A Different Kind Of Gender Gap

Howard and I are joking as we walk through my front door, but what we see makes us freeze like a politician’s smile.

The living room is full of women.

My wife and some friends are having a get-together. Estrogen is visible in little clumps in the air, the hairs on the back of my neck are doing the wave and I feel as conspicuous as a warthog in the window of Tiffany’s. My fight-or-flight instinct has kicked into overdrive, but I manage to hold it together long enough to cross the room and greet my wife. I do so gingerly, as if traversing a minefield.

Then I’m gone, Howard close behind me, and we wind up upstairs in my sanctum sanctorum, my Fortress of Solitude, my office. Howard shoots me a look over the clutter of my desk. That, he says, felt weird.

I used to think it was just me who panicked upon blundering into a room full of women. But Howard’s reaction made me wonder. So I embarked upon a rigorous scientific study. Meaning I surveyed 10 people, making sure to use responses only from those who met the exacting requirement of answering their phones.

Here’s what I found: five out of five guys confessed to some level of unease at the prospect of wandering into a living room full of women.

“If I didn’t know them,” said Andrew, “I would want to get out of that room.”

“You sort of feel like an interloper,” said Tony. “It’s like, all the (other) men knew they weren’t supposed to be there, except you.”

But when I reversed the question - asked women if they’d feel strange walking into a house full of guys - all five said what my wife did, “Why would I feel uncomfortable?”

Clearly I was onto something here. Just as clearly, I didn’t have a clue what it was. So I turned to an expert whom I chose by the time-tested method of opening a phone book, closing my eyes and plunking down my finger.

Which is how I wound up with a urologist. But on my second try, I kept my eyes open and found Dr. Rick Overman, a psychologist in Fort Lauderdale.

Dr. Rick spun several entertaining theories for me. He said male discomfort could stem from the fact that women tend to be more socially adept than men. He also suggested that men get nervous because “We don’t know what they’re talking about in there,” but we suspect it’s us.

And, he observed, the women’s movement has made it easier for women to come into “our” areas than vice versa. “Women can put on a man’s shirt and smoke a cigar and end up on the cover of a magazine,” he said, adding that you hardly ever see men wearing negligees and smoking little thin cigarettes.

For which I think we can all be grateful.

The thing that weirds me out - and don’t take this the wrong way - is, some of my best friends are women.

(See, you took it the wrong way. Stop rolling your eyes.)

I know that sounds cliche. Maybe even patronizing. But it’s also true. I was never a guy’s guy, never found satisfaction in dissecting last night’s football game or pondering the mysteries of the internal-combustion engine.

I’ve always enjoyed the company of women more. For the obvious reasons, yes, and also for the quality of the companionship, the easy intimacy of the conversation. I guess I thought that meant something, thought it proved that much of what we take to be the inviolable “nature” of women and men was in fact no more preordained than the headlines in tomorrow’s paper.

And I still believe that, I suppose. But at the same time, I also find myself burdened with new respect for the power of biology and socialization to draw lines, set borders, etch wonderful, tantalizing differences between us. There are, it seems, barriers even an enlightened man can’t cross, places even he doesn’t dare to tread.

My living room during a Tupperware party would be one of them.

xxxx