Boy needs girl...

As a nation we do have a navel-gazing approach to world events. Foreign news is always, well, foreign to us. We rarely make it ours as long as it's not some terrible tragedy and then all and sundry rally up to collect money or containerfuls of stuff.

But sometimes something happens and we come out of our cocoon and get curious about people hogging the headlines abroad. The name Sarah Brown will hardly ring any bells, although she is the wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

But Carla Bruni will surely press all the horns (excuse the pun). And it's not just because her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, came to Malta shortly after he won the election in May last year. Then he was still married to Cecilia - a non-supermodel.

By December the Sarkozy-Bruni love story had all men in grips. Why, even Labour leader Alfred Sant referred to it in an interview with Ariadne Massa during the electoral campaign: "My last thought before going under the anaesthetic was of Sarkozy having fun with Bruni. I thought just my luck to be in hospital." Very telling indeed. The first time a local politician commented on his tastes in women on record and nobody picked up on it.

I got myself interested in the story on Christmas day when Sarko whisked the ultimate men's dream and her son to Egypt. To be more precise, what caught my eye was a picture in London's The Times of the vertically challenged President (who wears stackers to appear taller) lugging Bruni's seven-year-old son Aurelien on his shoulders.

Bruni's son happens to take after his mother and is no tiny boy. At seven, he already looks the height of his step-father. The happy family clearly hadn't been on a three-hour hike and in all probability the boy must have been perfectly happy standing on his own two feet.

But no, the Napoleon wannabe president, still went ahead, straining his veins and carried the boy on his shoulders to visit the ancient Jordanian ruins of Petra. It could be that Sarko has a very, very, strong paternal streak in him, but I doubt it.

He was simply employing an age-old tactic: Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy wants to show girl he is strong and will protect her cubs. Girl marries boy. It is a clear example of the lengths (or should that be weight) men will go to impress a woman.

Sarkozy is a president of his time. He is a reflection of several males today: Men who are not boys' boys but girls' boys. Several men nowadays are relying more and more on women. If we take Sarkozy as an example yet again, it seems that he functions much better in the presence of women, regardless of whether he is married to them.

French Home Affairs Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie recently noted that on the occasions when Sarkozy had lost his temper in public none of his numerous female ministers had been present.

A girls' man is but a mirror image of the woman he shares his life with. If she likes art he will like art, if she hates Bush he will hate him too. But that's all as long as the relationships last. When it's all over, they act fast to prevent a God-forbid vacuum of discovering oneself.

They quickly recruit another girlfriend, and just as quickly take on a new personality. In the remote event they can't jump into another relationship, they will resort to the main woman of their life: their mother. And for a while, if she's religious, they'll become pious. And so on so forth.

Sarkozy made sure to fill Cecilia's void immediately. Probably he knew he couldn't have functioned otherwise and a president cannot afford that. Now the new Sarko is emerging. According to reports, three months into their marriage, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has been slowly turning the right wing president towards the left. She has been trying to 'sensitise' him to art and open his eyes to the plight of immigrants. She was even reported to have whispered "listen" to her husband when she noticed he was fidgety in meetings. One has to see how the story will unfold.

But all this makes me eternally grateful that I have a baby daughter. I think mothers of boys have a real tough job on their hands. The mother-son relationship can make or break them. On the other hand, mothers of girls need to instil in their daughters the principle of sisterhood, the importance of being a girls' girl and always being there for your girlfriends.

To which clearly Bruni - who notoriously lured Mick Jagger to her bed 24 hours after his wife gave birth - does not subscribe. All the same, I cannot but give her a standing ovation for bringing the glam into flat shoes again. Evive!