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Dashboard Light,” for example, is longer than dental school.
    I am the only man in the spinning class. The rest of the spinners are women, including the instructor, a terrifyingly fit personal trainer named Erica, who could defeat you in hand-to-hand combat using only her earlobes. If we ever decide to get serious about forcing captured terrorists to talk, she is the person to do it.
    ERICA (STARTING SONG): Now we’re going to pedal to this .
    TERRORIST: Not “American Pie”! Please! Waterboard me!
    Anyway, when the spinning class is over, the women often talk, and as you might expect, the topic they discuss most often is the technical features of their cell phones.
    Seriously, their favorite topic is relationships, defined as: What Is Wrong with Men. I have been a man for my entire adult life, and I have spent much time in male-only groups, and I can state for a fact that women think men are a lot more interesting, as a conversation topic, than men think women are. Sure, men will talk about women, but generally these conversations are brief and factual:
    FIRST MAN: Did you see that?
    SECOND MAN: Yeah.
    FIRST MAN: Whoa.
    SECOND MAN: Yeah.
    FIRST MAN: So how do you like your new phone?
    Sometimes, if a man is in a relationship and he’s talking with a really close male friend, the conversation will get a little deeper:
    FIRST MAN: Tracey’s really pissed off at me.
    SECOND MAN: Why?
    FIRST MAN: I don’t know.
    SECOND MAN: That sucks.
    FIRST MAN: Yeah.
    SECOND MAN: So how do you like your new phone?
    But this kind of probing, soul-baring discussion about women is rare for men. Whereas women, including women who hardly know each other, can talk for hours about men without getting bored. They find us fascinating and mysterious. They want to understand us. This is baffling, because men are not complicated and generally state their views clearly when asked, especially if you compare them to women.
    Take gifts. If you ask a mother what she wants for Mother’s Day, she’ll say, “Oh, you don’t have to get me anything.” This is of course a lie, as most men have learned, usually painfully. If you were stupid enough to actually give this woman nothing for Mother’s Day, she would be deeply hurt. Because when she says you don’t have to give her anything, what she means is that she doesn’t want to have to tell you to give her something; she wants you to spontaneously, on your own, without prodding, select some thoughtful and appropriate and utterly useless gift that shows how much you appreciate her and how much you think about her on Mother’s Day. She wants a fuss .
    Whereas when a man says he doesn’t want anything for Father’s Day, he means—pay close attention—that he doesn’t want anything for Father’s Day . He has already received too many Father’s Day gifts that he will never use. He views Father’s Day as a load of crap dumped upon men by the restaurant and greeting-card industries, working in collaboration with women. He would be thrilled if his family celebrated Father’s Day by going to a restaurant without him, leaving him on the sofa, snoring to the soothing sounds of televised professional golf.
    But when men say they don’t want anything for Father’s Day, women choose not to believe them. Women love Father’s Day, because it involves cards and gifts and family get-togethers and various other fuss-tivities that men generally dislike and women generally love. This is the real reason why we celebrate Father’s Day, not to mention birthdays and anniversaries, which men would not even pretend to care about if women did not make them.
    (I realize I am making some very broad generalizations here. Deal with it.)
    Another example is weddings. When two young people become engaged, the bride-to-be always tells the groom-to-be that she really truly wants him to be an equal partner in the wedding planning, because the wedding is for both of them, not just her. This is of course another lie. What