Guys Acting Macho

Guys start acting macho at an early age. Any parent will tell you that girl babies will generally display a wide-eyed curiousity about the world, whereas guy babies will generally try to destroy it. Girl toddlers will work hard to communicate with and imitate the behaviour of other family members; but guy toddlers will imagine that they are the large meat-eating dinosaurs and stomp around the house in their disposable diapers, trying to bite the dog.

Of course I am talking about very young guys here. As guys grow older and produce more testosterone, they become less mature. This is especially true when they're in control of automobiles. One morning I was driving in Miami on Interstate 95, which should have a sign that says:

In the left lane, one behind the other, were two well-dressed middle-aged men, both driving luxury telephone-equipped automobiles. They both looked like responsible business executives, probably named Roger, with good jobs and nice families and male-pattern baldness, the kind of guys whose most violent physical activity, on an average day, is stapling.

They were driving normally, except that the guy in front, Roger One, was thoughtlessly going only about sixty-five miles an hour, which in Miami is the speed limit normally observed inside car washes. So Roger Two pulled up behind until the two cars were approximately one electron apart, and honked his horn. Of course Roger One was not about to stand for that. You let a guy honk at you, and you are basically admitting that he has a bigger stapler. So Roger One stomped on his brakes, forcing Roger Two to swerve onto the shoulder, where, showing amazing presence of mind in an emergency, he was able to make obscene gestures with both hands.

At this point both Rogers accelerated to approximately 147 miles per hour and began weaving violently from lane to lane through dense rush-hour traffic, each risking numerous lives in an effort to get in front of the other, screaming and getting spit all over their walnut dashboards. I quickly lost sight of them, but I bet neither one backed down. Their coworkers probably wondered what happened to them. "Where the heck is Roger?" they probably said later that morning, unaware that, even as they spoke, the dueling Rogers, still only inches apart, were approaching the Canadian border.

This is not unusual guy behaviour. One time in a Washington, D.C., traffic jam I saw two guys, also driving nice cars, reach a point where their cars were suppposed to merge. But neither one would yield, so they very slowly - we are talking maybe one mile per hour - drove into each other. It was the world's most avoidable accident, but these guys had no choice. Testosterone made them crash into each other, just as, in the animal kingdom, testosterone controls the behaviour of male elks, who, instead of simply flipping a coin, will bang their heads against each other for hours to see who gets to mate with the female elk, who is on the sidelines, filing her nails and wondering how she ever got hooked up with such a moron species, until eventually she gets bored and wanders off to bed. Meanwhile the guy elks keep banging their heads into each other until one of them finally "wins," although at this point his brain which was not exactly a steel trap to begin with, is so badly damaged that, in his confusion, he will mate with the first object he encounters, including shrubbery.

This is of course the great irony of guy behaviour: Women never seem to be impressed by it. You rarely hear women say thing like, "Norm, when that vending machine failed to give you a Three Musketeers bar and you punched it so hard that you broke your hand and we had to go to the hospital instead of to my best friend's daughter's wedding, I became so filled with lust for you that I nearly tore off all my clothes right there in the emergency room." No, women are far more likely to say: "Norm, you have the brains of an Odor Eater."

I believe that, in general, women are saner than men.

For example: If you see people who have paid good money to stand in an outdoor stadium on a freezing December day wearing nothing on the upper halves of their bodies except paint, those people will be male.

Without males, there would be no such sport as professional lawn mower racing.

Also, there would be a 100 percent decline in the annual number of deaths related to efforts to shoot beer cans off of heads.

There would be no such words as "wedgie" and "noogie."

Also, if women were in charge of all the world's nations there would be -- I sincerely believe this -- virtually no military conflicts, and when there were a military conflict, everybody involved would feel just awful and there would soon be a high-level exchange of thoughtful notes written on greeting cards with flowers on the front, followed by a Peace Luncheon (which would be salads, with the dressing on the side).

So I sincerely believe that women are wiser than men, with the exception of one key area, and that area is: clothing sizes. In this particular area, women are insane.

When a man shops for clothes, his primary objective -- follow me closely here -- is to purchase clothes that fit on his particular body. A man will try on a pair of pants, and if those pants are too small, he'll try on a larger pair, and when he finds a pair that fits, he buys them. Most men do not spend a lot of time fretting about the size of their pants. Many men wear jeans with the size printed right on the back label, so that if you're standing behind a man in a supermarket line, you can read his waist and inseam size. A man could have, say, a 52-inch waist and a 30-inch inseam, and his label will proudly display this information, which is basically the same thing as having a sign that says: "Howdy! My butt is the size of a Federal Express truck!"

The situation is very different with women. When a woman shops for clothes, her primary objective is NOT to find clothes that fit her particular body. She would like for that to be the case, but her primary objective is to purchase clothes that are the size she wore when she was 19 years old. This will be some arbitrary number such as "8" or "10." Don't ask me "8" or "10" of what; that question has baffled scientists for centuries. All I know is that if a woman was a size 8 at age 19, she wants to be a size 8 now, and if a size 8 outfit does not fit her, she will not move on to a larger size: She can't! Her size is 8, dammit! So she will keep trying on size 8 items, and unless they start fitting her, she will become extremely unhappy. She may take this unhappiness out on her husband, who is waiting patiently in the mall, perhaps browsing in the Sharper Image store, trying to think of how he could justify purchasing a pair of night-vision binoculars.

"Hi!" he'll say, when his wife finds him. "You know how sometimes the electricity goes out at night and . . ."

"Am I fat?" she'll ask, cutting him off.

This is a very bad situation for the man, because if he answers "yes," she'll be angry because he's saying that she's fat, and if he answers "no," she'll be angry because HE'S OBVIOUSLY LYING BECAUSE NONE OF THE SIZE 8's FIT HER. There is no escape for the husband. I think a lot of unexplained disappearances occur because guys in malls see their wives unsuccessfully trying on outfits, and they realize their lives will be easier if, before their wives come out and demand to know whether they're fat, the guys just run off and join a UFO cult.

The other day my wife, Michelle, was in a terrific mood, and you know why? Because she had successfully put on a size 6 outfit. She said this made her feel wonderful. She said, and this is a direct quote: "I wouldn't care if these pants were this big (here she held her arms far apart) as long as they have a '6' on them."

Here's how you could get rich: Start a women's clothing store called "SIZE 2," in which all garments, including those that were originally intended to be restaurant awnings, had labels with the words "SIZE 2." I bet you'd sell clothes like crazy. You'd probably get rich, and you could retire, maybe take up some philanthropic activity to benefit humanity. I'm thinking here of professional lawn mower racing.

Grayewolfe
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