Ironic moves of men and women

Like you, I do not recall much of my toddler experiences, but I have a crystal clear memory of my first loose baby tooth. It was a monumental experience as I sat between my grandmother’s knees, and she pulled it out. It was a crude, dramatic, painful, bloody affair and from that day onwards, I kept other loose teeth a top-secret, until one grew over the other. With a knife and steely determination, that tooth was pulled out.

Thereafter, I pulled out all my loose teeth, bare-handed, myself, ninja style. My brother always looked at me like I was some Dracula, popping out a tooth and walking about with blood dripping from the mouth. Try as he did, he could not manage the feat. I saw this scenario play out when my daughter emerged from the bedroom, with a bloody mouth, calmly holding a tooth.

“I pulled it out.”

Her brother tried this a month back and he could not. “It’s too painful.” He whined.

I have come to understand that a woman’s pain threshold is nine times higher than a man’s. This was designed to help a woman deal with childbirth, and I suspect, to help us navigate heartbreaks. Because these sons of Adam can mince your heart and make soup of it.

A woman’s powerful pain threshold is what ensures the continuity of humanity. Can you imagine the crisis of gross, global under-population that would be there if men got pregnant?

Incidentally, women can block pain memories, until she is back in the labour ward. A man will watch a fighting match and feel the pain of the punches he is watching. The irony is that men get themselves into painful experiences and risky behaviour, more than women.

A woman’s immunity is better than a man’s. Man flu is real. Be kind. Stop laughing when he says he is bedridden with the flu. While we can nurse the flu, menses, and a toothache without losing sweat, men get terribly ill. The irony is that they get the flu once a year but resist our attempts at feeding them vitamin C supplements. Asking him to get a flu vaccine is akin to asking him to face the knife again.

A doctor told me how difficult it is to get men to seek diagnostic treatment. “Men show up when an illness has progressed too much to help them.” She said. “What started as a slight discomfort when swallowing ends up being a crisis because he will only be dragged to the hospital when he can no longer swallow even saliva.”

Women show up in droves for medical screenings and will attend seminars on health matters. A man would rather feed on some herb that a seller with a scanty character promised would enlarge, prolong, or outperform than get a screening of their prostrate.

On average, women tend to live longer than men. Women sense danger better than men. Not many a woman is willing to climb up a twenty-foot ladder, even though we are lighter. We understand the power of gravity and feel no need to test or compete with it.

Men understand that women have an elephant memory. We remember scents, people’s faces, and, of course, events because our emotions are involved in all these. That is why we can be stuck in an issue and harbour a grudge for months. We remember what you said, how you said it, and can deduce why you said it. We remember details of an argument and are stunned when you say that you cannot recall the issue.

Women perceive more colours than men and have superior taste and scent senses. Ironically, men are more visually oriented than women. Women make better morning people than men and handle sleep interruptions better. This makes a lot of sense. I remember someone losing their temper just because a foot bumped into him at three o’clock in the morning. Women’s bodies can stretch to phenomenal breadth and shrink, magically to their original sizes. Men will find it much harder to shrink their extended bellies.

Women like things slow and sensual while men like the opposite. With many couples, it can be a case of the fast and furious, with the man being fast and the woman furious. Women really, truly get offended by seven-second jobs. It is better not to start the job at all than start and end before she can even say, play.