P-I reporter Diana Mapes didn't make it all the way through a seminar called "Making Sense of Men," at which a perky brunette answered apparently baffling questions like "What does he find attractive?" (shiny hair) and "What do they really want?" (to "take care of" and "protect" you), but I don't blame her. Sounds like the seminar's sponsors were shilling enough stereotypes about men and women to fill the next six editions of The Rules.

Our presenter, named Alison, started off with a bit of personal history. She talked about her first marriage, her divorce, her wrongheaded conclusion that she just didn't have "the Grace Kelly gene, the gene that makes men love you." She told us how she began to think of herself as a woman who transformed princes into frogs and how her search for answers about men and the baffling language they spoke (which she dubbed "Menglish") eventually had led her to study the big lugs.

Not as a psychologist or anything, just as a curious bystander. A really curious bystander, I guess, since she claimed to have studied thousands of guys over the past 18 years.

As she talked — occasionally in a strange Munchkin-like voice for comic effect — I studied the hundred or so women sitting around me, wondering what had brought them to this place. They were young and old, married and single, scented and unscented, dressed in everything from Prada suits to puce sweatpants. Although they came from all walks of life (with perhaps one gay exception), I imagined they were looking for the same things I'd been looking for over the years: clues as to why so-and-so didn't call or why what's-his-face forgot another birthday. As Alison might put it, they wanted "manswers."

And over the next half-hour, she doled them out.

OK, Mapes isn't breaking any new ground in gender studies with this stuff. But for a daily newspaper, where "fish out of water" reporting on events like this typically ends with the writer grudgingly acknowledging that the person/idea/event she set out to make fun of has a point, it's pretty cool.