"Pardon me, Ma’am…I thought you Were a guy I knew in Pittsburgh?"
Grouch Marx


I attended a college commencement not too long ago and the person sitting next to me said, ”My kid and my spouse are both graduating today! See them? “ and pointed to a couple standing together in the front row.

“What nice looking boy! I can see the resemblance to his mother from here.” I said.

“She’s a girl and that’s my husband beside her,” said my neighbor. “Martin decided to quit his profession to do what he loves best.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

“He is going into nursing,” she said. “My daughter Geraldine majored in Architecture.”

“I see,” I said. “And I take it you have been the major provider while the two of them were in school?”

She nodded. “I’m president of my own hotel conglomerate,” she explained. “So it wasn’t a problem for us. Besides, my oldest boy, Jefferson works at home and cooks our meals. He’s into good nutrition and doesn’t think I know the first thing about whole foods.”

“How lovely of him!” I said. “Did he graduate from college as well?”

She shook her head. “He graduated from the Fashion Academy two years ago. He is quite a successful milliner.“

She looked closely at my outfit. “As a matter of fact, you are wearing one of his designs.”

I laughed. “You mean your son is the famous Mr. John?”

She nodded. “That’s him!” she said and we both stopped talking to watch the commencement procession.

This family has become The American Portrait for the second millennium. Sexual boundaries have relaxed since the beginning of the twentieth century and both sexes are free to follow their fancies at last. Men can cry if they like and women can construct buildings In fact, there is talk of erasing sexist pronouns like “he” and “she” from the lexicon and switching to the androgynous “thee” and “thou.”

I don’t think that is a realistic idea. While I believe that there are more differences within the sexes than between them, I still enjoy the basic emotional and psychological lines that divide them. Although many of our socially imposed stereotypes are blurred, there many more that I would hate to erase, because they reassure me. They tell me who I am and why I act the way I do.

Some things are female. They don’t interest men. Ever. Men don’t dye shoes to match their outfit. They don’t wear tutus when they dance. No man I know would spend hours in a beauty parlor waxing off his facial hair. He would use a razor. Women are obsessed with their curves and men with bulges. If a woman has an obvious protrusion, she diets. A man lifts weights and buys tighter jeans.

There are male and female choices as well. Men don’t care a whit about their cleavage and they rarely force their bodies into waist cinchers so they can look slender in a new dress. No woman would try to grow a beard. But then, no man would encourage her to do so. Men don’t decorate their hats with velvet ribbons and artificial birds. They don’t even wear them. Women do… when there are other women there to envy them.

Men prefer racing cars and winning poker games to gossiping on the telephone. They don’t really care if the neighbor’s son stepped on their petunias. They can imagine themselves on a lion hunt roughing it in the wild and they love fountain pens. Those are guy things. Women can cry all day because they feel neglected and will stop everything to cuddle a child . . . or a dog, or a bunny, or a goldfish . . . even a minnow. They like to mother little things.

Women pour their emotions out as easily as men shoot bullets at a moving target. Women complain. They chatter. They tell it like it is. Men have problems using any words at all to express themselves. Men rarely tell anything…they show it. My friend Leo was so happy to see his daughter that he baked her a batch of chocolate chip cookies. He put them out on the kitchen counter and never said a word. He didn’t have to. She understood…she knew because women are very sensitive to those things.

A man can touch someone he loves with so much tenderness, it makes women weep. A woman’s touch is a lovely thing, but it doesn’t light any fires in me. A man can do that with only his eyes.

Just as there are no absolutes in life, so there are exceptions to every rule. But still, it comforts me to know that while I might ask my best girlfriend to go shopping with me for an outfit from heaven, I would wear it for a man. When a woman says I look nice, she is measuring me against her appearance. “You look lovely,” she’ll say and she‘ll be thinking, I would never wear that shade of purple! It makes her look 100 years old!

When a man tells me I’m gorgeous, I am.

That’s the difference.


"What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him is a matter of no importance."
Oscar Wilde