Manslations (6 page)

And second, Ken has no genitals. It's just smooth down there. Who needs that?

Myth: Men Are Like Dogs
Fact: They Really Are

 


Dogs Cannot Read Your Thoughts. When you're mad at your dog, he has no idea why. He just knows you're mad because you're using your “bad doggie” voice. Exact same thing with us. The difference with us is that you can tell us why you're upset. You know, if you wanted to throw us a bone. (A figurative one for men. Dogs would prefer the actual thing.)


 


 


Dogs Cannot Direct Their Attention. If there's a squirrel in your yard, the dog is going to go nuts. What are you going to do, tell him to be reasonable? It's the same thing with men and, say, cleavage. If it's around, we can't help but pay attention to it.
^*


 


 


Dogs Pay an Inordinate Amount of Attention to Their Own Crotches and to the Crotches of Others. Don't know what this one is about, but hey, just be grateful we're not also obsessed with eating our own poop.


 

Men and women seem to have some very different attitudes, training, and behaviors about feelings. There are several misconceptions that I've heard from many women. Let's go through a few of the major ones.

FACT: Men are afraid when you ask them to talk about their feelings—because they have no idea what you want them to be feeling in that moment.

I'm not saying men don't have feelings. I'm sure we must. But if you ask me, “What are you feeling right now?”— frankly, I'm stumped. Not because there was nothing going on with me just then, but because I know that if I say, “I was just…thinking that if I try XYZ strategy in my new video game, I could get past that really hard place where the big alien keeps smooshing me,” I'm going to be in big, big trouble.

Here's what it is. Men don't usually spend much time paying attention to how we're feeling unless we're really angry, really scared, or really hungry. And we know that women do pay attention to that kind of thing. You know exactly how you're feeling. We're afraid that you not only know how
you
are feeling, but you probably know how
we
are feeling—and we're going to get it wrong, and you're going to get mad.

If you want to know how a man is feeling, understand that you are doing the equivalent of asking your dog if he wants to go skiing. He'll know you want some damn thing from him, but for the life of him, he won't know what it is. He'll
want
to know what it is. Badly. But since he's only too aware that he doesn't understand what you want, he's just trying to come up with anything that might keep you from getting mad. Because you have access to all the treats he likes.

This brings us to a “companion myth”:

FACT: Men are more in touch with their feelings than women are.

What?
Men?
More in touch with their feelings than women—the black-belt feelings experts? Yes. Yes, I believe that men are far less capable of denying their emotions than women are. Men get a bum rap about their emotions.

Women seem to have fallen under the impression that men aren't in touch with their feelings, because we are so unwilling to talk about them. You couldn't be more wrong.

Stay with me. Given that we are extremely incapable of discussing our feelings, how can I say that men are 100 percent in touch with them?

Here's how. Even when we can't talk about what we're feeling, even when we say the exact opposite of what we're feeling, even when we haven't the slightest idea what we are feeling, men are always
behaving
in strict accordance with what we're feeling. (Ahem. Golden Rule.
Again.)
Remember that dog you were so good at imagining? It's like that. We can't help it.

What this means to you, the common man-dater, is that even though he might not be able to talk to you about his feelings, you'll always be able to see what they are.

FACT: Men are mostly okay with how often we talk about our feelings. Women certainly do seem to want us to do it more, though.

I don't know what this one is all about. Most men see little reason to talk about their feelings, even if they were to spend time thinking about them.

Sure, we don't talk about them. But that only means that we don't think about feelings consciously. Remember, men secretly think they might be called upon at any moment to stop the Nazis from finding the Lost Ark of the Covenant and ruling the world. How would thinking about our feelings help us in that situation? There's a giant boulder rolling after us; a guy's saying, “Throw me the idol, I throw you the wheep.” How is it going to help us to know that we're feeling insecure and vulnerable right then?

But why can't you just tell us the truth about whatever you're really feeling?

…I hear you saying, in fancy ladyscript.

Two reasons:

He doesn't really know or care about the truth, and


You don't want the truth.

When you ask what's on a man's mind, he knows that there are only a couple of acceptable answers. And he had better be thinking one of them. He might be 100 percent crazy about you and
still
be thinking about his taxes while he's out on a date with you. He knows he can't say
that.

My advice? Stop asking for this one. Be honest for a second—most often when a woman wants to know what a man is thinking or feeling, she's fishing for a compliment, right? If you want a compliment, just ask him for one directly. And don't be afraid to tell us what kind of compliment, either. (“You there. Isn't my new haircut the kind of thing that a boyfriend might want to say looks really cute? It's exactly that kind of thing, isn't it?”) My girlfriend does this all the time, and it works like a dream. Trust me, he'll be only too thrilled to spear the holy hell out of the exact elk that you need speared. Then everybody's happy, and nobody has to get yelled at.

FACT: If a man doesn't cry, it means that he is not experiencing an emergency situation.

Okay, imagine you're at your job, and one of the women who works with you starts crying right in the middle of the salmon cannery assembly line (hey, I don't know where you work). What would happen? Mmm, nothing much. Everyone would wonder what was wrong, and someone would probably ask her, and it would work itself out in a matter of minutes.

Okay, now imagine one of the men you work with just bursting into tears at work. What would happen? The whole place would go nuts. Everyone would think that something must really be wrong, or else Balthazar (I don't know who you work with, either) wouldn't be crying in public. And everyone would talk about it for years.

For whatever reason, we just don't get to cry in front of people very often. And we don't really want to. Look, until men can find some big upside to crying (i.e., what it
does
), we're not going to do it very often. Personally, unless I've just been dumped (or seen the last twenty minutes of
The Iron Giant
), it just doesn't come up.

It's the “men who don't cry, don't feel” myth that leads some women to this next one:

FACT: We most certainly do, but it might not look like you expect it to.

A woman wrote to me once wondering if men are incapable of feeling brokenhearted after a breakup. This came up because she heard that her ex was out trying to get laid only days after they had split up. She was understandably hurt that he was already looking for someone else, but I can tell you that there's no reason to think that guy wasn't absolutely crushed. But you're never, never going to see it.

First of all, we've already talked about crying. So you're not likely to see any visible signs that he's an emotional wreck. Not in public. Not unless something really heavy just rolled over his toes.

But what about the “getting laid” part? How could he possibly be ready to be with another woman already? Well, that's the problem right there—you think he needs to get “ready” to be with another woman. I assure you, he's been “ready” since he was, oh, twelve years old. Whatever woman he can corral into his bed has nothing to do with his vulnerable emotional state. The fact is, he is probably out looking to get laid to
avoid
vulnerability.

I know, I know. Weird and strange, right? Well, no worries. That's what the next chapter is all about.

See? As promised, we've cracked open a ton of the myths about men, and we didn't even have to pretend that the sun was the chariot of Apollo or anything.

Next, we'll tackle myths, misunderstandings, and foolishness about a topic so private, so smoking hot-t-t, so potentially embarrassing, that it deserves its very own chapter. I give you…

__________________

CHAPTER 3

the notorious s.e.x., or abandon
hope all ye who enter here

M
any of the myths that women seem to believe about men revolve around the fundamental differences in how the two genders experience sex. (Quick review: The two genders are “men” and “women.” Just making sure that you didn't get lost in all this relationship jargon.) So let's talk about that. Sex, I mean. Ahem… let's do that. Er… is it warm in here?

Okay, clearly I'm a little uncomfortable with the subject, as I am from Connecticut, where we pretend that such things never happen, lest we blush so hard we have to be taken to the emergency room. So you can only imagine how embarrassed I am to write about… ahem… sex.

And clearly I'm not the only one who's a little nervous about this subject. Take, for example, the time-honored sex lesson, wherein some adult coughs and blushes his or her way through a thirty-second explanation of where babies come from. If you ever had any doubt about our society's discomfort with the idea of sex, think about the image they chose:

Uh… wha? Even granting the premise that children should be talking about animal sex at all, um, could we have come up with two animals with
less
obvious genitalia? I'm in my late thirties, and I haven't the slightest notion of what's going on below the belt for either species.