Separating the men from the boys

The Bluffer’s Guide is a justly famous series of thin books containing facts disguised as flippant observations. One of them is Antony Mason’s The Bluffer’s Guide to Men, which is hilarious and filled with things you ought to know about the male species.

The key to understanding men, according to this book, is to remember that men devote their lives to avoiding failure. You may call this self-deception, but men seem to be wired to believe they’re a success in everything they do. The feminists have a brisk answer to this: a popular bumper sticker that reads: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.”

But since this book is about men, let’s steer it back in that direction. Where lies the difference between the sexes? Not just in brawn, obviously, but, as this book asserts, also in the brains department. “Men have greater spatial aptitudes: originally necessary for following bison over the grasslands, today evident in better map-reading skills and sense of orientation. In laboratory studies, men score over women in tests involving mazes and perspective — but then, so do rats.”

And even if they don’t want to, boys grow up to be men. One of the stages in this process is called “Boys will be boys.” You know how it is: boys in nursery and playground play rough-house and high-energy games while the girls play quietly with a toy in front of them. “In one test arranged by sociologists, girls and boys were offered dolls to play with. The girls cuddled and talked to the dolls: the boys took their clothes off.”

After this stage comes teenage life, the only stage when male teenagers try to understand the females. After that, the teenage boy will be teased (by other males, by females as well), taunted (by females) and possibly rejected, too.

Next comes the middle-aged man, whose sexual insecurity takes the form of flirting with secretaries and stewardesses. The law of gravity is taking its toll: the face sags, the belly sags, everything begins to sag. “On the plus side, he is probably better off than ever, more self-assured, more confident, better at sex, and often, as a result, quite unbearable.”

In the 1930s, the diarist Elizabeth Delafield noted the marked differences between the sexes: “The male tends to procrastinate everything in the world except sitting down to a meal and going up to bed.” I don’t know if my friend Dr. Margie Holmes will agree, but this book claims that men think of sex every six minutes. So that is around 10 times in an hour!

There are also observations about equipment (“not for nothing are [the testicles] called the male weak spot, conveniently located for kicking or kneeling. They represent a major design fault, or evidence that God is a woman.” And since this is a family newspaper we will stop there, and move on to… feelings!

We all know that men are brought up to deny feelings and to bury them somewhere deep inside themselves. Parents train them to be stoic like the ancient Greeks. But such repression or sublimation is dangerous to one’s mental health. “The upshot (of this) is that men are more likely than women to suffer depression and have a 400 percent higher suicide rate (in the West, anyway).”

The armor for this is pride. Men like to strut about and be proud of themselves. They admire women with ideas — which means a woman who shares the man’s ideas. Overheard from a man, expressed with the greatest conviction: “I know I’m right — and if I’m not, it’s a mistake.” Moreover, the book says that men don’t like to be contradicted since it’s an assault on their (fragile) integrity. A prime example: men will drive around for minutes, even if lost, refusing to ask for directions, since this is a sign of helplessness.

Men are hypochondriacs as well. “When men are ill, it is never with anything trivial. A sore throat could be laryngitis, a touch of indigestion may be the onset of renal failure, tiredness is exhaustion, pins and needles may presage cardiac arrest, and a spot could well be skin cancer. They convince themselves they are going to die.” But they will never see a doctor, and complain to their wives or girlfriends who have had similar minor ailments before without making the same fuss.

Furthermore, men are less sociable than women, and have a repertoire of 4,000 words a day in speech; women have about 10,000 words. Men are economical, reducing their answers to grunts or one-syllable utterances. “For them, telephone calls are for the transmission of information, not for gossiping or the exchange of confidences.”

And what about the C-word, “commitment”? Men find it hard to be tied down; it’s like getting hold of soap in the bath. “A sense of commitment in a partnership — or rather the lack thereof — is one factor you can safely cite as the key difference between men and women. For men the very idea of commitment is uncomfortable: ‘To commit,’ after all, is the same verb as… being sent to an asylum. Marriage also goes by the unnerving term ‘wedlock.’”

The M-word (“monogamy”) is another minefield. It is practiced by 90 percent of the bird species, but only three percent of mammals, and guess where we belong?

Be that as it may, some men also know the joys of marriage: domestic comfort, a captive audience, better food. The single man seems to be happy on a Saturday night, but the married man is happier on a Sunday morning.

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The Bluffer’s Guide to Men is available at National Bookstore. Comments can be sent to danton_ph@yahoo.com.