Last Friday I wrote about a certain … well, even now I can barely discuss the traumatizing affair. Read the piece if you’re interested. (Fair warning: the word “lubricant” makes a disturbing appearance.)
By way of commenting on that post, many women wrote in to observe that men have no right complaining about anything bodily, since they’re not women.
“I do not feel one bit sorry for you,” wrote reader Judy. “Women have much worse to go through and more often.”
“When he whips out a set of metal prongs [for a medical procedure] …” wrote one scary reader, “you’ll get some sympathy from the women readers. But not before.”
And so on.
So, in order to show just how much I do understand the plight of women, here are but ten reasons for which I understand it’s better to be a man than a woman:
The peeing thing. This, of course, is the classic discrepancy. I once saw a drunk guy, looking for all the world like he was just standing on the street enjoying the night air, pee into the open window of a parked car. Talk about convenient! I once saw another drunk guy, in attendance at the opening night of an extremely swanky nightclub, pee into a potted palm tree. Those two instances alone prove that I hang around too many drunks. But more to the point: it’s unlikely that a woman could pee through the window of a parked car and have so few people notice. And a woman peeing into a potted plant in one of its lounge areas would instantly turn any establishment from swanky to skanky. Totally unfair.
Women have to live some five years longer than men. So unfair. At fifty-one, I’m already practically packing for the Big Check-Out. Every day something else on my body starts aching in some new weird way, or I find a new place from which unnatural hair is sprouting. Why drag life out? Yet women bravely do. Poor things.
Women have babies. Apparently having a baby is so anguishing it’s a mystery the human race has survived at all. In fact, I think the reason men die sooner than women is from the sheer guilt of being and then causing babies. Whenever I try to imagine myself pregnant, I wonder what’s wrong with me and make an appointment to see a shrink. But there’s no two ways about it: it’s better to be in the waiting room, laughing and handing out cigars, than it is to be in the delivery room, screaming and pounding on the head of an obstetrician.
Women make less money. Men feel truly bad about this obvious wrongness. And that is why, all across the country, men have done everything they can to wreck the economy. If women aren’t going to make as much money as men, then, by God, it’s only fair that men start making less, too. I, for one, applaud Wall Street for leveling the playing field as they have.
Women have to wear make-up. I can barely use a pencil to write on paper without accidentally jabbing it into my eyeball. How women use pencils to purposefully draw on their eyes is beyond fathoming. Four seconds into putting on lipstick, I’d look like I’d been shot in the face with a red paintball ball. My fake eyelashes would end up attached to my forehead. I don’t know how women do it. I do know why they do it, though: they want to show off to men what freakish hand-eye coordination they possess. Fair enough.
Women have to groom generally. The ultimate injustice. When I want to get serious about grooming, I duct-tape a Shell No-Pest Strip onto my chest. Women, though, aren’t done grooming until there’s no Kleenex or toilet paper left in the entire house. It’s just wrong.
Women aren’t as tall. If women could see the sorts of things men routinely hide on the top shelves, they’d wish they were short again. Some things shouldn’t change.
Women have to listen to men’s jokes. Again: men feel terrible about this gross injustice. But again, what can we do? It’s in our jeans genes to find funny just about anything to which we attach the sound, “honk! honk!” And for the life of us, we cannot understand why women don’t find funny the stuff we do. It’s like we’re looking at two different Will Ferrells. We would never let on that we’re aware of it, but it greatly comforts us to know that, late at night, our wives and girlfriends sneak out into the living room, put on an Austin Powers movie, and crack up while silently mouthing the words, “Yeah, baby, yeah!” I’m totally sure that happens.
Women have to go clothes shopping. Everyone knows that it’s more fun to have thistles jammed up your nose than it is to go clothes shopping. And yet women bravely persist in that most odious of endeavors, selflessly doing whatever it takes to get the job done. And thank God they do! Without women, men would wear nothing but a belt with a dish rag or two hanging off it. And that would be for special occasions, like company parties and weddings. I, to site just one example, pretty much live naked. My attitude is that if the neighbors don’t want to be traumatized, they shouldn’t look. My neighbors’ attitude, however, is to obnoxiously scream and call the police. My wife’s attitude is to scream and close the curtains. All of which combines, I think, to affirm the larger and more important point, which is that emotions are bad.
Well, that’s it for now. Today’s a special day: my wife is coming from her job to have lunch at home! So I have to go tape on a new No-Pest Strip. It’s the least I can do.
Related post o’ mine: Top 10 Tips for Becoming a Better Husband.
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