Monday, November 12, 2007

Mars, Venus   [John Derbyshire]

Sometimes the chasm between the male & female varieties of human nature yawns awfully wide.

After my son's football game yesterday I was sitting round with a bunch of Dads. This was at one of their houses, outside on the deck, which he has fitted up very nicely, with a TV and all. It was cold, so we got a log fire going in the firepit and sat around the fire drinking, watching the football game on TV, and b-s-ing. The wives were inside doing whatever wives do when away from their men—exchanging recipes, who knows?

Well, eventually we got into one of those dumb arguments you get into in these situations. The point at issue was: Will an empty beer bottle melt in a log fire? We've all seen it done, of course, but one of the guys claimed there's been some change in bottle manufacturing techniques so that a bottle nowadays won't melt. He: "It just goes CRACK! and that's it."

Now all charged up with the spirit of scientific enquiry, we of course had to put an empty Budweiser bottle on the fire. We sat there watching to see if it would melt.

Out comes a wife. She sees the bottle on the fire and squeals. "Oh my God, it'll explode!..." etc. That made us laugh. Then she went inside and we heard her yelling at the boys (who were watching a movie): "Who put a bottle on the fire?" She thought one of them had done it, which of course made us laugh more.

Now some of the other wives came out. We husbands were all gripped by the spectacle of the bottle, which was—yes!—beginning to lose its shape. (As most of us had some years previously... but that's a different issue.) The wives were incredulous that we'd get so much entertainment from watching a bottle melt. "You're nuts, all nuts..." etc. etc.

It struck me that some fundamental truth about the human condition was being acted out here. Why is it that a thing like that—watching a bottle melt in a fire—is such a guy thing—so fascinating for us, so incomprehensible to women?

The answer may be in this new book I've just started: Bernard Chapin's Women: Theory and Practice. Nothing about melting beer bottles yet, but I still have 180 pages to go, and it's shaping up as a fine deafening salvo in the war against Political Correctness.

11/12 11:03 AMShare