The Seven Worst Things About Being a Male

[Bonobo]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/201201/the-7-worst-things-about-being-male

The cultural stereotype is that it's great to be a man. Not only do we have shorter lines at the rest room, but we make scads more money and can reach things on higher shelves in the marketplace. We don't have to deal with double standards or glass ceilings, and we're raised to have confidence and high self-esteem, so we can all comfortably act like the Sean Connery version of James Bond. Cooly knock off a few bad guys in the afternoon, then drive our Aston Martins to our expensive hotel in Monte Carlo, where beautiful movie actresses are waiting to throw themselves into our arms.

But in truth, it ain't like that down here in Kansas.
Here are some simple facts about what it's really like to be a regular good ole boy



1. People want to hurt you. I have less than fond memories of the black eyes and swollen lips I suffered at the hands of various bullies as a young man. Or the nervous feeling in my stomach all afternoon when some would-be tough guy challenged me with the classic line: "After school, punk!" When I should have been studying for my math exams in high school, my mind was often filled instead with thoughts about how to avoid some bully in one of my classes, and whether the best strategy was to stare him down or make a self-diminishing joke, allowing him to establish his dominance at the expense of my acting submissive. But except for a few minor injuries and years of anxiety, I got off easy. If you go hang around almost any emergency room in any reasonable sized city, you will see a steady stream of young males staggering in, or being wheeled in, with knife wounds, gunshot wounds, gashes from broken bottles, or fractured skulls from baseball bats aimed at their heads. And as Martin Daly and Margo Wilson pointed out in their classic book Homicide, crime statistics from any year taken at random, from any society throughout history, reveal that men are many times more likely to be murdered than are women. The perpetrators are more likely to be males than females, but even when the usually more peaceful sex decides to murder, her victim is much more likely to be a man.

3. For a good portion of your life, you have an irrationally and self-destructively high desire for sex. By a "good portion" of your life, I mean two things: broadly, several decades between the teens and the fifties, and more proximately, many times a day during those long decades. One researcher found that among men between the ages of 18 and 25, fully 50 percent had thought about sex in the last 5 minutes.

4. If you are heterosexual, those sexual partners you desire so much do not reciprocate your urgency. Clark and Hatfield also had college men approach college women on campus using the same lines. The guys were reasonably attractive, as judged by the fact that over 50 percent of the women said "yes" to the request for a date. But the number of women who said yes to the sexual offer was precisely zero (the study was done twice, both before and after the AIDs epidemic, and the number was zero before as well as after). I heard a talk recently which revealed that it's not all about sex at all - the researcher discovered that if women were not afraid of men, if women found men attractive, and if women thought they'd have more fun in bed with a strange man, the sex difference would go away! The researcher seemed to take the findings as a blow to what she called "essentialism." Perhaps that's good news for Brad Pitt. But unfortunately, most real women essentially find most real men rather scary, unattractive, and unsexy, and they consequently say "No."