennial problem of how to present sexuality as a tame beast with which to milk the global wallets of the old diaspora by reassuring us that wherever we roam, there'll always be a welcome on the mat and a fine, economically independent female to warm the pot without giving you back-chat. The difference is she won't parade before you in her togs.
Were the Rose festival to be considered even for a moment as a measure of Irish femininity, we might glimpse the reasons women are not achieving top jobs in expected levels and why some are deciding not to climb the career ladder, even when opportunities arise.
The attributes of the fine female emerge from a consensual judging process of which the two long nights on TV are but the teaser. First among them is the obligation to love your parents, next the perennial assertion that you also love children and want to do good, and finally, the ability to execute a party piece which spares us viewers embarrassment but does not demonstrate too professional a level of talent or commitment. The bottom line is to be a good girl, 1990s style, with personality.
The good girl with personality can be chatty, but not too talkative, clever, but not too smart. In this, she resembles more or less exactly the image of femininity common to the old Aisling form, and that started nearly 400 years ago. Ideally, she must also demonstrate a level of modesty which attributes her soaring educational levels not to her own ability, but to the decency of her teachers in preparing her for all those college exams. She may hint about her sex life, but not talk about it, and never, but never, admit to carrying a condom in her bag. No wonder she is only being paid 73 per cent of what her male colleagues earn. The Rose of Tralee apart, niceness is rarely its own reward. Not least among the many challenges of this unusual cultural extravaganza is the question of why it merits so much coverage on RTE. Similar events like the Ballybunion Bachelor Festival hardly get a mention - and who says Irish masculinity isn't worth celebrating? In a week when the Government rightly refused to grant-aid the Miss World Beauty Pageant in Dublin next year, the Rose of Tralee may seem like an Irish answer to the dodgy politics of the multi-billion-pound beauty industry and the perceived need to get pretty women on our TV screens. Not so. The event has the quality of a home video you are being forced to watch when the home is not yours and the video was shot on a camera where the editing facility has gone into shock, with good reason.
Hours and hours of shiny frocks, hornpipe shoes dicing with the odd Manolo Blahnik and those must-pause moments for the sick granny in Carlow/Manchester/Auckland, or the little nephew in hospital who is being allowed to stay up late for the occasion make this more obligation than entertainment, except when they announce the winner and you know there'll be a bad tenor lurking just a few bars away.
Good poetry read badly and bad poetry occasionally read well collide with passionate displays of Irish dancing which only serve to underline without exploring it the cultural chasm that does exist between how they are Irish over there in Oz or, for the first time this year, in Japan, and how unbothered about it we are over here. Love songs sung by Roses while the camera shows us how her Da reacts breaches so many style taboos that it touches on voyeurism, while those endless queues of global Roses makes it impossible to remember who you took to, who you did not, or who you thought should have left the frock at home.
Of course, there is an odd compulsion to aspects of the Rose pageant: the chivalry of the escorts, the sheer bad presentation of having so many judges sitting on straight-backed chairs on stage and then making speeches that go on for far too long. This could be the 1960s - Eamonn Casey could pop up on stage to beam at us all as he gives a blessing, and we'd never mention the war. It's almost retro, except it lacks all self-awareness, save for the sure knowledge that it is good for business in the Kingdom, great for breeding future generations of tourists, and unsurpassed in the chance it gives for RTE to claim to fulfil its obligations to broadcast from outside Dublin.
Which is the rub. This lazy, unentertaining and badly-produced spectacle billed as The Rose of Tralee gobbles up the greatest number of consecutive hours of television coverage for the whole mid- and south-west region, other than sport. Mediocre television masquerades as public service, 30 minutes' worth stretches to elongated proportions, and none of us has a choice in the matter. What started as a chance for RTE to capitalise on Gay Byrne while the Late Late Show was on its summer holidays has evolved into a piece of viewing that a class of 10-year-olds could make themselves. Now that might be a real public service.