Manslations Page 4

  I know, I know. You don't believe me. And so we'll talk more about this one in Chapter 4, “First Date Dos and Don'ts.”

  MYTH: I Shouldn't Have to Tell Him What I'm Thinking.

  FACT: You only have to tell him what you're thinking if you want him to ever, ever know.

  Men want badly to read your minds. We really, really do. I swear, if we could gain the power to read your mind by cutting off a randomly selected toe, we would all give it serious consideration. But we never will. (And to save you some time, I already looked into it, okay? No one is offering that trade.)

  Let's take flowers, for example. If you were paying attention to the “What it DOES vs. What it MEANS” section in Chapter 1, you can guess how most men feel about flowers. They don't really register for men, because they don't do anything, so most men sort of forget they exist. But if, like many women, you enjoy getting flowers from time to time for no reason at all (i.e., when he's not in big, big trouble—even the dopiest of men knows to buy them for you then), do you know how you're going to get them? No, no, not by giving him flowers for no reason and hoping he gets the hint. He doesn't want flowers. How is giving him something that he does not want going to train him to give you something that you do want? You get your flowers by telling your man exactly that information—if he knows what you want (elk), he'll get it (stab).

  I can hear you. I know, I know. You don't want to tell him. You want him to just know.

  I don't know what to tell you. Date the Amazing Kreskin.

  MYTH: I Can Change Him, and He'll Be So Much Happier.

  FACT: Not unless you're talking about his diaper (in which case, you are very correct). This isn't Barbies, okay? He's not a Ken Doll. You don't want Ken, anyway. First of all, you want a guy you really want—as opposed to a guy you don't want but are pretty sure you can somehow Frankenstein into a guy you want. (Don't you have enough to do throughout the day?)

  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.

  FEELINGS: AN EXPOSÉ

  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.

  MYTH: Men Are Afraid to Talk about Their Feelings.

  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”:

  MYTH: Because They Can't Talk about Their Feelings, Men Aren't in Touch with Them.

  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.

  MYTH: Men Would Be Better Off If They Could Talk about Their Feelings.

  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.

  MYTH: If a Man Doesn't Cry, It Means He's Not in Touch with His Feelings.

  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:

  MYTH: Men Don't Get Brokenhearted in the

  Same Way That Women Do.

  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…

  __________________

  * When I say “myths,” I'm not talking about the kind that involve Zeus, Thor, or a flying snake with wings that asks Aztecs to do human sacrifices. That stuff is just weird and probably not very useful here. What I'm talking about are the stories told from generation to generation to annoy people who don't know them. They involve stuff that isn't true, such as when people say something like, “No, dude, Bigfoot is real,” or, “I read this Eastern philosophy book that said men can have multiple orgasms.” That's one of the best things about a myth: once you know it's only a myth, you can say, “Pff, that's just a myth,” and be totally right. And make them feel like real jerks.

  * And even if we're talking about a highly trained dog—one that can sit there for twenty minutes with a biscuit on his nose until you say, “Okay!”—even that dog is only thinking about the moment when you'll finally let him eat the thing. Some helpful advice, though: I would not recommend training your man in this fashion. If you try to balance some other woman's cleavage on your boyfriend's nose, someone's liable to get hurt.

  CHAPTER 3

  the notorious s.e.x., or abandon

  hope all ye who enter here

  Many 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:

  THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

  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.

  I do know that both of them lay eggs. So far, not helpful. And bees live in some weird configuration in which there's one female for the whole society. And before we start thinking that this might be somehow fun for her, it's not like she gets a room filled with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. It's just bees. Not that she's anyone to judge, being a bee herself. Okay, now that I think about it, that seems okay. But still, it's not going to help any of us primates get laid, so why are we even talking about it?

  Anyway, in this section of the book, we'll talk about some of the things that women seem to believe about men regarding sex, and we'll explore just what the truth is about the whole thing. It seems to me that there are four distinct areas of the male mind that we need to cover:

  Thinking about sex (also known as the “vast majority of the time”)

  Pursuing sex (not quite as much of the time as in number one, but still a lot)

  During sex (not nearly as much of the time as numbers one or two… for me, at least)

  After sex (that ten-minute period before we head right back to number one)

  By the time we get through here, you're going to know way, way more about men than maybe you even wanted to. (Get ready: In the area of sex, we're far more different from each other than you probably imagine.)

  THINKING ABOUT SEX, OR EXCELLENT

  REASONS NEVER TO ASK A MAN WHAT

  HE'S THINKING

  Okay, from what I'm told, this is one area in which men and women aren't even remotely similar. And no matter what you think we're thinking, it's probably… worse. Think of what is sometimes considered the cheapest, trashiest version of the female fantasy—the romance novel. A romance novel is related to a male fantasy in the way that a nice cup of coffee is related to crystal meth.

  The Porn Fascination

  Porn has been involved in every technological leap we've ever made—and probably within about ten minutes of each leap, going all the way back to pioneer times. Consider:

  Computers = computer porn

  VCRs = VHS porn

  Film = film porn

  Telephone = phone sex

  Telegraph = I'm sure that ten minutes after this was invented, there was a guy working the telegraph with one hand and whacking off with the other.

  What comes next? My guess: virtual reality. As soon as this technology is invented, society is in big, big trouble. Seriously. They have this on Star Trek where you can go into a room and experience full-body holograms of whatever you ask for. Look, as soon as that happens, there will be no starships, no lasers, no war, no industry, and no society. The day that a guy can press a button and have sex with Jessica Alba/Simpson/ Biel is the day that no one ever goes to work again.

  Why do we always make porn out of technology? Because the guys who make brilliant leaps in technology aren't seeing the business end of a boob very often. Think of the guys who invented the Internet. (No, not Al Gore—the other guys.) About ten seconds after they came up with it, I'm sure they were wo
rking on ways to meet women, real or otherwise. It's just the natural way.

  So how do you, the girlfriend/wife/what-have-you, deal with this obsession? Porn is not so different from what the two of you are supposed to be doing together… and ain't no way you're doing… that.

  No worries. A real man doesn't expect you to. This is just his fantasy world. Hold on, don't get disgusted. Remember male sexual fantasies? Remember how I told you they weren't like your fantasies? Yeah, here's what I was talking about. A man does not watch porn like an athlete watching game tape, looking for tips and planning out his next move. (Well, a smart man doesn't do that, anyway.)

  In other words, we don't have fantasies about this stuff thinking that it might actually happen. (The things that we are allowed to actually do, we just do. Why fantasize about… reality?)