by Dave Barry
Or let’s say two couples get together after a long separation. The two women will have a conversation, lasting several days, during which they discuss virtually every significant event that has occurred in their lives and the lives of those they care about, sharing their innermost thoughts, analyzing and probing, inevitably coming to a deeper understanding of each other, and a strengthening of a cherished friendship. Whereas the guys will watch the play-offs.
This is not to say the guys won’t share their feelings. Sometimes they’ll get quite emotional.
“That’s not a FOUL??” they’ll say.
Or: “YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT’S NOT A FOUL???”
I have a good friend, Gene, and one time, when he was going through a major medical development in his life, we spent a weekend together. During this time Gene and I talked a lot and enjoyed each other’s company immensely, but—this is true—the most intimate personal statement he made to me is that he has reached Level 24 of a video game called “Arkanoid.” He had even seen the Evil Presence, although he refused to tell me what it looks like. We’re very close, but there is a limit.
You may think that my friends and I are Neanderthals, and that a lot of guys are different. This is true. A lot of guys don’t use words at all. They communicate entirely by nonverbal methods, such as sharing bait.
* * *
Are you starting to see what I mean by “guyness”? I’m basically talking about the part of the male psyche that is less serious and/or aggressive than the Manly Manhood part, but still essentially very male. My feeling is that the world would be a much better6 place if more males would stop trying so hard to be Men and instead settle for being Guys. Think of the historical problems that could have been avoided if more males had been able to keep their gender-hood in its proper perspective, both in themselves and in others. (“Hey, Adolf, just because you happen to possess a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs, that is no reason to invade Poland.”) And think how much happier women would be if, instead of endlessly fretting about what the males in their lives are thinking, they could relax, secure in the knowledge that the correct answer is: very little.
Yes, what we need, on the part of both genders, is more understanding of guyness. And that is why I wrote this book. I intend to explore in detail every major facet of guyhood, including the historical facet, the sociological facet, the physiological facet, the psychosexual facet, and the facet of how come guys spit so much. Every statement of fact you will read in this book is either based on actual laboratory tests, or else I made it up. But you can trust me. I’m a guy.
1 Specifically, “asshole.”
2 To be or not? I got to know. Might kill myself by the end of the show.
3 Typical fan letter: “Who cuts your hair? Beavers?”
4 I also have a female dog, Earnest, who never breaks the rules.
5 I am taking some liberties here with Zippy’s vocabulary. More likely, in his mind, he uses the term mitigating.
6 As measured by total sales of this book.
Example Chart
Men Guys
Vince Lombardi Joe Namath
Oliver North Gilligan
Hemingway Gary Larson
Columbus Whichever astronaut hit the first golf ball on the Moon
Superman Bart Simpson
Doberman pinschers Labrador retrievers
Abbott Costello
Captain Ahab Captain Kangaroo
Satan Snidely Whiplash
The pope Willard Scott
Germany Italy
Geraldo Katie Couric
Stimulus-Response Comparison Chart:
Women vs. Men vs. Guys
Are You a Guy?
Take This Scientific Quiz
to Determine
Your Guyness Quotient
Alien beings from a highly advanced society visit the Earth, and you are the first human they encounter. As a token of intergalactic friendship, they present you with a small but incredibly sophisticated device that is capable of curing all disease, providing an infinite supply of clean energy, wiping out hunger and poverty, and permanently eliminating oppression and violence all over the entire Earth. You decide to:
Present it to the president of the United States.
Present it to the secretary general of the United Nations.
Take it apart.
As you grow older, what lost quality of your youthful life do you miss the most?
Innocence.
Idealism.
Cherry bombs.
When is it okay to kiss another male?
When you wish to display simple and pure affection without regard for narrow-minded social conventions.
When he is the pope. (Not on the lips.)
When he is your brother and you are Al Pacino and this is the only really sportsmanlike way to let him know that, for business reasons, you have to have him killed.
What about hugging another male?
If he’s your father and at least one of you has a fatal disease.
If you’re performing the Heimlich maneuver. (And even in this case, you should repeatedly shout: “I am just dislodging food trapped in this male’s trachea! I am not in any way aroused!”)
If you’re a professional baseball player and a teammate hits a home run to win the World Series, you may hug him provided that (1) He is legally within the basepath, (2) Both of you are wearing protective cups, and (3) You also pound him fraternally with your fist hard enough to cause fractures.
Complete this sentence: A funeral is a good time to
…. remember the deceased and console his loved ones.
…. reflect upon the fleeting transience of earthly life.
…. tell the joke about the guy who has Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
In your opinion, the ideal pet is:
A cat.
A dog.
A dog that eats cats.
You have been seeing a woman for several years. She’s attractive and intelligent, and you always enjoy being with her. One leisurely Sunday afternoon the two of you are taking it easy—you’re watching a football game; she’s reading the papers—when she suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, tells you that she thinks she really loves you, but she can no longer bear the uncertainty of not knowing where your relationship is going. She says she’s not asking whether you want to get married; only whether you believe that you have some kind of future together. What do you say?
That you sincerely believe the two of you do have a future, but you don’t want to rush it.
That although you also have strong feelings for her, you cannot honestly say that you’ll be ready anytime soon to make a lasting commitment, and you don’t want to hurt her by holding out false hope.
That you cannot believe the Jets called a draw play on third and seventeen.
Okay, so you have decided that you truly love a woman and you want to spend the rest of your life with her—sharing the joys and the sorrows, the triumphs and the tragedies, and all the adventures and opportunities that the world has to offer, come what may. How do you tell her?
You take her to a nice restaurant and tell her after dinner.
You take her for a walk on a moonlit beach, and you say her name, and when she turns to you, with the sea breeze blowing her hair and the stars in her eyes, you tell her.
Tell her what?
One weekday morning your wife wakes up feeling ill and asks you to get your three children ready for school. Your first question to her is:
“Do they need to eat or anything?”
“They’re in school already?”
“There are three of them?”
When is it okay to throw away a set of veteran underwear?
When it has turned the color of a dead whale and developed new holes so large that you’re not sure which ones were originally intended for your legs.
When it is down to eight loosely connected underwear molecules and has to be handled with tweezers.
It is never
okay to throw away veteran underwear. A real guy checks the garbage regularly in case somebody—and we are not naming names, but this would be his wife—is quietly trying to discard his underwear, which she is frankly jealous of, because the guy seems to have a more intimate relationship with it than with her.
What, in your opinion, is the most reasonable explanation for the fact that Moses led the Israelites all over the place for forty years before they finally got to the Promised Land?
He was being tested.
He wanted them to really appreciate the Promised Land when they finally got there.
He refused to ask directions.
What is the human race’s single greatest achievement?
Democracy.
Religion.
Remote control.
How to Score: Give yourself one point for every time you picked answer “c.” A real guy would score at least 10 on this test. In fact, a real guy would score at least 15, because he would get the special five-point bonus for knowing the joke about the guy who has Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
1
The Role of Guys in History
Men Went to the Moon, but Guys Invented Mooning
GUYS HAVE PLAYED an important role in history, but this role has not been given the attention it deserves, because nobody wrote it down. Guys are not conscientious about writing. Take thank-you notes. When a couple gets married, the bride very quickly—sometimes right after her new husband passes out in their honeymoon-suite hot tub—starts composing personalized notes thanking their wedding guests for all the lovely gifts (“… I didn’t know they even made a traveling case for the Salad Shooter”).
The bride will keep this up until she has written every single guest; if it was a really big wedding, she may still be thanking people after her divorce (“Aunt Esther, the meat fork is beautiful, and I expect to get many happy years of use from it once the surgeons extract it from Roger”).
Very few guys write thank-you notes, or any other kind of note. Guys would probably commit a lot more kidnappings if they weren’t required to write ransom notes.
My point is that, because guys don’t write things down, they are not well represented in the history books. You’ll find countless references to men, however, because men like to record every detail of their lives, for posterity. Alexander the Great, for example, kept a diary, so that today we can read, in his own handwriting, exactly what he was doing on any given day, as is shown by these actual excerpts:
327 B.C., Nov. 4—Cloudy today. Conquered Asia Minor.
324 B.C., Jan. 6—Note: Find out what “B.C.” stands for.
323 B.C., May 17—Died at an early age.
But what about the average guy in Alexander the Great’s army? What about his contributions to history? Yes, it is important that Alexander extended the influence of such legendary Greek philosophers as Aristotle throughout most of the civilized world, thus significantly affecting the development of Western thought and culture to this very day; but is it not also important that, at the same time, some of his lowly foot soldiers were perfecting the Rubber Spear Trick, or determining that the letters in “Aristotle” can be rearranged to spell “A Tit Loser”?1
That is the kind of historical guy accomplishment I’m going to explore in this chapter, starting with a discussion of:
Prehistoric Guys
Prehistory was a very difficult time for humans. Hostile, vicious, person-eating predators roamed the Earth. Disease was rampant. Mortality rates were horrific. The automatic bank teller was still only a dream.
Back then the clan was the basic unit2 of society, with the roles of males and females clearly defined. The females cared for the young and gathered roots, which they would soak in water, then peel, then painstakingly pound for hours between two heavy rocks, and finally throw away. “We may be primitive, but we’re not stupid enough to eat roots,” was their feeling.
Thus the basic food-gathering responsibility fell on the shoulders of the males, who would go off for days at a time to hunt the mighty dinosaur. This was hard work. They had to dig an enormous deep hole, then disguise it by covering it with frail branches,3 then hide in the bushes, waiting for a mighty dinosaur to come along and fall into the trap. The hunters often waited for long periods, because, unbeknownst to them, dinosaurs had become extinct several million years earlier.
So the males sat around a lot. Some of them eventually became fidgety and went on to develop agriculture, invent primitive tools,4 etc. But some males—these were the original guys—really liked sitting around. Eventually they stopped bothering to dig the hole. They’d just go out into the woods and sit.
“It’s not easy, trying to catch dinosaurs,” they would tell people, especially their wives. “But if we don’t do it, who will?”
They never helped with the roots.
Sitting around for no reason under the guise of being engaged in productive work was the first real guy contribution to human civilization, forming the underlying basis for many modern institutions and activities such as fishing, sales conferences, highway repair, the federal government, and “Customer Service.”
This is not to say that prehistoric guys did nothing but sit around. They also invented an activity that has become one of the most dominant forms of guy behavior, now accounting for an estimated 178 trillion guy-hours per year in the United States alone.5 The activity I am referring to, of course, is guys scratching their personal regions. And when I say “scratching,” I am not talking about a couple of quick, discreet swipes with the fingernails to relieve a momentary itch. I’m talking about an activity that guys spend way more time and energy on than they do on, for example, home maintenance.
Walk around any populated area and you’ll see dozens, maybe hundreds, of guys engaged in scratching themselves. Some will try to be subtle, but usually once they get going they completely lose track of where they are. Before long they’re rooting around in their pants using both hands, garden implements, etc., totally oblivious to the world around them. This can lead to trouble.
FIRST MATE ON THE TITANIC: Sir, don’t you think we should do something about it? Maybe change direction? Sir? Sir?
CAPTAIN: (… scratchscratchscratchscratchscratchscratch …)
One time in the 1970s I was watching a Philadelphia Phillies game on television, and at a key moment the Phillies’ manager, Danny Ozark (who looked exactly like a guy named “Danny Ozark”) walked to the pitcher’s mound for a conference. Danny had his back to the camera, and his right hand, seemingly acting on its own, sort of moseyed around to his rear-end region and started exploring, really probing, looking as though maybe Danny had lost some vital documents in there. The hand became so energetic that finally even the TV announcers had to start laughing. This was a guy in the middle of a baseball stadium and on TV, with the game at a critical juncture, and still his number-one priority was scratching himself. He was a guy’s guy, that Danny Ozark.
It was also during these primitive times of sitting around with absolutely nothing to do for weeks on end that guys developed golf. There is evidence that guys were playing golf as early as 2 million B.C., using balls made of animal hide and crude clubs fashioned from tree limbs. Amazingly, these early golfers had already invented such fundamental elements of the game as chipping, putting, sand traps, “bogeys,” ugly pants, and cheating. There was one element they had not thought of yet, however: holes. The result was that the primitive game lacked focus and tended to meander. Archaeologists now believe that the first humans to cross the land bridge from Asia to North America were a threesome6 of early guy golfers. (“How many strokes do you have?” “Okay, I hit two coming down off the glacier, and one from that mastodon there, so this would be, let’s see … seventeen million.” “LIAR!”)
Ancient Egyptian Guys
The most significant achievement of ancient Egyptian guys occurred at the funeral of the great Pharaoh Amentooten III, when some guys invented the famous “Substitute Mummy Filled with Live Weasel
s” prank. This led to the collapse of the Egyptian empire, but everybody involved agreed it was worth it.
Guys of Ancient Greece
Greece, in its Golden Age, was the fertile cultural ground fromwhich sprang some of ancient humanity’s most glorious contributions to politics, science, and the arts. Guys had nothing to do with this. The major guy contribution involved the ancient Olympics. These were quite different from the games we see today For one thing, the athletes competed naked,7 which meant that not only did their Nike logos have to be tattooed directly onto their skin, but also they sometimes found themselves having embarrassing bodily reactions. (“Is that a javelin you’re carrying, or are you just glad to see me?”)