by Dave Barry
Ha-ha! Of course that is not what happened. What happened was, the Women’s Emergency Relationship Support Network signal went off—BWOOP! BWOOP! BWOOP!—and the other women sportswriters immediately ceased sportswriting so they could devote their full analytical and reportorial and Googling skills to the many questions raised by the impending date. Some concerned the man: Exactly who was he? How old? What did he do? What were his prior relationships? Was he cute? Did he have any unmarried friends? Were they cute?
Then there were the questions for Bernice, the critical one being: What should she wear? Team Bernice settled on a skirt, but then there was the issue of length. It couldn’t be too short, because then Bernice would appear to be trying too hard. But it couldn’t be too long, because then she would appear to be a nun.
After much discussion, coaching, and preparation, Bernice was finally ready to go on her date. But she didn’t really go alone. She was accompanied, in spirit, by my wife and the rest of the team of women sportswriters. In a way, Bernice was accompanied by all the other women who have ever existed, surrounding her in an invisible scented cloud of supportive womanity, rooting for her to find a suitable mate and settle down and replicate and nurture her DNA.
Now consider the guy. Let’s call him The Dandelion. I don’t know him, but I guarantee he did not have a team of guys behind him. And I doubt he did much preparing. Probably fifteen minutes before the lunch his BlackBerry beeped, and he thought: “Whoa! I have a date!” Then he tried to remember if he was wearing the underwear without the ketchup stains.
When Bernice and The Dandelion met for lunch, they did not have the same goals. Bernice may have told herself that it was just lunch, but on some level, she was evaluating The Dandelion’s suitability as a lifetime partner featuring reliability, loyalty, kindness, etc. Whereas The Dandelion, not to put too fine a point on it, was evaluating her gazombas, and probably the gazombas of every other woman in the restaurant.
Go ahead, call him a pig. But remember that without male pigs, there would be nobody to mate with female pigs, at least outside of West Virginia. My point is that The Dandelion, like Bernice, was simply doing what he was genetically programmed to do.
Naturally the date didn’t work out. It’s amazing that any date involving a human male and a human female ever works out. Whatever way the human race came into existence—whether it was through divine creation, or intelligent design, or Darwinian evolution—crack was definitely involved. Our DNA is the Windows Vista of genetic code: The design is faulty, and it doesn’t seem fair to be constantly blaming only one gender for this. Remember that millions of us men manage to overcome our DNA, get married, settle down, and live happily ever after with our wives and never even think about mating with another woman such as—to pick a name at random—Scarlett Johansson.
But getting back to Bernice, and all the other women who’ve had trouble finding a man: Is there any hope for them? Of course there is! If you’re one of these women, remember this: There are literally billions of men on the planet, and the statistical probability is extremely high that one of these men is exactly the right guy for you. So if you’re patient, and you keep a positive mental attitude, and you don’t give up hope, the odds are very good that you will never meet this guy, because he probably lives in some place like Uzbekistan. So you might want to consider Plan B, which is becoming a nun, assuming you’re OK with the longer skirt.
If You Will Just Shut Up, I Can Explain
A Man Answers Questions from Women
Recently, I started spinning with my wife.
No, you pervert; spinning is a kind of exercise. You go into an enclosed space with other people and mount stationary bicycles and pedal furiously to oldies music until the atmosphere is 93 percent b.o. fumes and you feel as if shrews are gnawing your lungs, but you cannot stop because a spinning instructor with mutant pedaling powers is hectoring you to pedal faster until the end of the song, after which ANOTHER song starts and you must pedal more. This is when you discover how long certain songs really are. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” for example, is longer than dental school.
I am the only man in the spinning class. The rest of the spinners are women, including the instructor, a terrifyingly fit personal trainer named Erica, who could defeat you in hand-to-hand combat using only her earlobes. If we ever decide to get serious about forcing captured terrorists to talk, she is the person to do it.
ERICA (STARTING SONG): Now we’re going to pedal to this.
TERRORIST: Not “American Pie”! Please! Waterboard me!
Anyway, when the spinning class is over, the women often talk, and as you might expect, the topic they discuss most often is the technical features of their cell phones.
Seriously, their favorite topic is relationships, defined as: What Is Wrong with Men. I have been a man for my entire adult life, and I have spent much time in male-only groups, and I can state for a fact that women think men are a lot more interesting, as a conversation topic, than men think women are. Sure, men will talk about women, but generally these conversations are brief and factual:FIRST MAN: Did you see that?
SECOND MAN: Yeah.
FIRST MAN: Whoa.
SECOND MAN: Yeah.
FIRST MAN: So how do you like your new phone?
Sometimes, if a man is in a relationship and he’s talking with a really close male friend, the conversation will get a little deeper:FIRST MAN: Tracey’s really pissed off at me.
SECOND MAN: Why?
FIRST MAN: I don’t know.
SECOND MAN: That sucks.
FIRST MAN: Yeah.
SECOND MAN: So how do you like your new phone?
But this kind of probing, soul-baring discussion about women is rare for men. Whereas women, including women who hardly know each other, can talk for hours about men without getting bored. They find us fascinating and mysterious. They want to understand us. This is baffling, because men are not complicated and generally state their views clearly when asked, especially if you compare them to women.
Take gifts. If you ask a mother what she wants for Mother’s Day, she’ll say, “Oh, you don’t have to get me anything.” This is of course a lie, as most men have learned, usually painfully. If you were stupid enough to actually give this woman nothing for Mother’s Day, she would be deeply hurt. Because when she says you don’t have to give her anything, what she means is that she doesn’t want to have to tell you to give her something; she wants you to spontaneously, on your own, without prodding, select some thoughtful and appropriate and utterly useless gift that shows how much you appreciate her and how much you think about her on Mother’s Day. She wants a fuss.
Whereas when a man says he doesn’t want anything for Father’s Day, he means—pay close attention—that he doesn’t want anything for Father’s Day. He has already received too many Father’s Day gifts that he will never use. He views Father’s Day as a load of crap dumped upon men by the restaurant and greeting-card industries, working in collaboration with women. He would be thrilled if his family celebrated Father’s Day by going to a restaurant without him, leaving him on the sofa, snoring to the soothing sounds of televised professional golf.
But when men say they don’t want anything for Father’s Day, women choose not to believe them. Women love Father’s Day, because it involves cards and gifts and family get-togethers and various other fuss-tivities that men generally dislike and women generally love. This is the real reason why we celebrate Father’s Day, not to mention birthdays and anniversaries, which men would not even pretend to care about if women did not make them.
(I realize I am making some very broad generalizations here. Deal with it.)
Another example is weddings. When two young people become engaged, the bride-to-be always tells the groom-to-be that she really truly wants him to be an equal partner in the wedding planning, because the wedding is for both of them, not just her. This is of course another lie. What she means is that she wants him to agree enthusiastically with the we
dding plans she will make in collaboration with her mom, her friends, her wedding planner, her caterer, her florist, and her 4,538-page, seventeen-pound issue of Modern Bride. If the groom-to-be’s views were actually considered, the wedding would be a far more relaxed affair, possibly involving go-carts. Or it might not happen at all, since many grooms-to-be, when they see their fiancée mutate into a cross between Martha Stewart and George Patton, begin to wonder if it might be a good idea to just put the whole thing on ice for a decade or two.
Not that anyone asks them.
My point is that we men are not mysterious; there is no need for women to find us baffling. In hopes of ending this confusion, I recently conducted a survey of women whom I selected on the scientific basis of being either (1) friends of my wife, or (2) on the Internet. I asked these women to submit the questions that bothered them most about men. I got many, many responses, the gist of which is neatly summarized by my wife’s friend Amy, who asked: “Do men realize how unfathomably stupid women think they are; and, if so, why don’t they do anything about it?”
Note that this question has a somewhat negative tone. This was typical. Not one woman asked a question that implied men might have any positive qualities. They did not ask: “How can men be so darned rational all the time?” Or: “What can men teach women about somehow managing to get through life with fewer than sixty pairs of shoes?”
Anyway, my hope is that, by giving simple, straightforward answers to these women’s questions using the Q and A format, I can clear up some of the misunderstandings women have about men. I’ll begin with a question that many of the women asked, a question that seems to trouble women in general more than the danger of an Earth-asteroid collision:Q. Why don’t men put the toilet seat back down after they pee?
A. Because they care. Human males are descended from prehistoric tribal warriors who had to defend the women and children in their tribe from vicious savage enemy tribes who could attack at any time without warning to rape and pillage and plunder. So these early males had to be constantly vigilant. They had to pee standing up with their heads on a swivel. They could not afford to waste precious seconds aiming the pee stream or putting down the toilet seat, because the enemy might choose just that moment of distraction to strike and perform acts of vicious savage plundering on the women and children. That was a risk these brave and courageous and manly warriors of long ago were simply unwilling to take. This same protective instinct is still deeply ingrained in men today, not that we expect any thanks.
Q. But prehistoric tribes didn’t even HAVE toilet seats!
A. Exactly.
Q. Why don’t men listen when we talk? When we want to share our feelings with you, to talk about things that are important to BOTH of us—our children, our careers, our relationships; or when we simply share the details of a trying day, to get a little sympathy—why is it that you barely even bother to hide your lack of interest? How can you care more about some sports event on TV, or some unimportant message on your cell phone, than the feelings of the person who cares most about you, and is always blah blah blah? Why is it always our responsibility to worry about blah and blah, not to mention blah, while you are unable to spend even two minutes thinking about blah? Blah blah blah blah blah. Hello? Did you hear anything I just said?
A. What?
Q. WHY DON’T MEN LISTEN TO WOMEN?
A. They do listen. But they listen for specific information. Men are problem-solvers. They are doers. When you talk to them, they are listening to determine (a) what the problem is, and (b) what they need to do about it, so that they can (c) resume watching ESPN. When they have the information they need, they stop listening.
In the early phases of your relationship with a man, he listens to you a lot, because he is trying to solve a very important problem, namely, getting you to have sex with him. No matter what you talk about—your work, your friends, the fruit flies of the Ryukyu Islands—the man will pay close attention, because you might give him a clue indicating how he can get you to become naked.
Once he has solved this problem, he becomes more selective in his listening. He will be most alert when you talk about a specific, clearly defined problem, because he can then use his reasoning skills to come up with a solution. For example, if you tell him that the car motor is making a funny noise, he will listen intently, then determine what he needs to do, namely, wait for a few days, in case it goes away.
But when it comes to feelings, the man is in trouble. Scientists using brain probes have determined that the average man has approximately one feeling per hour, versus 850 for the average woman. So the man is not as comfortable with feelings as you are. When you pour out your feelings to him, he tries to figure out what the specific problem is so he can take action. But he quickly becomes confused, because there doesn’t seem to be a problem; he doesn’t understand what you want him to do. If you tell him you don’t want him to do anything, that you just want him to listen to you and to share his feelings in return, you only make it worse, because at any given moment he has just the one feeling, and it’s usually something along the lines of “My balls itch.”
Eventually the man concludes that for some reason you periodically have a massive internal buildup of feelings that must be released in the direction of another human being. He adopts a strategy of monitoring these releases for key words or phrases indicating a problem that he might have to do something about, such as “fire,” “internal bleeding,” or “district attorney.” Otherwise he’s just hunkered down, waiting for the feelingstorm to blow over, maybe sneaking a peek at the sports highlights so his time is not completely wasted.
Q. But doesn’t it occur to men that, because these feelings are important to somebody he cares about, they should also be important to HIM?
A. What?
Q. Never mind. Why do men feel that they must know what’s on every TV channel all the time?
A. Back in prehistoric times, when men had to protect their loved ones by peeing standing up, they also were responsible for feeding their families by hunting. This meant they had to be constantly scanning the environment, always searching for prey.
Q. So you’re saying that when men change channels, they’re looking for prey?
A. No, breasts.
Q. Why ARE men so obsessed with breasts?
A. In many species, males and females use visual cues to attract each other for the purpose of facilitating reproduction, which is necessary to avoid extinction. For example, the male peacock drags around an enormous tail, which he displays to the female peacock, who responds: “Whoa! That is some large tail you have! Let’s engage in reproductive activity in the form of getting it on!”
Yes, she is treating the male as a sex object. But this does not bother him. He does not think, “Why is she so obsessed with my tail? It’s just feathers, for God’s sake. She can’t even make eye contact with me!” Why doesn’t he think this? Because his brain is the size of a Cheerio. But also because he knows that unless the female becomes attracted to him, there will be no reproduction, and if there is no reproduction, then peacocks will become extinct. So he is happy to display this important visual cue to the opposite gender.
Q. Are you suggesting that women should go around displaying their breasts to males?
A. I was talking about peacocks. But hey, sure.
Q. Why do men refuse to read instructions?
A. As we have established, men have a lot on their plate, what with protecting their loved ones, preventing the extinction of humanity, etc. When a man purchases a necessary appliance such as a TV with a flat screen the size of a squash court, he cannot afford to fritter away valuable minutes reading the owner’s manual, especially when the first seventeen pages consist of statements like: WARNING: Do not test the electrical socket by sticking your tongue into it.
A man does not need instructions written by and for idiots. A man already knows, based on extensive experience in the field of being male, that the way to handle an appliance is to plug a
ll the plugs into the holes that look to be about the right size or color, then turn everything on and see what happens. This is the system I use, and it has proved to be 100 percent effective roughly 65 percent of the time.
Granted, sometimes I have to make some adjustments. Two years ago I got a high-definition TV, and after I set it up, my wife (a woman) complained that the picture did not look like high definition to her. So I made some adjustments in the form of explaining patiently to her that she was incorrect, because it was a high-definition TV, and therefore, by definition, the picture she was seeing on it was in high definition.
For months, every time my wife watched television, she told me that the picture didn’t look like high definition to her, and I had no choice but to roll my eyes in a masculine fashion to indicate that she was getting in over her technological head. Then, after we’d had the TV for about a year, she decided—you know how women get these crazy ideas—to look at the manual. She removed the plastic sealing and began reading, and on page 28, somewhere after the warning about not using the TV as a life raft, she found a section about “inputs,” and she changed something, and there was a dramatic improvement in the quality of the picture. I argued that this could be coincidence—that maybe at that exact moment, the TV networks had decided to change from high definition to even higher definition. But my wife was sure it was because of what she had read in the manual. She even tried to show me the manual, but of course I did not look directly at it, because of the danger that my penis would fall off.