Men and Quizzes

What is it with men and quizzes? They take it soooo seriously and often ignore a mere female in the process. Quizzes are very serious business here in Lyon and every anglophone pub has one - so from Monday through to Thursday you can go to a quiz. Some offer money prizes, others meals and drinks, others offer boxes of crap. Typically questions are asked in both French and English and I got into them as it was helping me learn French and a good way of meeting people.

The team I tend to play with is a flexible one, with different people playing each week, due to the odd nature of some of their working shifts, and generally speaking we do quite well at winning the box of crap and sometimes we win money and drinks. However it is a very male dominated team and each week there are only one or two females.

What gets me though is the way that the men talk over, ignore or completely put down suggestions from me, DESPITE sending me messages asking if I am playing the quiz that night?? Yep, I'm confused and not so vain to think that it is my stunning looks and company they want for the evening, these boys take the quiz very seriously and don't like carrying lame ducks.
Here are a couple of examples from last Thursday.

"Which hollywood actor has a pilot's license and flew his own Boeing 707 to South Africa for the World Cup this week?" I said "John Travolta" before the question had finished. My team mate who was writing the answers refused to put anything down until he heard the question in French (fair enough) but as no one had anything better and I was so quick with the answer, it was accepted.

Later there was a question on tall buildings - which they wanted to put down Empire State Building and this was where I went wrong - I suggested a possibility rather than going in with a statement. I said "Wasn't the Chyrsler building built before the Empire State?" Big mistake. it was completely ignored. (I was right). I then repeated this mistake with a question on which UN members vetoed sanctions by saying - "Oh, it could be Turkey as that would explain a headline I saw on the BBC website." The two journalists (who had not been working that day, nor it appears, been anywhere near a newspaper or the internet) went for Burma and North Korea (I was right).

I did get slight victory for the question "Which tournament started in August 2007, with a match between Tahiti and New Caledonia, which New Caledonia won 1-0." After much pursing of lips and deep frowning, especially from the sports journalist, I chipped in with "Is it the World Cup? Don't the qualifying rounds start years before?" This was initially greeted with negative comments and more frowning as they tried desperately to think of any other tournament - possibly some french DOM-TOM tournament, and probably because each week I cheerfully admit to my lack of sporting knowledge, before they admitted defeat and wrote down 'World cup 2010', as "We've got no other answer."

I guess the solution is to be the one who writes the answers on the quiz sheets, as then you have ultimate control and can put down whatever you want, which I did one week when they were debating whether it was the Jules Rimet or not. I just wrote down 'Oscar', as that was the right answer and left them bickering amongst themselves.