You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (7 page)

And yet they do. There are boners up all over what is theoretically family viewing time. It is Bone-a-Rama. This is grotesquely inappropriate. It also creates a deeply troubling picture of the physical state of the modern American male. You watch an evening of TV and by the fifteenth erectile dysfunction ad you’re thinking:
Can’t
anybody
in this nation get it up?
Inevitably, if you’re an older guy, you start to wonder:
Could this happen to
me
?

You especially wonder this because the guys in the Viagra commercials are always more masculine than you are. For example, there’s one Viagra commercial, which I have seen dozens of times, in which a rugged aging cowboy is driving a manly pickup truck towing a horse trailer Kors whon a rural road and he gets stuck in the mud out there in the middle of nowhere. Is he daunted? No, he is not. The announcer says: “You’ve reached the age where you don’t back down from a challenge.”

For the record, this statement is one hundred percent pure bullshit. It is the
opposite
of true. The older you get, the
more likely
you are to back down from a challenge. If you want scientific proof of this, go to YouTube and search for any variation of the phrase “shoot bottle rocket from ass.” This will turn up many videos of people attempting to shoot bottle rockets from their asses. It goes without saying that all of these people are males. But more to the point, they are all
young
males. I have no doubt they were all responding to challenges from their friends. “I dare you to shoot a bottle rocket out of your ass!” their friends said. And, being young males and therefore less intelligent than a bowl of grits, they
responded to the challenge
. And then they went to the ER to be treated for, among other things, scrotal burns.

Here is my challenge to you: Find an older man—any older man—and challenge him to shoot a bottle rocket out of his ass. I guarantee you that he will not hesitate: He will immediately back down. Learning when to back down from challenges is one of the main reasons he got to be an older man, as opposed to dead. His current idea of an acceptable challenge is trying to stay up until 10:30 p.m.

Also, for the record: If an older man has trouble getting a boner, he will not view that as a “challenge,” any more than he will view a tapeworm or hemorrhoids as a “challenge.” He will view it as “a medical problem.”

But getting back to the cowboy in the Viagra commercial: He gets out of his stuck pickup and opens the doors to the horse trailer. The announcer says: “This is the age of knowing how to make things happen. So, why would you let something like erectile dysfunction get in the way?” And, by gum, the cowboy
doesn’t
let it get in his way. In the very next scene, there are two horses hitched to the front of the pickup, and the cowboy—thanks to the miracle of Viagra—is having sex with
both
of them.

No, that does not happen. At least not during the commercial. Of course we don’t know what happens later when the camera is off; we cannot say for certain how the cowboy expresses his gratitude to the horses for towing his truck. We do know it gets lonely out there.

But my point is, if you’re an older man watching TV, you’re going to be bombarded with commercials suggesting that there is a nationwide epidemic of noodle dick. You inevitably start to wonder:
Could this condition afflict
me
?
You also wonder this about all the
other
medical conditions—there seem to be thousands—featured in TV commercials for prescription drugs whose names sound like characters in
The Lord
of the Rings
, as we see in this comparison chart:

E
very morning my wife and I take our dog, Lucy, on a two-mile run.

OK, “two-mile run” is inaccurate. A better way to describe it would be “several hundred closely spaced urination stops.”

Urination is a major component of Lucy’s lifestyle. Think about the most wonderful thing you’ve ever experienced—falling in love, seeing your child being born, going an entire day without hearing the name “Kardashian.” Remember the joy you felt? That’s the kind of joy Lucy feels
every time she smells another dog’s urine
. And since we live in a dog-intensive neighborhood, Lucy is in a state of near-constant rapture.

Each morning we leave the house and trot perhaps four steps when, suddenly,
YANK
, Lucy—a big, strong dog who has the ability to create her own planet-level gravitational field—stops and makes herself roughly as mobile as a convenience store, causing my leash arm to come halfway out of its socket. Lucy’s nose hoovers the ground and her tail whips around like a snake on amphetamines, which is her way of signa Ne bdtfwayling the fantastic news:
You will never guess what I have found here: DOG
WEEWEE!! Can you BELIEVE it??
Then she squats to squirt some of her own weewee—she has a 275-gallon bladder—on top of the other dog’s weewee. To humans, this behavior may seem pointless, even stupid, but it serves an important biological function: It is how one dog signals to another dog the vital information that both of them contain weewee.

When she’s done squirting, Lucy permits us to trot a few more steps, whereupon, incredibly, she discovers
another
place where a dog has urinated and,
YANK
, we must stop again. And so on, for two miles. It is slow going. We make about the same rate of progress as Bill Clinton passing through a roomful of women. If the early American pioneers had taken Lucy along on their wagon trains, everything west of Cleveland would still be untamed wilderness.

So our morning “run” takes quite a while, and during this time Michelle and I have a chance to talk. And when I say “Michelle and I,” I mean “Michelle.” She does the vast majority of the talking. I’d
like
to contribute to the conversation, but I can never think of anything to say. At that point, Michelle and I have been together for at least twelve straight hours. We had dinner together the night before, watched TV together, slept in the same bed together, woke up together, went through the morning routine together and drove our daughter to school together. If I had anything to say to Michelle, I’d have said it by then. So when we’re running, the only potential conversational topics that pop up in my mind are the same ones popping up in Lucy’s (
Squirrel!
).

Whereas Michelle, who is a woman, always has many new topics she wants to talk about, and every one of these topics reminds her of
other
things she wants to talk about, and those other things remind her of still
more
things she wants to talk about. She is a nuclear reactor of words. But I’m not complaining and I’ll tell you why: I don’t want to sleep in the driveway.

No, seriously, I enjoy hearing Michelle talk. She’s like my own personal talk radio station, Radio Michelle, always full of interesting news, such as what our daughter Sophie is up to. Michelle knows because she actually talks to Sophie. Whereas I do not. I spend a fair amount of time in the car with Sophie, driving her to and from activities, and we’re happy in each other’s company, but we don’t talk: I listen to sports radio and she exchanges texts and Instagram messages with her fourteen million girlfriends. We don’t discuss these things with each other because Sophie doesn’t really care if the Dolphins need help at offensive tackle and I don’t really care if Girlfriend No. 11,368,421 and Girlfriend No. 5,820,327 are mad at Girlfriend No. 7,009,256 because she (I refer here to Girlfriend No. 7,009,256) said something to some boy in the cafeteria.

But Michelle
does
care about these things so she talks to Sophie all the time, which means that when we’re on our run she can fill me in on things about our daughter that I would not otherwise know, such as whether she is happy, what grade she is currently in, whether she has had any major operations, etc.

And it’s not just Sophie; Michelle talks to
everybody
. She has many, many friends, and when they call, she can talk with them for hours, even if they already talked earlier that day. I have maybe one percent as many close friends as Michelle, and, being males, they
never
call. This is fine with me because if they
did
call, even if we hadn’t talked in fifteen years, we would quickly run out of things to talk about. Within seconds we would be discussing the Dolphins’ situation at offensive tackle. By the end of a minute we would be down to awkward silence, and that would be that for another fifteen years. Some of my close friends could Sfrile. easily be deceased; this would not have a serious effect on our relationship.

I don’t think I’m abnormal. I think I’m a regular male person, and there are plenty more like me. For example: Some years ago, because I needed something to write a column about, I became an official Notary Public in the state of Florida and performed a wedding. The bride, whose name was Pat, gave me the following account of how the groom, Phil, proposed to her:

“One day he was telling me what needed to get done, and he said we needed to register the boat, get a fishing license and get a marriage license. So I said, ‘Wait a minute, what was that again?’ And he said, ‘Register the boat, get a fishing license and get a marriage license.’ So I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to register the boat.’”

Phil, a male, did not feel the need to get all blah-blah-blah about his decision to go ahead and engage in matrimony with Pat. He’d decided that the time had come for them to get hitched, so he informed Pat of this decision, thoughtfully grouping it with other to-do items requiring proper legal documentation.

Another example: I once ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a group of about ten women sportswriters and they got to talking about another woman sportswriter, whom they did not like. When I say “got to talking,” I mean they talked about this woman, and nothing else, for
two solid hours
. They explored in great detail the reasons why they didn’t like her; they analyzed the various possible causes of her behavior; they agonized over whether their feelings toward her were justified; and on and on and
on
. Finally, they noticed me, sitting quietly at the end of the table behind a forest of Dos Equis bottles, and they asked me if a group of men would ever have this kind of discussion about a person whom everyone in the group disliked. I said a group of men would handle it as follows: The name of the disliked person would come up and somebody would say, “What an asshole.” Then everybody would nod, and the conversation would turn to a more fruitful topic, such as the situation at offensive tackle.

I realize that I may sound as if I’m pushing the hackneyed old stereotype that women talk way more than men. So let me clarify something: That is
exactly
what I am doing. Because the stereotype is true. It is a scientific fact that women talk more than men. This was proven in a study done by researchers at the University of Maryland and reported on the Internet, a leading source of information. If I understand this study correctly—and I think we can all agree that this is highly unlikely—it concerned a protein called FOXP2, which is associated with vocalization, and which is found, among other places, in the brains of baby rats. In their study, the researchers found that if you separate mother rats from their babies, they will bite you.

No, seriously, the researchers found that the baby rats whose brains contained higher levels of FOXP2 emitted more distress cries and, as a result, the mother rats retrieved these babies first. I
was surprised by this. Not the protein part; the part about the mother rats retrieving their babies. I don’t think of rats as being maternal. I think of them as being vermin. I assumed that if you separated a mother rat from her babies, she would just shrug
*
and resume scurrying around and spreading the bubonic plague. But no: She’s a mom! She retrieves her babies!
Aw.

Then she eats them.

No, I don’t know what she does with them and I frankly don’t care because—follow me closely here—they are rats. But the scientific point is that the baby rats with more FOXP2 protein in their brains vocalized more than the ones with less. And here’s the thing: It turns out that FOXP2 is also found in the brains of humans, and Sf hic fac
female humans have more of it
. So there is your scientific reason why women talk more. We still don’t know what causes women to wear shoes that hurt, or fill their homes with reeking decorative candles that provide no more illumination than a lukewarm bagel, or watch
The View
, or put small weird-shaped pillows on beds that already
have
pillows, but we assume some kind of mutant brain proteins are also causing these behaviors.

Anyway, I think both men and women can benefit from the Maryland study—men by understanding that women have a biological tendency to vocalize, and women by understanding that it would not kill them to every once in a while just shut up.

Kidding! I am kidding!

But I do think you women can learn something important from this study, which is this: The next time you become frustrated with your husband or boyfriend because you don’t think he’s sharing his innermost thoughts and feelings with you, remember: Talking is not as easy for him as it is for you. Men are more suited to taking action, such as opening a beer, or opening a second beer.

You should also consider the fact that men, compared to women, don’t
have
all that many innermost thoughts and feelings, and the ones we do have we are not necessarily proud of. Consider the situation of a man and a woman on a first date. I guarantee you they are not thinking the same kinds of things:

What the woman is thinking:
He’s physically attractive enough, but what about his personality? Is he intelligent? Does he have a good sense of humor? Does he have good manners? Is he self-centered or is he sincerely interested in me? Is he involved in any other relationships? Is he in good physical shape? Does he drink too much? Use drugs? Is he trustworthy? Does he have a good job? Would he be a good provider? What kind of family does he come from? What are his interests? What about his values? Are our backgrounds similar enough that we would be compatible? Does he want to have children? What kind of parent would he be? Am I talking too much about myself?

What the man is thinking:
She has a vagina!

Trust me, that’s pretty much all he is thinking. Men have that particular thought
a
lot
. And they think it in a totally positive way. But it’s not something they can
share
. So when you ask us what we’re thinking and we answer, “Nothing,” take it as a compliment. We’re probably thinking about you! Or at least your vagina. Or
somebody’s
vagina. Or the situation at offensive tackle.

The point is, whatever we’re thinking, you don’t really want to know, OK? This doesn
’t mean you can’t have meaningful conversations with us. It just means you’ll have to provide the topics and most of the actual words. But that’s OK! We don’t mind listening! Really.

As long as we can see the TV.