The rise of yawn porn Michael Odell joins the Dull Mens Club and meets fellow dullards obsessed with

By Michael Odell For You Magazine Published: 12:01 BST, 13 July 2024 | Updated: 16:55 BST, 13 July 2024 View comments Unless he’s Mick Jagger, once a man reaches middle age his outlook begins to change.Gay porno Instead of walking down the street peacocking, perhaps even preening himself in shop windows, he is more likely to look down at an interesting drain cover and remark, ‘That’s an original Thomas Crapper!’ Yes, the noted Victorian toilet tycoon also manufactured drain covers, and a certain type of man finds this tremendously interesting. To be honest, I thought it was just me, but now I have discovered the Facebook group Dull Men’s Club, I know I am not alone. Boy, am I not alone. Just over a year ago there were 40,000 members. Now there are 1.4 million of this global community swapping stupefyingly anodyne bits of information. Have you ever wondered why some drivers park their cars with the bumper overhanging the pavement while others don’t? OK, maybe you have. But, and here’s the real test of whether you will fit in at the DMC, would you take a photo of said car-parking infraction, annotate it with copious banal detail and then post it online? You would? Fine. You’re in. But members of the Dull Men’s Club don’t merely log life’s petty annoyances, they sometimes seek answers to eternal philosophical conundrums. For example, when a train carriage bears the emergency signage ‘to obtain hammer break glass’, shouldn’t there be a second hammer outside the glass with which to do this? Tips are astonishingly well thought out. Until I joined the club, my shower cubicle was a patchy, water-stained disgrace. But jaw-droppingly dull member Beau Woods has come to the rescue with a fail-safe 16-step shower-cleaning routine. There’s even an instructional diagram.    First you stand inside the shower cubicle with your squeegee and make two downward strokes. The third stroke is a broad horizontal sweep followed by… actually, you’ll have to look up the rest. I’m not sure I can get to the end without first receiving electroconvulsive therapy. A lot of the content is like this. A member spots something mind-numbingly boring about the world which, at the same time, turns out to be bleakly fascinating. When you’ve written a suitably enervating post, for reasons which aren’t entirely clear, you sign off noting your shoe size. In fact, DMC moderators are known to ban material that is too exciting.  Will my first contribution – ‘why is the average circumference of unbagged dog poo in my local park invariably above 5cm?’ – make the cut? I don’t actually measure these turds but it’s true; owners of bigger dogs seem more likely to leave their animal’s mess for me to step in.   Now, is that because bigger dogs tend to wander further away from their owners while out walking and are therefore more likely to take a dump unnoticed? Or is it simply that owners of bigger dogs are more arrogant? There, I’ve said it, and in the process possibly saved my marriage, because when I asked my wife while we were out with our jack russell last weekend she simply said, “Christ, listen to yourself, will you?” And yet, lots of women seem to find the DMC’s prize bores extremely attractive and many even join in.  There’s Jayne, who says she’s been introducing some variety into her life by occasionally paying at the kiosk rather than at the pump at her local petrol station. And I really like the sound of Marlene (size six shoes) who tells us at great length how, when she was stuck in traffic behind a bus recently, she noticed two of its rear panels and the registration plate combined to look like a cat’s face. Women have even found love on the DMC. Two British 30-somethings, Danielle Goodyear from Leeds and James Warbuton from Manchester, hooked up on the site last year. At the time, Goodyear spoke about her hatred for dating apps like Tinder and  how she had been attracted to the idea of men discussing how best to organise a sock drawer.  With Warbuton, she seems to have struck gold. One of his most memorable posts was about the colour of the light on his kettle (white). For many women, boring is a reassuring corrective to toxic masculinity. Online influencers like Andrew Tate or geopolitical ‘alphas’ like Trump and Putin tend to hog the headlines. And yet we dull men are the many, they are the few. The DMC celebrates people, mostly men, who are boring, quirky, practical but, above all, curious. Does mince really defrost more quickly if you roll it flat before putting it in the freezer? What are the different smells you can get with various brands of dog-poo bags? I never knew I cared, but now I really do. Since joining the Dull Men’s Club my world has turned completely taupe. By the way, my kettle light is blue and my shoe size is 11. Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group