Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? (2 page)
This book is dedicated to all the little things that made the production of this book possible and daily life more enjoyable:
A Ambien, Apple Computer, American Idol, Artichokes, Almodóvar
B Bar Pitti, Beer, Balneol, Breakfast Burritos
C Chocolate-Covered Espresso Beans, Chewy Tiny Sweet Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, Chicken Livers
D Diet Mountain Dew, Daytime Movies, Daydreaming E Egg Whites, Espresso
F Flip-Flops, French Fries, Formula One, R.W. Fassbinder, John Ford
G Google, Grand Theft Auto
H Hot Dogs from Gray’s Papaya, Hot Tamales, Hou Hsiao-hsien
I Internet, iPod, Allen Iverson
J Joe’s Pizza, Jamon y Queso, Jaromir Jagr
K Knicks, Sandy Koufax
L Listerine,
Law & Order (Criminal Intent)
M Mets, Mary’s Fish Camp, Maalox, Maker’s Mark, Manny Being Manny
N
New York Times,
NPR, Nyquil, Novocaine
O Osso Bucco, Oysters
P Propel, Percocet, Pedro, Albert Pujols,
Project Runway
Q “Quail Hunting”
R Red Wine, Red Vines, Red Bull
S Sour Skittles, Scrabble, Survivor, Steak Frites, Sushi
T Target, Tequila, Tums
U UV Radiation, Underdog
V Vasoline, Valvoline, Velvet Underground, Vitamin C
W WD 40, White Castle
X X-rated anything
Y Yoo Hoo
Z Zeppelin, Zzzzzzzzzzs on the couch with the baseball game burbling in the background…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Billy:
To Brody Alexander Goldberg: In utero, you inspired this book, and in the flesh you continue to amaze me and your mom. I would also like to thank my parents for all their unwavering support. To David, Patty, Mara, Lily, Dana, David, Lewis, and Benjamin: This ride wouldn’t be as much fun without you. To all my friends and to everyone in the Emergency Department: Thanks for the support and for keeping the abuse to a minimum.
Mark:
To my brilliant and beautiful daughter, Gaby. Miss Higley Higgs. I LOVE YOU. (I know…my b’s 2 b.)
Together we would like to thank…
Amanda Urban (you’re the best), Carrie Thornton, Penny Simon, Steve Ross, Jenny Frost, Jim Walsh, Jennifer Smith, and Alison Schwartz.
OBLIGATORY PRELUDE TO THE FOREWORD TO THE PROLOGUE TO THE PREFACE OF THE INTRODUCTION
OR DOES ANYONE READ THIS CRAP?
Okay, so here we go again….
It feels a bit different this time. When we were writing
Why Do Men Have Nipples?,
we had no idea that anyone (other than our editor, wives, moms, and dads) would read the book. Shows what we know.
Our little nipples book has sold more than a million copies internationally and spent twenty-five weeks (and counting) on the
New York Times
bestseller list. You have no idea how much we have loved this ride and how much we adore babbling on TV, drive-time radio, and especially in the makeup rooms where we shamelessly flirted with a succession of fantastic makeup artists at all the major networks. (By the way, Mark prefers the spray-on nozzle method which he likens to being simonized in a car wash.)
But a funny thing happened along the way. We quickly became aware of the fact that we’d barely scratched the surface. As we talked to people who’d enjoyed our first book, we began accumulating hundreds of new questions—some funny, down-to-earth, exotic, some embarrassing, some perplexing, but always thought-provoking enough that we knew we’d have to include them in a brand-new volume.
We realized the gravity of the somber task ahead of us. We felt deputized. We knew we were now bound by honor and a fiduciary duty to you, our readers, to deliver unbiased, unadulterated, thoroughly researched, and unimpeachably factual answers to your questions. Humbled, but galvanized and inspired by the immense challenge that lay before us, we hunkered down in a windowless, antiseptic research cocoon, and made a solemn pledge to produce a new volume that would surpass the original and blaze new trails in the democratization of medical knowledge….
Oh please…SEQUEL!!!!!!! Here it is…
Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex?
Leyner:
You there, Nip Bro?
Gberg:
Yeah.
Leyner:
Just hit the motherload of medical
anomalies and bizarre conditions!
Gberg:
Halleluyah.
Gberg:
Get us some words too!
Leyner:
It’s the table of contents of some
obscure academic book…but it lists
everything…we just have to pick and
choose and look some shit up online…but
it’s a complete list. You’ll be delighted.
Gberg:
You are prolific!!
Leyner:
Don’t worry. Soon we’ll devote
ourselves fully to the book. We’ll get it all done…no problem…and have a
blast too! I promise you.
Gberg:
Will you promise me a rose garden?
Leyner:
Alice in Wonderland syndrome!!
Leyner:
People who see things in the wrong
proportions…very small or very big!!!
It’s an actual syndrome!!
Gberg:
It wouldn’t be bad to have someone
with that syndrome check you out with your pants down.
Leyner:
Here’s a whole list of prefixes (e.g., brachi) and suffixes (e.g., plasy, algia, etc.)…we could make a little game of create your own pathology.
Gberg:
I also heard that they are changing the name of the disease Reiter’s syndrome because they found out Reiter was a Nazi.
Gberg:
Excellent.
Leyner:
That’s fantastic!!
Leyner:
We should also tell some stories…
Gberg:
We only have eight weeks to finish the book.
Gberg:
Tight. Very tight.
Leyner:
I know. We’ll do it.
Leyner:
We could do the book in a month.
Gberg:
It will require a lot of chocolate-covered espresso beans and diet Mountain Dew.
Leyner:
And we have two.
Leyner:
We should really consider a research person.
Leyner:
Let’s talk about it on Friday…
Gberg:
Or a geisha.
Gberg:
A research geisha.
Leyner:
Someone to squeegee our ball sweat.
Gberg:
Mine are as dry as the Gobi.
Leyner:
Maybe we should even save this.
Gberg:
Consider it saved.
Leyner:
From now on we should save EVERY one of our IMs.
Leyner:
Seriously.
Leyner:
OK.
Gberg:
Done!
Gberg:
OK, let’s talk later…
Leyner:
Later.
Leyner:
Victory or Death.
CHAPTER 1
BATTLE OF THE SEXES
It’s
9
A.M
. Leyner and I are sitting in our office, awaiting our first patients. After finishing
Why Do Men Have Nipples?,
we decided to go into practice together. Leyner’s BA in English and Masters in creative writing hardly qualified him to treat patients, and his adamant refusal to seek higher medical education didn’t help matters. (Leyner was violently opposed to the idea of attending school again. During a rather heated discussion of the issue, he smashed a printer we’d just purchased for our new office, and scrawled an adolescent vulgarity on a print of van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
hanging in the hallway.)
When Leyner regained his composure, we realized that the thing that made our partnership work was our fanatical mutual admiration, our boundless love of arcane medical matters
and
our capacity to talk endlessly about our own insecurities and desires, and the personal crises and dilemmas in which life occasionally ensnares us. For some bizarre reason, people other than the two of us seem to be interested in what we have to say…. We finally agreed that if Dr. Phil could do it on TV, why couldn’t we offer our learned and empathic counseling services. This would preclude the need for advanced degrees, and, I also figured it was a way to safely keep medical instruments and sharp surgical devices out of Leyner’s emotionally unstable grasp.
Our office assistant, Wendy Thurston, who was recently fired from her position as senior editor at Half a Dozen Ponds Press after she was arrested for shoplifting lipstick from a Rite Aid, escorted our first patients of the day into our office. They were a young couple. The woman was attractive, conservatively dressed, and—at first glance—seemed somewhat despondent. Her husband, dragging behind, seemed more interested in the defaced painting in the hallway than in being here to address “issues” with his inexplicably unfulfilled wife.
“Who wrote ‘sniff my crotch’ on the van Gogh out there?” he asked as he took a seat next to his wife. “I love it!!!” he guffawed, slapping his thighs.
His wife grimaced with chagrin. “You see,” she said, “I married a philistine and a troglodyte.”
“Insult me in English, you pretentious bitch!,” the husband replied. Leyner assumed a fighting stance—the Drunken Crane pose of the Shaolin School.
I remembered the last time that Leyner assaulted a patient and, hoping to avoid more litigation, I interceded and suggested that Leyner’s pose is the typical noncommunicative and defensive position that spouses take and that this impedes further discussion. A dissapointed Leyner shrugged in agreement and slouched into his leather armchair.
As I turned to the fuming couple, I asked them to role-play with us. I offered to play the husband to our female patient and Leyner enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to play wife to the man.
I began, “Sometimes patients feel more open and honest with a surrogate spouse, so I want you to tell me exactly what you need from me in this marriage.” Sheepishly the woman responded, “I need a partner, a soul mate, someone to talk to. Sometimes I just want to be heard. I don’t need someone to solve all my problems, I just need someone to hold me and listen.” The husband jumped at the chance to answer his wife, but I stopped him.
“I want you to respond to Leyner as if he were your wife. This will keep the two of you from becoming defensive and allow you to see each other’s point of view.”
Confused, the husband looked at the beaming Leyner and said, “I listen, I hold you, but it’s always the things that I don’t do. I feel like you don’t appreciate the things that I do. I barbecue, I walk the dog, I take out the garbage, I even put down the toilet seat. What do you want me to do? Lactate?”
Leyner rose from his chair red-faced, tears welling in his eyes, spittle flying from his mouth as he gesticulated with melodramatic hysteria.
“Bastard…You stole my youth and now you’re drowning my soul in your vile bullshit. You make love to me as if I were some inflatable doll—pumping for a minute or two while you watch
Sports Center
and then losing consciousness. You’re torturing me…I hate you. I HATE YOU!!!”
Tears streamed down Leyner’s face as he wept uncontrollably. The couple sat silently, completely and utterly confused.
So much for the role-playing. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the Battle of the Sexes, but here are some answers….
WHY DO WOMEN PEE MORE THAN MEN?
Any man who has taken a long car trip with a woman truly believes that women need to pee more than men. As we speed down the highway and begrudgingly pull into another rest stop, we wonder whether this is the result of a genetic difference, obsessive water consumption, or a vicious plan to throw us off schedule.
If you happened to be leafing through the February 5, 2005, edition of
The Journal of Urology,
you could begin to find an answer. Doctors reviewed twenty-four-hour “urinary diaries” of both men and women and recorded fluid intake and urinary frequency. They found that women do pee more often than men but not because they drink more. In fact, men generally have higher fluid intake but don’t need to go as often. When men finally feel the urge, they tend to pee in higher volumes than women. This is because men have a larger bladder capacity. That means smaller bladders in the ladies. Women are also more likely to suffer from overactive bladder syndrome which makes them go even more. No wonder the line is always longer at the ladies’ room.
Diaries and memoirs are a red-hot genre these days. There’s
The Diary of Anne Frank,
Che Guevara’s
Motorcycle Diaries, The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,
Karrine Steffans’
Confessions of a Video Vixen,
and, of course, James Frey’s
A Million Little Pieces.
But, if you’re inspired by literary ambition, and decide to keep and then publish your Urine Diary, be aware that it will most probably be classified as “nonfiction.” You must account accurately for each and every drop, with absolutely no embellishment or hyperbole. Remember—if you fib in your Urine Diary, it could really piss off Oprah.
WHY DO WOMEN HAVE SMALLER FEET THAN MEN?
Overall, women are smaller than men. The “why” is an evolutionary question that is too complex for us to answer here. But the ways in which men and women differ anatomically is more approachable. Male and female feet differ in size relative to stature. Men of the same height as women tend to have longer and wider feet.
When you compare a male and female foot of the same size, the woman’s foot will have a higher arch, a shallower first toe, a shorter ankle length, and a smaller instep. Women also have larger calf circumferences.
Women seem to have an incredible knack for disregarding the shape of their feet and forcing them into ever smaller and pointier high heels. This callous disregard makes the foot differences between the genders even greater by ultimately changing the natural shape of female feet. In 1993, it was reported by the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society that 88 percent of the women surveyed wore shoes smaller than their actual foot size. No wonder our wives are constantly patching their traumatized feet with Band-Aids and tape.
ARE MEN BETTER THAN WOMEN AT MATH?
Danger! Danger! Answering this question incorrectly may force us to sleep on the couch with our wives beating us with the infamous Teen Talk Barbie that was programmed to say, “Math is hard!”
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers stepped into this minefield in 2005, when he suggested that biological differences might be one of the reasons that fewer women are in the fields of science and engineering. His speech led many professors to protest his statement, and others threatened to withhold donations. Several days later, Summers was forced to apologize. And he has since resigned.
So here are some facts (though these are often debated)….
The brains of men and women are definitely different. Women’s brains are generally about 10 percent smaller than men’s, but this is meaningless when it comes to intelligence. Men and women show no disparity in general intelligence. There are, however, some areas with slight variances. Women are better at visual memory, mathematical calculation, and get better school grades in mathematics. Men, however, are better at mentally rotating shapes, mathematical problem-solving, and score higher on mathematical word problems and on tests of mathematical reasoning.
Whether you agree or disagree on the interpretation of the available data, sociologists generally agree that social factors exaggerated any differences touted in the past. Women are clearly underrepresented in certain scientific fields such as math, engineering, and physics, but women now comprise more than 50 percent of medical students.
In the interest of gender harmony, let’s create a new politically correct, asexual Barbie who says something neutral like “Cognitively rotating abstract shapes can be a daunting task—I prefer mathematical calculation and more linguistically complex and empathy-centered forms of interpersonal communication.” Fun!
WHY DON’T MEN LISTEN?
For this one, Dr. Billy exhaustively searched for an answer. How sweet would it be if there existed the perfect scientific comeback for the next time a women screamed at you, “Why are you ignoring me!”
Well, here are the inklings of our anatomical answer….
In the September 2005 issue of the journal
Neuroimage,
psychiatric researchers at the University of Sheffield reported that male and female voices activate distinct regions in the male brain. The scientists monitored the brain activity of twelve men as they listened to male and female voices. They found that in men, women’s voices stimulate an area of the brain used for processing complex sounds, like music. Male voices, on the other hand, activate a region of the brain used for producing imagery. This may suggest that, at least for men, the female voice is more complex and more difficult to hear and understand.
But there’s more…
An earlier study in the July 2001 issue of
Radiology
also showed that men and women listen differently. In this study, researchers at Indiana University had twenty men and twenty women listening to a passage from a novel. While listening, they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. A majority of the men showed exclusive activity on the left side of the brain, but a majority of women showed activity on both sides of the brain.
Now there is certainly more research to be done, but we can put these two pieces together and start to make a leap toward excusing occasional male lapses in listening to their female partners.
So men out there, here is our suggested comeback when you are accused of not listening:
Honey, I try so hard to listen. It’s just that my brain is incapable of doing what my heart desires. (Then go back to watching football.)
WHY DON’T WOMEN HAVE ADAM’S APPLES?
The Adam’s apple is simply a bulge in the human larynx that is made of cartilage. This area is called the thyroid cartilage because it is located right on top of the thyroid gland. If you want to get technical, you can also call it the prominentia laryngea, but Adam’s apple is much more quaint, don’t you think? It also is not exclusively a guy thing. Both men and women have thyroid cartilage and therefore an Adam’s apple. They are about the same size until puberty when increased testosterone causes it to grow more prominent in men.
For some women, the Adam’s apple may be larger than desired. But fear not, modern plastic surgery can fix almost anything. All you need is a tracheal shave to reduce the size of the Adam’s apple. This sounds like it can be done down at the corner barbershop, but it actually involves making a small incision in the throat and cutting away some of the prominent cartilage. This is one of the most common plastic surgeries for male-to-female transsexuals, unsurprisingly.
So where does the name Adam’s apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick—Adam’s apple, Adam’s pomegranate, Adam’s banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.
12:35
P.M
.
Gberg:
Hey, what was that title that the Aussie radio guy suggested?
Leyner:
You Put WHAT, WHERE?!
Gberg:
I think we should use that.
Gberg:
Rectal foreign bodies are the new iPods.
Leyner:
You make me laugh…
Gberg:
WE NEED TO HIRE A TEAM OF OOOMPA LOOMPAS TO HELP US RESEARCH.
12:40
P.M
.
Leyner:
That’s what I tried to tell you a long time ago, motherfucker. Why don’t we?
Leyner:
Can’t we find some “young person” to do the raw research and then we’ll parse it and pickle it.
Gberg:
Raw research?
Gberg:
Sounds like a porn film.
Gberg:
Subtle.
Leyner:
Subtitle.
Gberg:
Raw Research—A Nipple Brothers Production starring Lance Boyle.
Leyner:
“Raw Research”…starring the
Nipple Brothers. I like that.
Leyner:
Middle finger would watch that.
Gberg:
Maybe we should have a Bravo show where we pick a new Nipple Brother.
Leyner:
The supernumerary nipple.
Gberg:
You need a catchphrase.
12:45
P.M
.
Leyner:
It should take place in some fetid garage meth lab in Nipple Ridge…
Gberg:
Mammary Ridge.
Leyner:
Sorry…I knew something was wrong with my geography…
Gberg:
We can make it a combo of
Project Runway
and
Biggest Loser.
Leyner:
And we get gorgeous, desperately horny actresses and models to play crank-addicted skanks from the Ozarks…and…and…and…they fluff us all day long…as we decide who’s gonna be the 3rd Nip Bro.
Gberg:
There aren’t enough good crank-addicted skank parts for actors these days.
Gberg:
That should be its own category at the Oscars.
Leyner:
And the winner for…crank-addicted skank…ooooh, I’m so nervous I can’t even get my trembling tweaking fingers to open this fucking envelope…
12:50
P.M
.
Gberg:
This IM thing is dangerous. I am supposed to be researching the new temporal artery thermometer and instead I am rambling on with you.
Leyner:
It’s…LISA KUDROW!!!!!!!!!!!! Mazel tov, you drooling skank!!
Gberg:
You need some anger management.
Leyner:
YEAH BABY!!!!
Leyner:
I’ll call you later.
Gberg:
Ciao.
Leyner:
Ciao.