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INFINITY... AND BEYOND
LOUISE TREWAVAS
"HERE, HAVE A PROPER MAGAZINE!" sneered some bloke I'd never clapped eyes on before, as he thrust a very black-looking tekkie publication at me during the Dive Show.
Oh, my gosh! Are women allowed to look at this stuff? I wondered as I flicked through page after page of serious derring-do.
The publishers had left a fairly large clue: there were no women divers in sight (or to read about) in the entire thing. Hmmm, how odd. I just didn't get it. So I showed it to the girls on my stand.
Fair play to the lads, they must have had a suitably sympathetic male audience in mind as they penned those self-glorifying descriptions of their intrepid dives. I don't think they had envisaged the impact it would have on a female audience.
We wept. We were doubled over in pain. We took it in turns to read out the most lurid of the passages, and absolutely howled.
OK, it may have helped that we were, to a woman, cave-divers and tekkettes; when you've done deco stops at deeper than 100m, it's difficult not to giggle at men who regard themselves as Titans for reaching 50m. I managed to laugh my mascara off - genuinely no mean feat, as that stuff is mask-clearing proof.
And that's when I got it. It's not a diving magazine - it's a fantasy magazine! It caters to the same kind of people who dress up as knights and re-enact historic battles in their spare time.
It provides an opportunity to escape from normality for a while and play out an imaginary existence in your head. You too can be brave, strong and true and look the part in your extraordinary outfit!
Fabulous. If you're too embarrassed to go the whole suit-of-armour route, what better place to secretly indulge your heroic fantasy life than in technical diving?
For a woman who appears at the top of her column in a studded collar, you could accuse me of being a bit slow to catch on.
Next time I'm on a dive boat, I'll be taking a sneaky look around to see which of the blokes is "doing a Buzz Lightyear" and getting himself into the part by twiddling with his spacey-style gadgets.
It totally explains the thinking behind the design of the VR3 computer. And that's why so many male divers feel the need to arm themselves with huge knives and spearguns: you never know when you'll run into the Evil Emperor Zurg!
OK, it's too easy to poke fun at the blokes. Let's be honest, even if we don't use our diving, we're all at it - women included. Who doesn't have a way of dressing up that makes them feel special and maybe capable of doing things that we wouldn't normally do?
Your "lucky" top, your "pulling outfit", those boots (you know the ones I mean), that uniform that never leaves the bedroom... Oh yes.
Without a rich streak of fantasy, nightclubs would lose their most colourful customers, movies and the Internet would slump, and
X-Factor would miss its most fascinating auditionees.
But fantasy is a notoriously tricky area. How do we walk the line between having a laugh and being a joke? I guess it's about awareness; knowing that you're using a fantasy to heighten your enjoyment but not taking it too seriously or believing that it's true.
Later that day, I happen to be walking past the stand of the "proper diving magazine". This fantasy business doesn't seem to be delivering much fun - the lads are all grim-faced as hell.
Like Channel 4's Space Cadets before the revelation, someone has seriously missed the trick.
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