"Wow," I said. "How'd you get that?"

She looked at it, puzzled.

"I don't know."

"When did it happen?"

"No idea."

This sort of thing drives men crazy. "How can you not know how you got
a welt like that?! You didn't steal a PlayStation 3 recently did you?"

"I just don't complain about little bumps. Some of us are hardier than
others," she said, knowing full well I would now be forced to defend my
honor by slandering her in the newspaper.

I'm normally not one to generalize. People who generalize are lazy
thinkers whose ideas should be used for entertainment purposes only
and do not reflect the views of the Mariner or her parent company,
AOL/Time Warner DaimlerChrysler Frito-Lay Hingham Lumber. That said,
I think all spammers should be summarily executed. I also think women
bruise more easily than men. At least the women in my life seem to. I
can bang my shin against the open dishwasher door as I did just this
morning, hard enough to cause a hairline fracture and ten full minutes
of profanity, and I won't have a single mark to show for it. I get zero
credit. Meanwhile all it takes is a hard stare to turn my sister black
and blue, and my daughter Mary is a certified wimp with marks on her
thighs that suggest she's jousting in her free time.

This bruisability discrepancy leads to a lot of arguments over whether men
or women are physically tougher. The argument always ends the same way,
too. Guys can talk all day about things they voluntarily endure--war,
rugby, clothes shopping, you name it--but inevitably the subject of
childbirth is brought up, the women in the room cross their arms and
smile triumphantly, and the men have to think of a totally different
conversation they can dominate.

I want to be clear that I have every sympathy for women over the whole
childbirth thing. I'm easily the biggest fan of epidurals that I know. It
should be illegal to perform a bikini waxing without first offering an
epidural. I would change my name to Mister Epidural if I didn't think it
would give my wife another excuse to claim we're unrelated. But there
ought to be some way to resolve the "who's tougher" question without
resorting to apple-and-orange comparisons.

A college dorm mate of mine thought he had the solution. He bet
his girlfriend that if they ran at each other and crashed head-on,
repeatedly, that she would complain before he did. This seemed like a
fair contest to us, the mostly drunken crowd egging them on. The two
of them were about the same weight and height. Neither one played any
contact sports. So with great fanfare they separated by fifteen yards,
faced each other, and we all yelled, "Go!" They ran toward one another
at a speed that surprised even the sober among us and at just the last
instant she raised her left knee--she later claimed it was an involuntary
reflex--and nailed him right in the groin. They bounced off one another,
she spun around and stayed on her feet, and he crawled very slowly to
the emergency room while we tried to raise her on our shoulders but
mostly fell over and went to sleep in the courtyard.

This argument may have higher stakes for me than it does for most men.
I'm married to a second-generation immigrant of farming stock who
doesn't believe in injury timeouts, naps, or relaxation of any kind for
that matter. Both she and her mother have one goal in life and that is
to keep moving. If you have nothing pressing to do at the moment you
should go milk a cow. If you have no cow handy I'm quite sure there's
something you can shovel--just keep busy. Entertainment, breaks, terminal
illnesses--these are indulgences to be scorned. They're really a lot of
fun, these two. Unfortunately I have the biorhythms of a large cat. I like
to sleep in, work intensely hard for about thirty minutes, then snooze
till dinner and spend the night hunting for funny clips on YouTube.
It's all very primal, and obviously it clashes with my wife's agrarian
nature, but so far we've managed to work things out by yelling a lot.

I'm sure the relative pain threshold issue will never be resolved between
my wife and me, let alone between the sexes. But I will say that if
tomorrow the responsibility for giving birth were somehow shifted from
women to men it's not true that we'd be doomed as a species. We would,
however, be real sticklers for due dates.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset, unaware that his wife has recently begun
leaving her keys in his car and parking it just a little bit closer to
the street every night.