Woman Moment

 To be a man is to have an excuse. 

Women are too difficult to understand. Their emotions are opposite their words. They laugh about womanly things – makeup, clothing, maybe – and exclude men. When they do consider men, it is from a negative perspective. They continually choose loneliness for men as they know that a man becomes small before the possibility of a woman’s interest. A woman might outwardly present as beautiful because she can wear appearance-enhancing products. She will use this mirage to manipulate a man. Her target will then wake up next to her and see hair on her cheeks and smell her unperfumed sweat.

There are many things that women are expected to do. These are not particularly unusual, but it would be socially irresponsible to ask any man to reciprocate these tasks. The man must leave the house and hunt prey. He has to sit in a cubicle chair or clock into the back-line. Here, the man will be busy being smart and very sneakily looking up his coworker’s skirt. He will also spend the day being innocuously stupid. He will accidentally say something crude in a self-proclaimed pathetic attempt at communication. He will leave the simpler tasks – throwing out used napkins, flushing the toilet – to somebody else, not because he wanted to be rude but because his mother, a woman, never taught him to do these things. He will spread his legs on a bench or train or bus because his ass is sweaty. If acknowledged, he will close his legs and sit in quiet discomfort like a woman should, but he will be embarrassed to be womanly.

The man should never clean dishes. In fact, a woman shouldn’t teach him how to do dishes. He must stay focused providing for them, for their children. The man has earned his time to sleep in and take long showers. This time is limited if he were to clean the home he occupies. Thankfully, most women know not to ask men anymore; even asking is a waste of the man’s time. And no, it’s not that the man doesn’t care. He wants a clean space but is simply too dumb to create it for himself. He is innocent! The woman never asks him to help, so he doesn’t. His mother never taught him to vacuum or sweep, so why would a woman expect him to just be able to do it now? When a woman demonstrated to him how to run a load of laundry, she did a poor job and he wasn’t able to retain the steps. But even if she had, even if he knew, even if he could – why? Why would he? A woman does these things. A woman can. A woman should.

To be a man is to put your head in your hands because your wife, who is having a pitocin-induced labor with a failed epidural, is making too much noise for you to sleep after a long shift. To be a man is to take a nap when she asks you to watch your newborn while she cleans up the puke that has set into the carpet – the same puke you saw last night while you peed on the rim of the toilet. To be a man is to call yourself a father when you put on television for the baby who has shit itself in the high chair that you’ve left it in all afternoon, walk away, and then immediately complain about the smell to your wife who just got home from the store because you were too confused by the baby formula aisle to determine what food to feed the  child that you “father.” To be a man is to get upset when your wife mentions the way in which you bastardize yourself as incompetent and useless in order to be a lazy man. To be a man is to require a woman to tell you all of this to have it cross your mind. That's your excuse.