by Dave Barry
This ability was vitally important millions of years ago, when primitive humans lived in a hostile environment. Back then, a guy could not afford to engage in a lot of time-wasting sentimental foreplay such as kissing, hugging, stroking, putting down the haunch of meat he was gnawing on, etc. A guy had to immediately achieve orgasm with the female (or, if a female was not available, with his hand, or a prehistoric Playboy magazine1) so that he’d be ready to fight off predators or hunt game or take a biologically important nap.
Unfortunately, in modern times the ability to have quick orgasms and then fall asleep is no longer as prized as it once was, especially among women. When modern women describe the qualities they’re looking for in the ideal man, the phrase “a real fast ejaculator” is usually pretty far down the list, right after “a large amount of nasal hair.”
Thus we have a fundamental disparity between the sexual needs of men and women, as is shown in the following table:
Average Time Required to Achieve Orgasm
Men Fruit Flies Women
2.3 (measured in seconds) 4.7 (measured in seconds) 5.6 (measured in episodes of “General Hospital”)
This disparity causes a lot of unhappiness, because when a man and a woman are trying to have sex, he will often climax before she is ready. Sometimes he will climax before she is, technically, in the room.
Naturally, guys get all the blame for this problem. You’d think that, just once, a leading public figure (and here I am thinking of the secretary of commerce) would get up at a press conference and say, “Hey! Women! Let’s try to have faster orgasms so that everybody will have more time to grow the economy and create needed jobs, not to mention watch Monday Night Football!”
But no. As is so often the case, the responsibility for changing is placed entirely on the shoulders of guys. So over the years, guys have developed a variety of techniques for delaying orgasm, with one major category being
PHYSICAL TECHNIQUES
The most effective physical technique, one that has been honed to perfection over the years by some of the world’s greatest lovers (and here I am thinking of my friend Tom Shroder, who told me about it) is when the guy, just as he is about to climax, bangs his head violently into an iron bed railing and raises a head knot the size of a golf ball. Another effective physical technique is when, at the critical moment, the guy’s dog, which has padded silently into the bedroom and which has a nose-surface temperature of forty-six degrees below zero, decides that this would be a good time to sniff the guy’s bare butt:
GUY: … yes, yes, yes …
WOMAN: … yes, yes, yesyesyes …
GUY: … yesyesyesyesyes YEOOOOWWWWWW
Of course physical techniques are not practical in every situation, such as when a guy is really hitting it off with his date, but they have decided to go to her place. (“Do you mind if we stop at my apartment first? I need to pick up my dog.”) This is why guys wishing to delay reaching orgasm have also had to develop certain
MENTAL TECHNIQUES
The primary one is the Mathematics Technique, which is when the guy tries to distract himself during sex by solving a math problem. This technique is the reason why, over the years, most of your breakthrough mathematical discoveries have been made by guys. It has nothing to do with guys being naturally better at math; it has to do with guys frantically trying to think about math to take their minds off the fact that they are having sex. (You don’t actually believe that Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he figured out gravity, do you? Give me a break.)
The problem with the Mathematics Technique is that, what with the overall decline in U.S. academic skills, a lot of guys can’t solve math problems without calculators, which, even if used in a suave and subtle manner, can suck the romance right out of a moment. This is why more guys are using the alternative technique of Picturing Something Really Nonappealing, and Here I Am Once Again Thinking of Margaret Thatcher, or in Extreme Cases, Rush Limbaugh in a Thong-Style Bathing Suit.
My point here is that a lot of guys are making a tremendous and sometimes painful effort to be more effective at satisfying their mates, and yet they are still, according to generally accepted standards of sexual performance, considered to be pitifully inadequate. And do you know why? Because women set the standards, that’s why. And I’m not just talking about sexual standards; I’m talking about all standards.
This is because women invented standards. It happened on a fateful day millions of years ago, when all the primitive guys were out in the forest doing some important guy thing such as hunting wild game or picking their noses with spears. Back in the village, the women were pounding roots to make them tender enough to be thrown away, when suddenly one of them, who was known as Smart Woman, said to the others: “You know what we need around here? We need some standards.”
And the other women said, “Yes. What are ‘standards’?”
And Smart Woman said, “Standards are when we say to our mates, ‘Don’t do something.’ For example, we could say, ‘No peeing in the cave.’”
And the other women, amazed, said, “We could say that?”
And Smart Woman said, “Why not?”
“But why would our mates obey us?” asked the other women.
“Because,” said Smart Woman, “we will look at them in a Certain Way.” And she demonstrated a new facial expression that she had been working on; an expression that only women can make; an expression that has the mysterious power to make men realize that they are in Big Trouble, without knowing exactly why.
“Wow,” said the other women, deeply impressed. Then one of them said, “How about, ‘No gnawing on a fish during sex’? Can that be a standard?”
“Certainly,” said Smart Woman.
And another woman said, “Can we say, ‘No playing the hilarious2 joke where you creep up to your mate and put your face directly in front of hers and open your mouth wide to reveal that you have a mastodon eyeball in there’?”
“Of course,” said Smart Woman.
And another woman said, “And a standard that says, ‘No migrating all the way across the land bridge to what will eventually be known as North America without stopping once to go to the bathroom’?”
“Yes!” said Smart Woman. “We can make any standards we want. We can even establish standards for personal hygiene!”
“What is ‘personal hygiene’?” asked the other women.
“Personal hygiene,” said Smart Woman, “is, for example, ‘No storing meat in your armpit.’”
“Wow,” said the other women.
So when the guys got back to the village, they received a severe shock.
“What do you mean, no peeing in the cave?” they said. “We always pee in the cave!”
But the women gave them a Certain Look, and instantly the guys realized that, unless they followed the new standards, their delicate primitive social fabric was going to be strained, plus they were not going to get any nooky for the next 2.3 million years. So although they did not understand the standards, they did their bumbling best to follow them.
This is basically where we stand today. The only difference is, we have way more standards. As we have noted, there are standards for sexual performance that are ludicrously incompatible with the guy biological makeup. There are social standards involving being sensitive, remembering anniversaries, listening during conversations, not farting loud on purpose, and not going away for six or eight months at a time without at least leaving a note. There are thousands of standards for domestic life, involving such totally alien (to guys) concepts as curtains, bedspreads, napkins, butter dishes, hors d’oeuvres, ceramic cat figurines, salad forks, hand towels, chafing dishes, floral arrangements, tablecloths, shelving paper, coasters, linen closets, throw rugs, room deodorizers, hangers, irons, little soaps shaped like fruit, and decorative boxes to hold tissues that already come in a perfectly good box. To name just a few.
Guys, left on their own in the wild, will develop lifestyles that do not i
nvolve any of these things. I base this statement on my own personal experience living as a bachelor in an apartment in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with my friend Randall Shantz. When we moved in, we looked around at our apartment, which was barren and sterile, devoid of furniture, and we realized what we needed: a hockey game. So we got one, the kind with little men who spin and flail around while you frantically work the levers and curse at the men for being so inept. This was the centerpiece of our living room.
Of course we soon had other furnishings. These consisted of some folding lawn chairs, a TV set, and a rabbit named Flyer, who could drink beer and poop an estimated 584,000,000,000,000,000 small, hard pellets per day. That was pretty much it, decor-wise. It never would have occurred to us to go out and pay money for something to put over the windows, or a special dish to put butter on. For one thing, we didn’t have butter. We never had anything in our refrigerator except beer and cartons of Wawa brand iced tea, which we generally had for breakfast along with some nutritional Marlboro brand cigarettes. I believe we had one plate, a white one, which we kept in the sink, ready to be rinsed off for those formal occasions that required a plate, such as when we couldn’t find an ashtray. We had our dinners catered by the New Haven Style Pizza3 takeout department; we ate from boxes while watching TV.
Other than rinsing the plate and sweeping up the rabbit doots when company was coming, we did very little housecleaning, because we had very few things to clean. We left the bathrooms pretty much alone, our theory being that when the fungal growths reached a certain size and aggressiveness level, we would find a new apartment.
It was a simple lifestyle, one that provided us with all the basic comforts, yet at the same time was uncluttered enough that we could play Indoor Ricochet Death Frisbee. Of course by even the most basic standards of domesticity, Randall and I were living like savages. But we honestly didn’t know this, because we were guys, and guys in their natural state simply are not aware of domestic standards, in the same sense that fish are not aware of the stock market.
This is the profoundly ignorant state that the typical guy is in when he enters into a domestic arrangement with a woman. He has maybe four domestic standards (“No spitting in bed,” for example), and she has hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. She has strict standards concerning which pillowcases go with which sheets; he has slept on a naked pillow for years, ever since the time he used his lone pillowcase to wipe off his motorcycle after he washed it in the shower.
(I have been married, off and on, since 1969, and I still do not grasp the point of making the bed.)
The woman and the guy have profoundly different concepts of “clean.” When the woman “cleans” a bathroom, she will go in there with numerous specialized products and implements for cleansing, scouring, shining, and deodorizing the glass, porcelain, and tile. She will spend hours just on the “grout.” She will eradicate dirt on the molecular level. She will track down and destroy each individual mildew spore. She can actually hear germs, and she can make them scream. She will leave the commode clean enough to be used in a surgical procedure. Whereas the guy, if instructed to clean the bathroom, will go in there with a single paper towel and the first spray bottle he finds. It might be Windex, or it might be Raid. The guy will spend about three minutes in the bathroom, squirting stuff randomly out of his spray bottle and then wiping it up with his towel. He will pay no attention to whether or not he is actually getting the bathroom cleaner. There could be a dead human body lying in the bathtub, and the guy would spray and wipe it.
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating the domesticity gap between guys and women. If so, perhaps you will be interested in the following actual letter I received:
Dear Dave,
I need your opinion. My girlfriend is trying to change me. She doesn’t like the way I live, while I see it as practical and efficient.
First of all, she doesn’t like the way I blow my nose on my dirty clothes. Whenever I have a cold, rather than waste $1.50 on a box of Kleenex, I blow my nose on a pair of dirty pants or a shirt in my laundry hamper. The way I see it, the clothes are already dirty, and they’re going to get washed soon anyway. What’s the big deal? My girlfriend says it’s “gross.”
Also, I was recently cooking a batch of Sloppy Joes, and while I was draining the grease, some of it dripped on the kitchen floor. Rather than fooling around with the hot grease, I told her I’d let it congeal overnight and scrape it off in the morning with the paint scraper. Of course she went crazy. You would have thought I suggested going out and inhaling asbestos fibers.
Lastly, I tend to let my newspapers pile up. I put them in grocery bags and they sit in my apartment. My girlfriend keeps nagging me to take them to the recycling center, but I’ve discovered that I can arrange the bags to create furniture. Not only have I saved myself some gas money, but I’ve new brown hard furniture to boot. I don’t actually use the couch much, but I’ve found I can set a hell of a lot of beer bottles on it. So please, help my relationship. Am I out of line, or am I simply logical and practical?
Sincerely,
Brian Robinson
Portland, Oregon
Being as objective as is humanly possible without a sex-change operation, I have to side with Brian on this one. I mean, compared with a lot of guys, he is Martha Stewart in the domesticity department. He has grocery bags. He can cook Sloppy Joes. He has a laundry hamper. And yet because of a few minor deviations from The Standards, his entire lifestyle is under attack.
And while we’re on the topic of women being pretty harsh with guys, let us consider the following excerpt from a letter sent by Alison Schuler of Albuquerque,4 New Mexico:
My husband announced one morning that he had discovered the previous night, on the eve of a two-day business trip, that he was out of underwear. Why he told me, I do not know. I never tell him when I’m out of underwear. Anyway, he decided to remedy the situation in true guy fashion, by washing exactly three sets of underwear, thus disregarding the bulging hamper full of the rest of his underwear, which, presumably, would wash itself during his absence.
This is a perfect example of the kind of hurtful stereotypical blanket statement5 about guys that women, as a group, are always making. Just because Ms. Schuler’s husband doesn’t do the entire laundry, doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions upon millions of males who do do the laundry, then hang it out to dry under the three suns of the Planet Xoomar, where they live. I will admit, however, that most guys here on Earth do not do any more laundry than they absolutely have to. A single-sock load would not be out of the question, for a guy. A guy might well choose to wash only the really dirty part of the sock.
Why is this? Are guys simply worthless, irresponsible scum? Yes, but that is not the cause of laundry impairment. The cause of their impairment is that guys, even when they have learned that they should do laundry, are afraid to do it, especially laundry belonging to people of other genders, because they know they will probably get into, once more, Big Trouble. The problem is that women usually own a lot of sensitive garments with laundering-instruction tags full of strict instructions like:
DO NOT MACHINE-WASH. DO NOT USE BLEACH. DO NOT USE HOT WATER. DO NOT USE WARM WATER. DO NOT USE ANY WATER. DO NOT EVEN TOUCH THIS GARMENT UNLESS YOU ARE WEARING STERILIZED SURGICAL GLOVES. PUT THIS GARMENT DOWN IMMEDIATELY, YOU CLUMSY OAF.
I’m deeply intimidated by such instructions. I developed my laundering skills in college, where I used what laundry scientists call the Pile System, wherein you put your dirty under-shorts on the floor until they form a waist-high pile, thus subjecting the bottom shorts to intense heat and pressure that causes them to become, over several months, clean enough to wear if you’re desperate and spray them with Right Guard brand deodorant. When I lived with Randall, we fed our laundry to large carnivorous coin-operated machines in the basement, and threw away whatever clothes didn’t fit when we were done. This is why most married guys use the Hamper System, which is similar to the Pile System except that the clo
thes really do get clean, thanks to magical hamper rays.
I am jesting, of course. I realize that hamperized clothes are in fact cleaned by a person such as Alison Schuler of Albuquerque, New Mexico. But I also know that women follow a complex procedure involving sorting and presoaking and twenty-seven different combinations of water temperatures and chemical compounds such as fabric softener, stain remover, fabric hardener, cream rinse, ointments, suppositories, enriched plutonium, etc. A woman wouldn’t let a guy do her laundry unless he underwent years of training, because she assumes he’d screw it up and cause her garments to shrink down to cute little Tinkerbell clothes, or transmaterialize in the dryer, similar to what happened to that unfortunate man in the movie The Fly, so she’d wind up with, for example, a brassiere that had pants legs.
This is why women are reluctant to let men near the laundry, as was shown by a nationwide survey of several women I know. A typical reaction came from my research department, Judi Smith, who gave the following statement regarding her husband, Tim, a Ph.D. college professor: “I don’t trust him to do my laundry at all, unless I’ve sorted it first and given him strict instructions before each and every load, because otherwise everything we own would be mauve or gray…. He puts his clothes away damp. He can’t put away anyone else’s clothes, because he can’t fold. I mean, the man can’t fold a towel for God’s sake. Somehow, he can’t get the corners to match up. A hand towel, even.”
I’m not defending guys here. I’m just saying that a lot of us have developed a powerful laundry phobia, and we will continue to suffer from it as long as women roll their eyes and shove us away from the washing machine when we’re about to, for example, wash our delicate silks in the same load as our boat cover. This is also true of the other major domestic areas such as cleaning and cooking and remembering where, exactly, we left the children. Yes, we guys have problems in these areas, but this is not our fault. We are talking about nature here. It’s a lot like tapeworms. Tapeworms tend to not have a positive public image, because they are repulsive organisms that get inside people’s intestines and eat people’s food and grow to lengths of sixty feet and have millions of repulsive little babies. But is this their “fault”? No! It is their nature! And guys are no different! Guys are exactly like tapeworms, except for being slightly less likely to help with the dishes.