I introduced one of my friends to a man the other day. She’s been internet dating like a Trojan over the last few months as she believes blind dates without the prerequisite photo test aren’t going to work for her. Photo first, date later.

I took the liberty of introducing her to a guy that seemed to fit all of her requirements.  Solid, athletic, isn’t bald, knows how to use a fork and knife in the correct way, pulls out a chair for a lady, even does volunteer work on the weekends. 

She didn’t like him. “His ears look like cauliflowers.”

I know humans are entitled to a bit of pickiness, but when it comes to a small foible such as ears? Does having "off earlobes", as she described them, reason to dismiss a 99 percent suitable package?

Women tend to think the male of our species as the shallow counterpart. Men, after all, are classified by two categories: those who like bums and those who like boobs. (I’ve seldom heard a man saying he is both.)

Most of my boyfriends, drawn from this fact, have been bum men. I wear a 34B, and am of the opinion that I have an amply-shaped derriere. When I don’t eat all the pies.

Women, traditionally, are seen to be less inclined to pick out specific physical attributes of a man. Unless a woman has an adverse fetish towards, say bad feet, we think of ourselves as the far more accepting gender.

While men who love big bouncy milk jugs cause women around the world to assess at one point or another whether they’d go for a boob job, women can in turn be blamed for men going for penis enlargements. The size of the male phallus has haunted men for thousands of years.  

I’m being honest here – size does matter. Should a penis be larger than an aerosol can of Glade, or smaller than a cocktail sausage, then it’s going to affect my sex life. But anything between the spectrums of massive and minute is not an issue for 99.9 percent of women.

Personally I’m a bit of a legs girl. My specimen has to have a good pair of shapely legs. But what makes my version of shapely legs doesn’t necessarily match another person’s version of shapely legs. My shapely means slim calf muscles. Someone else’s version may mean rippling bulges of muscle extending from groin down to ankle.

I also happen to like beautiful forearms, with just the right amount of man-hair on them. It’s my fetish, and I’m proud of it. It’s observation at a sexual scale, and whether we admit it or not, we all do it. Think of it as sussing out the gene pool for our future generations, in intricate detail.

The point here is simple this: both genders are shallow, and equally so, if we’re going to generalise.

At the end of the day, if my friend is so turned off by "bad earlobes" that she can’t envisage sweaty naked nights with the guy, why should she be blamed?

If you’re a fiercely loyal boob man or shoulders girl, at the very least, you have an idea of what you’re looking for in a package.