Why do girls read humor blogs?

It's a phenomenon as antiquated as the medium it expresses itself upon and yet it remains as enigmatic as the retrograde motion of the stars. If Ptolemy, Shen Kuo and Hipparchus were alive today, it would no doubt stump them. If Hwang Woo-Suk were still a credible member of the scientific community, he would falsify data and claim to have busted the phenom. If Winona Rider saw the solution in a department store, she would shop lift it. But that isn't necessary, because we here at FCN put our best minds to work on breaking the code and discovering what it is, exactly, that makes humor blogs so popular among the female gender.

While we may have falsified some data, no cute dogs were killed in the process. Take that, Hwang!

In the interest of full disclosure (never a priority here at FCN, but still occasionally stimulating), the good people at Life From the Toaster first brought this quandary to our attention last week. If you want a free CD and are a guy (some people just aren't liberated, we know), visit his site and place a comment on his post. What CD, you ask? What are the chances of winning, you ask? We don't know; just go comment already!

Goodness, full disclosure can be really painful.

Uncle Wally put some work into the Malthusian science of Demographics. He installed a (chocolate chip) cookie on our blog that logs arcane information about visitors like screen resolution, web history and propensity to spend money online. By cross-referencing this information with a database of "technically" legally retrieved information purchased from a seedy Haitian-based web dealer, he discovered that the vast majority of FCN's readers are females. The results of his study, complete with mind numbingly complicated line charts will be published in the April First issue of the journal Science.

Now to that "Woo-suk" data we promised: FCN's readership clocks in at 11 unique visitors since December of 2006. We are proud of each and every one of these visitors who form the entirety of the FCN few and make up what we like to call "The FCN Dozen." In the spirit of the baker's dozen, we are one shy because we gave up early. But we still find a way to be proud of our accomplishments.

Gender ambiguities in Uncle Wally's data don't let us know for sure how many of our readers are female and absent an absolute guarantee from him, we are reticent to share his conclusions. We will, however, say that the majority is undeniable.

The limits of Uncle Wally's research were reached when we asked the basic question "why?" That's when we put FCN's best minds to work (sorry Wally) and came up with the following 5 reasons for feminine preference for humor blogs:

1) Spending Opportunities. FCN gives you, the faithful few, many opportunities to flex your expenditure muscles and invest in our gear. Actually, "invest" isn't the best word, since our products depreciate faster than that real estate you're holding a sub-prime mortgage on. But that difference does not matter to our female readers. No sireesir. The average woman spends 400 hours a year shopping or nine years over the course of her lifetime. Fully a quarter of that time is spent (note the pun?) on clothing and FCN is loaded with great clothing items.

2) Relationships. When the three of us got together a couple years ago to start writing humor, we didn't strategize ways to fit every sordid detail of our failed love lives onto this site. We simply resolved to tell mostly truthful stories about ourselves and, for some reason, messy relationships, failed dates and poor decisions with women dominated the content. Just about every major series on FCN and many of the minor ones involve a girl. And none of us has a serious girlfriend just yet, so more stories are inevitable.

3) Relationships, continued. If Days of Our Lives couldn't resolve its relationship problems in 43 years, we shouldn't be expected to do so in one paragraph. Guys that are interested in relationship issues are the exception and those are the guys reading FCN. Girls who are interested in relationship issues are the norm, hence the popularity of relationship humor among that demographic. Boy that sounds nerdy.

4) We are just unfathomably cute. Despite the fact that we have never uploaded an unaltered picture of ourselves and the faithful few who don't know us in person have no idea how handsome or ugly we may be, our daring good looks translate well through our writing and attract the opposite gender. C came up with that theory all by himself and he is really, really proud of it, so please don't knock it in the comment section. We haven't figured out why our unfathomably cute looks don't help us out in our real lives, but we maintain confidence in this theory nonetheless.

5) FCN offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a college male. Granted, that glimpse is also offered in most popular media, television, music and movies, but we like to consider FCN unique and valuable despite these ripoffs. Just as we watch chick flicks to understand women, you read FCN to get to know guys. Our unrestrained honesty is an education for female readers whose friends lack our unwaivering commitment to transparency and are unwilling to submit themselves to embarrassment and self depreciation.

If that doesn't make things crystal clear, I don't know what will. As always, ladies, we appreciate your readership, even if, like so many other things about you, we don't understand it.