Men: Lovable but dumb

And so we enter the holiday season, or, if you like, gift-giving season, as it is most represented on these shores.  There is already a big kerfuffle about Walmart opening on Thanksgiving for the first time as Black Friday begins to give way to Glazed Over Thursday.  And of course we all saw our first Christmas ads and hummed along to our first carols well before the left-over Halloween candy was fully consumed.

Be that as it may, this is a particularly difficult time of year for the male of the species as the pressure to produce the right gift for one’s beloved is exceeded only by the pressure to discern what that gift might be.

Men, you see, generally don’t have antennas for such things, or if they do, they aren’t in good working order.  We are more like television sets of the 1950s with rabbit-ears antennas wrapped in tin foil that had to be jiggered with every fifteen seconds to stop the picture from dissembling or to make the ghost images disappear.  For those too young to remember the pre-digital days of TV, go to YouTube for disturbing example of the dark, blurry age of television viewing.

In any case, the American male finds himself still very much technologically backward in the area of gift selection. Yes, we understand that despite your declarations that, “Oh, I really don’t need – or want –anything”, you have, in fact, been dropping hints like Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs along the trail for months.  No doubt we’ve been told in a 100 subtle ways what your fondest desire is.  But these signals, so self-evident to you, are not so clear and obvious to us. Continue reading →