Why We Suck

by DR. DENIS LEARY

  Women, that’s who.

  Every job has parts of it that are a giant pain in the ass—whether you carry a penis or a purse.

  The Feminist Movement raised the expectations of almost every chick in this country forty-some-odd years ago and over the last few decades women have convinced themselves that men CAN and somehow HAVE changed and WERE willing to be different and more emotionally available and eager to work side by side with them and get paid the exact same amount of money.

  No.

  We are not changing we are not more emotionally available and we are more than willing to work side by side with you and get paid the same IF you can do the job.

  Do you think any race car driver on the IndyCar circuit is in the least bit worried about Danica Patrick’s recent win leading to a flock of ladies in flame-retardant pleather jumpsuits taking over their sport?

  No.

  Danica may eventually be joined by one or three or five more girls but the numbers will stop somewhere shortly after that because:

  a. Most women do not know how to merge. And let’s face it, if merging at thirty or forty miles an hour freaks you out or makes you even the slightest bit panicky, merging at two hundred and thirty miles an hour while bouncing off other automobiles and fighting for the lead spot just ain’t gonna fly. My wife screams and slams on the brakes if a squirrel dashes out in front of her car. It takes her twelve minutes of deep breathing to get past a four-second episode of that—the first six minutes of which involve searching the rear and sideview mirrors to see if the rat with a tail might still be alive. Dale Earnhardt Jr. suddenly swerving in front of her on a banked oily curve? Two words: pulmonary embolism.

  b. Talking while driving might seem like a keen attraction to females considering getting behind a race car wheel, but once they find out that all the chatter on the headset is limited to tire updates, fuel tank leaks and loud angry screaming? Not so much. They’d rather go back to forty-five in the fast lane while discussing bikini wax jobs and Barack Obama’s teeth on the hands-free.

  c. The raw DNA facts I mentioned in the prologue of this book.

  Science has proven that women of child-bearing age have an actual biological resistance to taking any extreme risks—Elizabeth Berkley star-ring in Showgirls notwithstanding.

  Annika Sorenstam worked out like a maniac and put on ten extra pounds of muscle before trying to challenge Tiger Woods and the top male golfers in the world to a fair-play championship round of golf a few years back and what happened? She hit it long, she hit it hard, she landed on each and every green with a chance to birdie or par and then—she three- 1 putted. Or four-putted. Or five-putted. She pitter-putted her way right out of the tournament and then cried at the sight of the first microphone that popped into her face because she is—in fact—a woman.

  She could compete until the pressure got high, and putting on a PGA green? With thousands of people surrounding you and tens of millions watching on TV? It doesn’t get much higher than that. It’s what men like to call the “Eek! A mouse!” factor. Women react differently to certain things than men do. Mice, blood, gunfire—you name it. My wife is deathly afraid of mice. Me? Bats. Not baseball bats—the ones that fly. They don’t make me cry or shriek. No time for that. Too busy fleeing.

  Crying, of course, is the chief complaint men have about women in the workplace. Just ask Hillary Clinton. She was way behind in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary—until she cried. Then she gained a bunch of Empathy Points. Mostly from other woman. Not to mention Guilty Husbands Of Empathetic Women—who also voted for her because they were afraid their wives would shut down sexual access if they didn’t. Don’t laugh—I know at least three guys who voted for Hillary based on that actual situation. Shocking? Not really. I’m only surprised Hillary didn’t bawl her way through the remaining forty-eight states. As a matter of fact, if she had changed her campaign motto from Blah Blah Something Change to Vote For Me Or Your Wife Won’t Fuck You she would have had the election wrapped up at sunset on Super Tuesday. As Tip O’Neill once said—all politics is local. And for men, it doesn’t get much more local than your crotch.

  Which reminds me—every woman I have ever known seems to be utterly in an information blackout when it comes time for their period to arrive. They get bloated and angry and snippy and terse and if you ask them if they might be possibly getting their period? First they bite your head off and then they go—ohhh, maybe.

  Believe me, if blood came out the end of my penis every month? I’d have the due date nailed down to the exact goddam second and every guy I worked with would know when it was gonna happen. That’s another thing about guys—we won’t go to the doctor to have our prostate checked—can’t stand any man OR machine touching our asses—but we see the slightest beginning of a mole or a growth or even just a stray dot of lint on our penis? Right down to the cock doctor’s office. Immediately. So if blood came outta that thing? Forget it. There wouldn’t be a war for another seven centuries—unless we could all synchronize our situations. Then we’d bomb and maim and behead each other for three weeks—take ten days off to bloat, whine and moan—then compare notes about who bled how much and go right back to the maiming and the killing.

  Who Bled How Much would become a sign of whose dick was bigger, by the way.

  Which brings us to shopping, somehow.

  Why is it that everything a woman brings home was “on sale.” Shoes, coats, gloves, chairs. Anything and everything she buys. “It was supposed to cost eighteen hundred but I got it on sale for a thousand.”

  That’s how she describes a lamp.

  Men? We are the exact opposite. Nothing worth having is worth having at all unless it was the most expensive one ever made. “Look at this plasma, Bob—forty-seven thousand six hundred and ninety-nine bucks! Biggest one they make!”

  It wasn’t enough to have a pill that gave you a hard-on that arrived within half an hour and lasted almost fifteen minutes.

  Nope.

  We needed an even more expensive pill that bonerizes within seconds and can last up to almost three goddam days.

  Cialis—the onus of the trophy wife.

  I’ll bet Marla Maples filed for divorce from The Donald about eight minutes after she heard Viagra was headed to the open market.

  You have to keep a sense of humor about it all, which can be hard in this country nowadays—pun most definitely intended.

  One thing that drives men crazy is women who arrive humorless into whatever workplace it might be and then can’t understand why none of the men they work with will either flirt, laugh or co-operate with them. The answers are thus:

  1. Flirting is now considered a form of sexual harassment.

  2. Laughing means you have to have mutual respect, which is earned and not legislated or demanded in a memo.

  3. See Flirting and Laughing. 1

  When men work and hang and eat lunch and work and sweat and laugh and work with each other—as explained earlier in this book—there are several things involved: cutthroat challenges, seemingly endless competition, nicknames and a sense of bust-yer-ass for the team camaraderie. You don’t get to pick your own nickname—it’s given to you based on your performance. This seems to evade most women. They see the competition and ballbusting and direct eye contact as demeaning and sexist and male. It is. If ya don’t wanna run with the big dogs then stay on the fucking porch.

  Men have no guilt gene about being at work instead of at home with the kids—it’s the natural order of things. Nine out of ten kids tested will tell you when they fall down, when they are hungry, when they are tired, when they are just plain in a pissy mood—they want their mommies. Knowing that to be a fact—knowing that it is an actual enzyme in your system—you can’t possibly be happy not being at home with your children.

  No kids—go ahead and pick a career and chase it down like Lawrence Taylor tearing after an enemy quarterback.

  Kids? Your place is with them.

  You cannot have it both ways.


  Where did the shame in being a full-time, hands-on, always-there-when-they-need-me mom come from?

  I know single gay men who are more willing to stay home and raise kids today than half of their female friends. Which means, of course—the kids’ll be better dressed and even the boys will carry lip balm, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. This is:

  I’d have had a lot more respect for Hillary Clinton if instead of launching an eleven-thousand-page listing of All The Important Things She Did When Her Husband Was President, she just simply said—hey, I spent those eight years trying to shield my only daughter from the international media glare. I’d have stepped right up to support her if—rather than bullshitting her way through imaginary snipers in Bosnian airports and peacemaking meetings with Irish officials that were actually only sitdowns for tea (probably Woman Ends The IRA brand), she had coughed up a couple of good cookie recipes and an itemization of how she helped Chelsea get ready for her SATs.

  But no—she wanted to prove that she was more like a man than a mom and that she wasn’t just traveling the world in a jumbo private jet to satisfy her own ego—she was out there making a difference. Of course, if she had been at home doting on her husband it may have kept him from trawling for interns.

  No mention of interns in the eleven thousand pages, by the way.

  It’s hard for men to have sympathy for The Feminist Movement when one of its arbiters—Gloria Steinem—took the opportunity of supporting Hillary’s bid for White House glory to say being a black man in America was easier than being a woman because at least the black man got the vote thirty years before women did.

  Wow. Really?

  I wonder how Martin Luther King Jr. would have responded to that quote?

  Last time I looked, no one’s ever tried to assassinate Gloria Steinem because she has tits.

  It’s hard to have respect for a woman like Brenda Berkman, who went to court in 1982 to force the FDNY to place her as a member of that department even though she had failed the physical test.

  This goes right to the brunt spine of the argument—you wanna be a firefighter—you have to pass the test. Everyone does. Fat guy, skinny guy, black fat guy, yellow skinny guy—fat Muslim, fat Jew, fat Catholic—race, color, creed and sexual equipment have nothing to do with it. It’s the same as saying you wanna play professional football—you want Lawrence Taylor’s job? Strap on a sports bra, a pair of shoulder pads and a helmet and get out there to kick some ass.

  Only difference between football and firefighting is:

  a. Fire

  b. Life

  c. Death

  The fire test—among many other feats—requires that you run up seven flights of stairs while wearing and carrying over 100 pounds of equipment, pick up a 150-pound human dummy and carry it all the way back down—within a certain number of seconds. Just like you would in a real fire. Brenda couldn’t do it. She had to drag the dummy down by the feet for the last five flights. So her lawyer—the noted feminist Gloria All-red—argued that Brenda, by dragging the dummy, had actually helped save the dummy’s life because smoke rises and therefore keeping the head on the stairs the whole way down and below the smoke level was better.

  No mention of the fact that five flights of head-banging might lead to a 150-pound quadraplegic. Or the fact that even back then, the only fire victim you’re gonna find who weighs less than 200 pounds is either an infant, an anorexic or a crackhead. Unless the fire was in a modeling agency. This is America—most people you are going to rescue in a fire have THIGHS that weigh 150 pounds.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Brenda won the case and was then thoroughly dismayed at the lack of respect she received from the guys on the job. She even went so far as to say—immediately after 9/11—that looking at the names of the 343 firemen who died that day disgusted her—because it didn’t have one female name on it. That going to the funerals and hearing the words “firemen” and “fireman” and “the brothers” and “the brotherhood” used during the eulogies was “hard to take after twenty years on this job.” Not hard to take because 343 genuine American heroes had given their lives in what goes down on record as the single greatest rescue event in the history of the fire service. No. Hard to take because it wasn’t about her and her “cause.”

  Open vagina—insert head.

  I don’t know about you but if my kids or my wife or even me and my skinny, hairless Irish ass are trapped inside a burning building, the person I want running in to get us out could be green or black or a Chinese female midget on steroids—I don’t give a shit as long as they can carry us out. And I’d like us all to come out alive and not needing wheelchairs to go get the paper.

  My cousin Jerry Lucey was a kickass firefighter who gave his life in the line of duty at age thirty-eight while trying to rescue a homeless couple from a burning warehouse building in our hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, back in 1999. Jerry was a big, competitive guy who loved his job and in his obituary was called “a firefighter’s firefighter” by the men he worked side by side with, a phrase that implies the pride and trust and honor and respect his co-workers felt for him. You cannot be given those words by a judge or a legal brief or a team of spin doctors. You have to do it the old-fashioned way—you have to earn it. I believe that system works just fine.

  But then again—I’m crazy that way. I actually think you need to actually be able to DO the job if you wanna get paid the same as a man.

  And when it comes to equal rights—why are female reporters allowed to roam through men’s locker rooms, while the guys are naked and/or toweling off? But guys don’t have the same right when it comes to the locker room the girls are in. Hmmm.

  Double standard much?

  There was a case in Boston recently where a group of male FBI agents cracking a case brought in a whipsmart female D.A. and made her a part of their team. She led them into court and argued a brilliant angle that not only won the day, it apparently almost single-handedly guaranteed a conviction. When they left the courtroom, one of the guys was so happy about the job she did, he grabbed her from behind around the head and gave her a noogie. Now—amongst men, giving a guy a noogie is considered one of the ultimate signs of respect. In fact, if you were gonna chart out what various physical signs between men actually mean, it would break down like this:

  The history of The Noogie and its use by men goes back all the way from that courtroom scene through the Three Stooges and every dad and his son and big brothers and little brothers and Little League coaches and probably even Jesus and certain Apostles (odds being firmly against Judas).

  The female D.A. should have considered it the ultimate equal rights tribute. But instead?

  She filed a sexual harassment suit.

  Open vagina—insert noogie.

  Once the suit was filed the three FBI agents—fearing the politically correct era we all slog along in—refused to acknowledge that there was a noogie when they were questioned because they knew by the D.A.’s response when she was given the noogie that she didn’t understand the depth and breadth of meaning the noogie brought to the situation.

  Noogies aren’t politically correct.

  This is the era we live in.

  No noogies.

  Next thing you know—you give one to your kid, it’ll be called child abuse.

  We live in a country where the fireman coming to save you might be a firewoman who may actually do more damage while trying to pull you out of the fire than if she had never shown up at all.

  We live in a country where Don Imus calls the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of nappy-headed ho’s and gets chastized by former gangbanger and gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, who—when someone compared his lyrics to Imus’s statement—said “We ain’t no old ass white man sittin’ on top a MSNBC—some punk—we talkin’ ’bout other ho’s—ho’s that’s in the ’hood that ain’t doin’ shit, that’s tryna get a nigga for his money—these are two separate things.”

 
We live in a country in which, when Barack Obama calls some working-class voters in Pennsylvania so bitter and pissed off by the lack of help from their own government that they cling to guns and religion and a hatred of immigrants as a way to vent their frustration, those very same bitter, pissed-off voters who cling to guns and religion and a hatred of immigrants vent their frustration by voting for Hillary Clinton, who was BORN in that part of Pennsylvania and knows that what Obama said is true but decides to just jump on the Bullshit Ourselves In Spite Of Ourselves Joytrain and lacerate Obama for being “elitist.”

  So that’s what they call telling the truth now—elitism.