[Okay,
I have been over the below a few times now,
trying to find a way to slant the wording so
that you will not read it and say, ?geez, that
Scott sure is a misogynistic pig! How appalling
that he thinks all women are oversensitive and
that men can?t share their honest opinion! I bet
he has no women friends at all.? I would really
love to avoid driving everyone to that reaction.
But I can?t find a way to do it. So I will tell
you now that I think women are the coolest
things on the planet, and that I really do not
have any problem with the way interactions
happen and that it?s all cool. It won?t help,
but at least I tried.] I am at the gym for
something like the second time after two week's
absence, suffering the torment of the damned,
needless to say. Alas! If only M&Ms were not
so darned delicious, perhaps I would not need to
generate calorie-burning opportunities for
myself. And if wishes were horses, beggars would
ride, yeah. Behind me, a guy is looking at his
hair in the mirror, and picking at it. He is
complaining to a nearby woman about his hair. "I
hate it like this, it just looks like crap. Like
I put a dozen things in it or something." The
girl, presumably his vague friend, or gym
friend, or whatnot, says, ?it?s not so bad.?
Ouch! Even eight feet away, I cringed at the
damning-with-faint-praise inflection. I had the
hardest time stopping myself from saying aloud,
?ooh! Rookie mistake!? Because, speaking in
general terms, no guy in the history of Homo
Sapiens would ever have fallen into that trap if
the gender roles in that conversation had been

reversed. In fact, there were probably several
alternate branches of evolution that were
brought to a premature end by their males?
inability to sidestep loaded questions like ?do
these pants make me look fat?? Darwinian
processes weeded out the unfit and slow,
resulting in a finely tuned male species, which
understands that correct responses might have
included, ?geez, I don?t know, how are you
feeling about it?? ?it looks great to me!? ?you
look sharp!? ?you can change it if you want, but
I certainly cannot see anything wrong!? (any
qualifiers whatsoever are bad: ?...but I

certainly cannot see anything dramatically
wrong!? for instance, is a mistake). The
interesting thing to me, though, was that the
woman felt comfortable saying that to the guy.
He asks, ?does this hairstyle work?? and she has
no problem at all giving her opinion, even
though it might make him feel bad. She clearly
did not worry that he was going to have a
strongly negative reaction, or read more into
her statement than what she actually said, or
any of the things that would make a guy tread
carefully on that same ground. What makes that
difference? Is it because guys are not

conditioned to attach the same degree of
importance to their appearance as women are, so
a slander against our appearance is not taken
personally? Or are guys just expected to be more
emotionally resilient; able to handle the
occasional unintentional slight without
requiring explanations and apologies? Or
possibly that we generally truly do not care,
and hearing our hair sucks has the same
emotional impact as being told we need to wash
the car? What would it have looked like if there
had been two girls having the conversation? I
took a quick poll at work, and the girl >
girl equation was much more complicated. The
general feeling was that they might have tried
to be a little politic if the friend was a
casual friend. But if the friend was a very
close friend and was having hair problems, then
suddenly they were willing to be brutally
honesty and even remove the girl bodily from the
room to find a mirror and begin hair repair
procedures. And if it were two guys having that
exchange, well, guys would just never have that
exchange. Oh, and everyone was appalled that the
conversation I overheard took place in a gym at
all. We were generally more of the camp that
rolls out of bed, tosses on some clothes, and
smoothes down our bed-hair as gym preparation,
rather than the camp that would get glammed up
and avoid sweating at the gym. And of course,
exceptions exist, I am not trying to say no guy
has ever made the occasional rookie mistake, or
that even seasoned guys do not screw up every
now and again. And I have seen women say
unintentionally hurtful things to other women
with the best of intentions, and so on and so
forth. But by and large, I really think that
conversation plays out four or five very
different ways depending on the gender
composition.