How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?

by David Feldman

  Ah, Frustables (short for “Frustrating Imponderables”), the ten Imponderables we most wanted to answer for this book but could not. In most cases, we contacted experts who came to no useful consensus, or we suspect our sources are not delving into the Imponderable with the depth it deserves.

  So we leave it to you. Can you help? We offer a complimentary autographed copy of our next volume of Imponderables to the reader who supplies the best answer to each, or the first reader who leads us to the proof that supplies the answer. And of course, your contribution will be printed and acknowledged in the book. Remember, only you can prevent Frustability.

  FRUSTABLE 1: Why do we close our eyes when we kiss?

  Interested in any and all theories, as well as any amusing anecdotes about this subject.

  FRUSTABLE 2: Why do women “of a certain age” usually start wearing their hair shorter?

  The hairdressers and beauty consultants we spoke to, for the most part, felt there was no good reason for women to wear their hair shorter as they got older. Why has ever-shortened hair become a traditional fashion statement of mature women? Or is this custom merely a way to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with long hair?

  FRUSTABLE 3: Why do the clasps of necklaces and bracelets tend to migrate from the back toward the front?

  Can this phenomenon be explained by some weird, unwritten rule of physics? Does the slight extra weight of the clasp affect its ability to stay put on the wrist or neck? We have received this complaint from several women and so far have heard no good explanation.

  FRUSTABLE 4: Why is it customary to include the full address of the recipient of a business letter before the salutation?

  Presumably, the recipient of a letter knows his or her address. When a letter is prepared for a window envelope, this practice saves the sender the time and aggravation of addressing an envelope. But isn’t it a waste of time and space otherwise?

  FRUSTABLE 5: Why do most women like shopping more than men?

  Yes, we know this is a gross generalization. But it is fair to say that far more women were “born to shop” than men. We thought men were supposed to be the hunter-gatherers. Why do women seem to derive far more psychic benefits from shopping than men?

  FRUSTABLE 6: How and why did the association between wearing eyeglasses and nerdiness and/or greater intelligence begin?

  Was the original assumption that people needed glasses because they wore out their eyes reading books? Were glasses considered to be signs of physical weakness? This is one stereotype that never made much sense to us.

  FRUSTABLE 7: Why and where did the tradition of tearing down football goalposts begin?

  We’re confident that the practice started during the days of early American college football, but our usually reliable college football experts can’t pinpoint either where it started or whether it began as a demonstration of joy at a victory or a riot after a defeat.

  FRUSTABLE 8: Why do artists, models, and bohemians wear black clothing?

  In almost any metropolitan area in the Western world, black seems to be a uniform of hipness. Sure, we know that “black makes you look thinner,” “everybody looks good in black,” “black goes with everything,” etc. But why would folks who wouldn’t think twice about dyeing their hair purple or inserting earrings through any possible bodily protuberance find black eternally chic?

  FRUSTABLE 9: Why is the best restaurant coffee better than home-brewed coffee?

  We expect to hear complaints about the premise of this question. Yes, there is plenty of pitiful coffee served in restaurants and cafés, but several readers have asked why they can’t make coffee at home that competes with the best restaurant coffee, especially when they are often using more expensive coffee beans than the restaurant.

  FRUSTABLE 10: Why don’t women spit more?

  Yes, we know we are culturally conditioned to consider spitting to be the domain of uncouth males. We realize that males of yore smoked cigars and chewed tobacco that stimulated saliva production. But most of the tobacco-abstaining, ultracouth males we’ve spoken to commonly feel the urge to spit. Yet many women deny they ever have such a need. Can there be a physiological explanation? Are women suppressing a desire to spit?

  Can you help us? We have great expectorations about this Frustable!

  Frustables Update

  Our Readers Respond to the Frustables First Posed in When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?

  FRUSTABLE 1: Why do women often go to the restroom together? And what are they doing in there for so long?

  Since we are in the rare position of having read several hundred people, mostly female, describe their restroom habits in graphic detail, and since we are about to embark on a dissection of such habits in detail worthy of a Ph. D. in anthropology, it is only fair we share with women what a men’s room is like: a morgue.

  About the only place where one can observe the average man more uptight is in an elevator. Even if a male should happen to saunter into a bathroom with a friend, any vocal interplay between them is strictly prohibited (unless approved in writing by Major League Baseball, of course). Men glide over to the urinals, unzip, and look straight ahead with a steadiness of gaze that a marine drill sergeant would envy. They go about their business with the seriousness and speed of someone paying by the hour. By our casual observation, an embarrassing percentage wash their hands as they make a beeline for the exit door. Average time in restroom? Fifteen seconds. Maybe we’re exaggerating a tad, but you get the idea.

  No wonder, then, that men are amazed that women will troop off together to the bathroom, just as the dinner table is engrossed in a fascinating conversation about the relative merits of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Phoenix Cardinals, or about whether the family auto requires 10-40 or 10-50 motor oil. As their dinner curdles, the men wonder what happened to the women. Have they been spirited into UFOs? Having a Tupperware party? Having a sauna? Here’s what we heard:

  Safety

  We were surprised how many women echoed the sentiments of Lin Sherfy of Nevada, Iowa:

  Practically from birth, Mommy tells her little girl how dangerous public restrooms are. They are dirty, they are filled with strange, unspecified diseases, and they teem with evil strangers who must never be spoken to. One of the most popular urban legends, after all, deals with the little girl who was drugged by an evil woman in a department-store restroom, her hair dyed. Her mother “just happened to catch a glimpse of her shoes as she was carried out the door and rescued her!”

  Consciously or subconsciously, a woman feels vulnerable with half her clothes down around her ankles and only half a door between her and whomever walks into the restroom. If there’s another woman around, most women will issue a general invitation and a group will go together to watch out for each other. Besides, it’s nice to have someone to hold the stall door shut since the lock has almost always been removed, and to pass you a Kleenex when, as usual, there isn’t any toilet paper.

  Meryl Silverstein of Brooklyn, New York, also mentioned that women are conditioned to fear restrooms from an early age:

  Despite many people insisting that things are worse “now” than they were “then,” when I was in elementary school, girls were never permitted to leave the classroom singly, certainly not to go to the bathroom. Presumably a would-be mugger or child molester would be deterred by two little girls. The college I attended had signs on the restroom doors advising women, “Never enter a bathroom alone.” Old habits die hard.

  Several women mentioned that they fear not only physical attacks but unwanted attention from lecherous men en route to the bathroom. We received a particularly biting primer on the subject from Nancy Tropkoff of Brunswick, Ohio, who even included suggested dialogue to assist, as she so delicately puts it, “moron-evaders”:

  Why would you want to go alone if you could be molested by some moron? [If you run into a jerk], your companion can say, “Let’s go, I gotta go real bad!” In especially urgent times, “Mrphh-gag-gag…I don�
�t feel so good” is also effective. On the way back from the bathroom, friends can also be a human shield (“No, I haven’t seen her.”) If a woman is somewhere with husband and kids, she will enlist children (“I know you have to go. At least try to go!”).

  To Kill Time

  High on the list of most women’s pet peeves are the long lines to get into restrooms. Diane Larson of Lakeville, Minnesota, summed up the thoughts of many women when she said that having a companion along is preferable so “that you have someone to talk to during the interminable wait to get into a stall.”

  Hair/Make-Up

  This may surprise our male readers, but beauty makeovers do not occur only in salons and on afternoon TV talk shows—actually, the epicenter of fashion and cosmetics is not Paris or New York City but your local women’s room. For men, a toilet is a toilet. For women, evidently a toilet is a toilette, or more precisely, a continuing education course in toilette, as Lin Sherfy explains:

  Any group of more than two women invariably includes one who’s recently read one of those “How To Make Lipstick Stay On” magazine articles, and often she’s also read that “everyone ought to use a lipstick brush.” So there stand her companions, waiting patiently because it would be rude to walk out and leave a friend alone in that evil place, while she gets out her lipstick brush, unscrews brush and lipstick, loads the brush, carefully paints her lips, blots, powders the blotted lipstick, picks her brush up off the floor where it rolled, washes it, dries it, loads the brush, paints over the powdered lipstick, blots…and then, she takes her comb and brush and spritzes spray…”

  You get the idea.

  Sharon Brandon of Indianapolis, Indiana, wrote:

  Women are (wrongly) conditioned by our culture to place a heavy emphasis on their appearance. Therefore they feel a need to make sure they still look “all right” at some point in the evening.

  All the respondents who mentioned this point added that men are “easy graders” in this department. As Kelli Zimmerman of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, put it,

  My date isn’t going to tell me that something doesn’t look right. My girlfriend will.

  Some women use their companions for positive feedback, too, such as Joan Cartan-Hansen of Boise, Idaho:

  Women seem to need confirmation that they look okay. After fixing your face in the bathroom mirror, it is nice to turn to your companion for a quick approval.

  Female Bonding

  We heard from many fans of Deborah Tannen’s bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand. Tannen posits that while men are task-oriented in word as well as deed, what she calls “rapport talk” is extremely important to women. Mary Roush of Wilmington, Delaware, explains:

  Where better to have conversational intimacy than in a women-only restroom?…You have to go to the restroom together to help form a relationship or otherwise miss an alliance-building, affiliative opportunity. The task (going to the restroom) is simply the secondary vehicle for the primary work [of women] in life: relationship maintenance.

  One reader, Charles T. Galloway of Bolton, Ontario, compares mass restroom migration to earlier, seemingly anachronistic rituals:

  There are certain subjects that both males and females seem to regard as appropriate for discussion when the other sex is absent but unsuitable when they are present. The ladies’ trip to the washroom takes the place of the old Victorian habit of the ladies withdrawing from the dining room to “leave the gentlemen to their cigars” so that these conversations can take place. What the ladies are doing in there so long is engaging in “girl talk.”

  David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, finds that “girl talk” is not only a way for women to increase intimacy but also serves to defuse what could turn into conflicts and turn them into ego-boosters:

  Women will often go to the restroom together precisely when they are in the company of men who take a dominant role in the discussion of the group…. The men are airing their opinions, controlling the direction of conversation and, for the most part, dismissing the women’s contributions. The simple outlet for the building frustration on the women’s part is to take leave of the men’s company temporarily without challenging their pompous position. It may come at a time when one of the women truly needs to use the restroom. What better occasion for the other women to take leave of a frustrating, possibly boring, situation without the slightest hint of confrontation!

  Once in the restroom, the women now have an opportunity to regain their sense of self-esteem. They can do this by having a brief discussion of their own choosing. If they feel particularly put down by their male counterparts, they can restore the balance by sharing their opinions of the men awaiting their return. No wonder we men start fidgeting after a while. And then we wonder why the women look so radiant and self-satisfied when they return.

  Nothing we heard from our readers contradicted Dr. Ryback’s observations. Indeed, Karen Pierce of Springfield, Virginia, eerily echoed his words, and added, “I’ve had better discussions fixing my make-up than I’ve ever had talking to my boyfriends.”

  Men, on the other hand, aren’t too likely to bond in restrooms; one reader, Bob Kowalski of Detroit, Michigan, thinks the reason might relate to Darwinesque theories:

  Men, probably harking back to their caveman hunter days, prefer to respond to nature’s call alone. You don’t want a prospective enemy too close at hand when you have your, uh, guard down!

  Facilitating Conversations Outside of the Restroom

  Readers brought up two points we had never considered. Diane Larson notes that since women seem to use the restroom much more often than men,

  it’s better to have one lull in the conversation while several women go to the restroom at once. Otherwise, the table is constantly having to play catch-up because someone is always missing part of the conversation.

  And Jennifer Talarico of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, uses her group defections during double-dates to force the deserted males to bond:

  When we are in the restroom for extended amounts of time, the topic of conversation is undoubtedly the men we are with. And we know that the men back at the table are discussing us as well. Sometimes the purpose of our escape is so that the men can get to know one another, especially when we girls have been friends for a while and the guys have just recently met.

  Conspiracy Theories

  Several respondents have already suggested that the conversation regarding the abandoned males might be less than laudatory. This was very much on the minds of many of the males who wrote, including Wayland Kwock of Aiea, Hawaii:

  As to why women go to the restroom in packs…it has to do with make-up…. The alternative, that they are making fun of their dates, is just unthinkable.

  Sorry to do this, Wayland, but please meet Linda Lassman of Winnipeg, Manitoba:

  …another reason women leave together is because they often think the things men say are really stupid, but they don’t want to cause hurt feelings or arguments by saying so. Going to the restroom in groups allows them to talk about things that actually interest them, to discuss the same topics and have their opinions listened to, and to laugh at the men they’re with without worrying about how the men will feel.

  If we are indeed engaged in a war of the sexes, perhaps the paranoid musings of Ted Baxter might contain the true answer. Several readers, including Mark La Chance of Pleasanton, California, remember the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” news anchor’s answer to this Frustable:

  He believed that there was a women’s plot to take over the world, and that their secret meetings were held in the ladies’ rooms so that men wouldn’t hear. I have to admit that after my history of disastrous and humiliating relationships, the idea of gender-guerrilla warfare rings true to me.

  Sorry things haven’t been working out, Mark, but by the time you finish this discussion, you will have delved as deeply into the female psyche as is genderly possible. Perhaps you will now be able to plumb the psyches of a woman as deftly as Richard Gere’s American Gigolo. />
  And What Are They Doing in There for So Long?

  Many of the explanations mimicked the discussions above. Several women cataloged the checklist of make-up and grooming that must be undertaken before any restroom exit. But more moaned about clothing problems. Diane Larson is typical:

  I defy any man to don pantyhose, a girdle, a slip, a tight skirt and high heels and then go to the restroom in record time after squeezing into a tiny cubicle barely big enough to sit down in without your knees hitting the door.

  And one type of apparel not to buy for women with weak bladders was mentioned by Joan Cartan-Hansen: “Woe to the woman who wears a one-piece jumpsuit and practically has to do a striptease to answer’s nature’s call.”