Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys Read online

  I am not saying here that human guys are as sexually indiscriminate as toads and beetles. I’m saying human guys are capable of being much more indiscriminate. Anybody who doesn’t believe this should spend some time observing guys in bars. At first they will be somewhat restrained, but after a few drinks they are capable of making passes at women whom they really don’t find attractive at all, or other guy’s wives, or nuns, or reasonably well-groomed livestock. (“Bartender! Give this little lady here some hay!”)

  I’m not saying that women don’t think about sex also. I’m saying that women are capable, for at least brief periods of time, of not thinking about sex, and that most guys are not. This is why, when an attractive woman walks past a group of guys, no matter what activity they are engaged in, they will suffer an attack of Lust-Induced Brain Freeze (LIBF):

  BOMB-DISPOSAL EXPERT (calmly but urgently): Okay, we have fifteen seconds to bypass the timer circuit. On the count of three, I’m going to switch to auxiliary power, and I want you to short out these contacts, got it?

  SECOND EXPERT: Got it.

  FIRST EXPERT: Okay, one, two … (An attractive woman walks by.)

  FIRST EXPERT: Whoa.

  SECOND EXPERT: Yes.

  FIRST EXPERT: Mmm-MMM.

  SECOND EXPERT: YES.

  FIRST EXPERT: Whoa momma.

  SECOND EXPERT: YESSSS.

  BOMB: Boom.

  Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. Perhaps you think that intelligent guys cannot be reduced to this level of drooling idiocy by indiscriminate lust. Well, perhaps you can recall the 1988 Democratic presidential primary campaign, starring Gary Hart, who everybody agreed had a Brilliant Political Mind, which at some point must have gone through the following analytical process:

  On the one hand, I have a very good opportunity here to become the Democratic nominee for president, and a reasonable chance to become president of the United States, the most powerful person on Earth, capable of influencing the lives of literally billions of people and changing the course of history.

  On the other hand, I can have a HOT BABE sit in my lap.

  No contest! Lust-Induced Brain Freeze triumphs again!

  I want to stress here that I am not saying that guys are stupid. I am saying that, because of subtle and extremely complex biochemical reactions taking place in their bodies, guys act stupid.

  The main ingredient in these reactions, as you are no doubt aware, is a substance that guys contain called testosterone.4 But what you may not be aware of is that testosterone is actually illegal. I found this out when I got a letter from a reader named Richard Watkins, who is a physician and who sent me a shocking medical document concerning the federal Anabolic Steroids Control Act.

  Steroids are substances that some guys put in their bodies in an effort to develop bulging, rippling, sharply defined muscles like the ones Michael Keaton wore when he was Batman. This is foolish, because women are not attracted to rippling, sharply defined muscles. Women prefer a type of male physique that is known, in body-building circles, as “the humor writer.” This is a softer, more-rounded, aerodynamic shape, similar to the one used in the popular Ford Taurus station wagon. This physique has inspired a whole line of mature-guy casual pants, which go by the name “Dockers” because it was not considered a shrewd marketing move to come right out and call them “Pants for the Bigger-Butted Man.”

  But back to steroids. They have bad side effects, although it took medical researchers many years to discover this. They’d get a bunch of steroid users together and say, “Okay, anybody having bad side effects, raise your hand!” The steroid users would strain and grunt like water buffaloes in labor, but due to their extreme muscularity they couldn’t raise their hands above their waists. Many of them must press elevator buttons with their foreheads.

  The result was that medical researchers had no idea what kinds of problems steroids were causing until one day when they happened to ask for oral responses. Then they discovered the awful truth: steroids can cause men to develop thick Austrian accents. This is what happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was actually born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, and spoke like a regular American until he used steroids to build his body up to the point where he was legally classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as “construction equipment.”

  So anyway, the government is cracking down on steroids. I thought this was a fine idea until I got Dr. Watkins’s letter, which was written on a hospital physical-examination form, in the section headed “Chief Complaint and Present Illness.”

  “Here I am,” Dr. Watkins wrote, “sitting around in my doctor suit waiting for an emergency to happen, and suddenly I get a memo: ON FEB. 27, 1991, TESTOSTERONE WAS DECLARED A CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE, LIKE HEROIN.”

  My immediate reaction was to think that Dr. Watkins had been wearing his stethoscope way too tight. But it turns out he’s telling the absolute truth. With his letter, he enclosed a document from the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, listing various types of anabolic steroids now controlled by the federal government, and testosterone is on the list.

  This presents a serious legal problem, because many guys, including several known Supreme Court members, are walking around with testosterone in their possession. They can’t help it. As Dr. Watkins put it, in medical terminology, testosterone is “a substance exuded by your you-know organs, hereinafter your Ralphs.”

  So as I interpret this document—and bear in mind that I applied to law school twice—it is basically against the law to be a guy. This makes sense to me. Testosterone is a dangerous thing. Aside from causing indiscriminate sexual behavior, it can result in:

  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 curiosity about the world, whereas boy babies will generally try to destroy it. Girl toddlers will work hard to communicate with and imitate the behavior of other family members; boy toddlers will imagine that they are 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:

  WARNING

  EXTREMELY HIGH TESTOSTERONE LEVELS NEXT 15 MILES

  In the left lane, one behind the other, were two well-dressed middle-aged men, both driving luxury telephone-equipped automobiles. They 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 behavior. One time in a Washington, D.C., traffic jam I saw t
wo guys, also driving nice cars, reach a point where their lanes were supposed 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 behavior 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 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 macho behavior: Women never seemed to be impressed by it. You rarely hear women say things 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.”

  No guy is immune to testosterone pressure. Once in New York City I was in a car driven by Calvin “Bud” Trillin, a great guy, a great writer, and one of the most civilized, courteous, and urbane people I know. He was waiting for another driver to pull out of a parking space, when a third driver started to pull past us. I thought this driver was just trying to pass, and so did Bud’s wife, Alice, but Bud was certain the driver was trying to get his parking space, so he honked his horn and gestured angrily. This led to the following exchange between Alice and Bud:

  ALICE: Bud, he just wants to get past.

  BUD (raising his voice): He’s a SHIT POT, Alice, and he WANTS MY SPACE.

  Fortunately the other driver kept going, which meant that Bud did not have to run him down. Bud was displaying the territorial urge, there. This also dates back to primitive times, when guys would need a certain amount of land so they could have somewhere to hunt, fish, spit, etc. Of course this was the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the parking spot was not exactly teeming with game. It was more teeming with Marlboro butts. But territory is territory, for guys. Bud was driven by the same powerful instinct that causes guy dogs to mark off their territory by peeing on it. Show a guy dog anything—Mount McKinley, the Gobi Desert, the Parthenon—and his immediate reaction will be: “Hey! I better pee on this!” Your basic guy dog firmly believes that if he pees on enough territory, he will be declared Dominant Male Dog of the Entire Earth and receive a plaque plus valuable dog prizes, such as a bag of dead squirrels.

  This is basically the same instinct that determines U.S. foreign policy, except that instead of peeing on foreign countries, we give them money or drop bombs on them, sometimes simultaneously. Thus we see that testosterone can lead to some very destructive forms of male behavior, the two worst being:

  War

  Do-it-yourself projects

  It’s a well-known fact that a male with even a moderate testosterone level would rather drill a hole in his hand (which he probably will) than admit, especially to his spouse, that he cannot do something himself. Put an ordinary husband on the Space Shuttle, and within minutes he’ll be telling his spouse that by God he’ll repair the retro thruster modules, because if you call in NASA they’ll just charge you an arm and a leg. I personally have destroyed numerous perfectly good rooms by undertaking frenzied testosterone-induced efforts to fix them up despite the fact that I have the manual dexterity of an oyster. Hundreds of years from now, archaeologists will look at my home-improvement projects and say: “This civilization was apparently wiped out by a terrible natural disaster involving spackle.”

  We will explore some of these issues in more detail later in this book, but the point I am trying to make here is that when we see guys acting in certain guy ways, we must not judge them too harshly. We must view them the same way we view any other creatures of nature, such as snakes. They do things that seem inappropriate in a civilized world, but they are only following behavioral patterns that were embedded in them eons ago. If we are patient and understanding with them, if we seek to understand what “makes them tick,” we can succeed in modifying their behavior and bringing them more “in tune” with modern society.

  I’m talking about snakes here. Guys are hopeless.

  1 Assuming dragonflies have cocoons.

  2 Nature doesn’t dare leave this up to the female, because a lot of the time she has a headache.

  3 Assuming beetles can nod.

  4 From the Greek words testo, meaning “stuff,” and sterone, meaning “that guys contain.”

  3

  The Social Development of Guys

  Nature Alone Should Not Take

  the Rap

  SO FAR in this book I have shown, using extensive scientific documentation,1 that there are powerful underlying biological reasons why guys act the way they do, as opposed to acting like human beings.

  But society also plays a role in determining guy behavior. This process begins right at birth, when the tiny guy baby is still emerging from the mother, and the doctor tells her that it’s a boy, and she, in a classic expression of maternal joy, responds, “ARGGHHHHHHHH.” She is not feeling so great, because the baby is not that tiny, compared with the orifice that it is emerging from. Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.

  But my point is that even then, as the male baby is barely entering the outside world, he starts to become indoctrinated into the ways of guyness, because of the way he will be treated by his parents, particularly his father. Some fathers will attempt to teach their sons to play catch right there in the delivery room. (“No, son! Always catch the ball away from your umbilical cord!”) This process continues when the baby guy gets home, and his parents give him a bunch of stereotypically male toys to play with. It is sad but true that even today, boy babies are generally given toys that stress power and dominance, such as trucks and planes and trains; whereas girl babies generally get toys that stress nurturing and sacrifice, such as dolls with names like Baby Puke-On-U.

  It’s hard to avoid falling into the stereotype-toy trap. When my son, Rob, was born, my philosophy was that he should have only politically correct, environmentally sound, gender-neutral toys, such as a spinning top carved out of nonendangered wood or recycled tofu. Sincerely determined to purchase something along these lines when I went to the Toys “R” “A” Big Industry store, I am sincerely embarrassed to report that what I actually purchased was a radio-controlled tank. I couldn’t help myself. This was a really neat tank. It had a working turret and real treads, so it could turn on a dime and climb right over various obstacles, such as books or pillows or my son, Rob, who, being a small infant with basically the same motor skills as a watermelon, was unable to operate this tank personally. So I had to operate it for him, which I did at every opportunity, because he seemed to enjoy it, as was indicated by the increase in his drool output.

  This is also how I could tell that he liked the electric train.

  Thus we see that even sensitive and concerned parents such as myself can contribute to the guy-ization of a male infant. But I think it would happen anyway, because little boys just naturally seem to be crazy for power. For example, from early on, Rob loved big trucks. He loved them even before he could pronounce either “big” or “truck.” When he saw a big truck, he’d say something that sounded like “bee fut.” He said it a lot, because he was obsessed. He only had eyes for trucks. We’d be in mid-town Manhattan shortly before Christmas, walking beneath spectacular skyscrapers, past delightful animated store-window displays, with music playing
everywhere and Santa Claus clanging his bell on every corner, and Rob’s attention would be totally focused on: a garbage truck.

  “Bee fut!” he’d tell me, pointing at it.

  “Bee fut!” he’d inform random pedestrians.

  “Bee fut!” he’d state to the world in general, repeating it 1,753 times, in case any unfortunate person might be unaware of this amazing development. And I’d have to stand there in the cold for fifteen minutes, admiring this stinking, crud-encrusted hulk and agreeing over and over that, fut-wise, it was extremely bee.

  Then came the dinosaur phase. Rob loved dinosaurs even more than he loved trucks, and I don’t think this was because dinosaurs were fascinating and diverse creatures whose fossilized remains can teach us much about the rich biological history of our still-mysterious planet. I think he loved them because they could stomp an enemy flatter than a cheap pizza. Power, that’s what dinosaurs symbolized: We’re talking about massive, forty-foot-high creatures with fearsome claws and massive jaws; creatures that enjoyed total physical domination over every other life-form; creatures that did not have to go to bed unless they felt like it. Many a weekday night I would be exhausted, desperate to fall asleep, but unable to do so because a short but fierce Tyrannosaurus rex was raging through the house, waving its pacifier around angrily, declaring that it was not at all tired.

  So I suppose it was inevitable that Rob would be interested in power-and-dominance toys. But I want to stress, as a fundamentally nonviolent person who has never owned any form of weapon, that I did not buy him toy guns. I’m not saying he didn’t have any toy guns; in fact, by the time he was four, he had enough toy guns to conquer a toy nation the size of France.2 I don’t know where they came from. They just appeared in my house, and in the houses of all my nonviolent, son-having friends. I think maybe the Gun Fairy finds out where little boys live and comes around at night, dressed in camouflage, scattering battery-operated Nuclear Death Ray-guns everywhere.3