Help the Handicapped

A friend of mine has a plan for what to do about men. It’s just not good enough to roll one’s eyes and then, casting one’s glance toward the nearest woman, exclaim, “Men!” Nor is it humane to dismiss them out of hand as insensitive brutes and go on to live one’s life without them. There’s another way, says my friend -- a sensitive, kind way to embrace our benighted brothers, to accept and love them in spite of their frailty.

Men are handicapped, indeed they are cursed, by their own primary sexual characteristics; those pieces of lumpish skin that men are forced to drag around with them all day and all night, carry the seeds of their destruction, asitwere. Let us call those seeds testosterone poisoning or TP. (TP represents an equally appropriate French phrase “tant pis” meaning, when accompanied by a Gallic shrug, “Tough, dude.”) Thus poisoned, men are frequently, with no warning whatsoever, rendered blind, deaf, dumb and stupid to everything around them; they might as well have been cattle-prodded when their genitals stir, for all the good they are at that moment to themselves or to the rest of the human race. Too often, the poor darlings, when recovering from a case of TP, slap their foreheads and say, “What have I DONE?” Too late, way, WAY too late. They’ve already picked a fight with a guy two stones heavier, or micro-managed the best assistant in the world to the point where she quits on the spot, or, say, they've inadvertantly invaded Iraq.

Fortunately for the rest of us, TP also renders men extremely distractible; when we see one of them careening wildly off course, preparing to roll a grenade into someone’s life, or indeed into their own, it is OUR responsibility to make them an offer that will guarantee interruption. Oral sex would work, in fact according to the Sweet Potato Queens, just the OFFER of oral sex does the trick; you don’t actually have to do it to derail the onrushing disaster. When they show up to collect (if in fact they remember what the original offer was, or even that one was made), they can be distracted again by something else, like food. Or a soft porn flick.

Anyway, my friend’s suggestion is that men be declared handicapped, because indeed they are. With certification (granted them merely by their showing they in fact do carry the lumpy skin), they can have a much easier time navigating this world. Men can gently be diverted or distracted by anyone noticing one of them headed for trouble. They can have their own parking places, each place being the width of two normal ones so that they don’t risk having the paint job on their cars scratched. With designated parking for men, the rest of us can get out of their way when they’re pointed towards one of them; that way we don’t risk their ramming us if they think we’re trying to get to it first. (The fact that ramming another car does WORSE damage to the paint job than if someone merely opens her car door into a fender is, apparently, NOT THE POINT. Someone wants to take his parking space and NO FUCKING WAY, man.)

To help these poor creatures even further, we can at government expense give any man who seems to need it his very own little nation, tailored to fit inside the average two-car garage; these nations can take the form of miniature railroad layouts, for example, or modeled terrain with little lead soldiers, or GI Joes complete with tanks and IED’s (filled with paint balls, of course). These little setups would make a lot of gun and bomb noises, which seems to make men very happy.

We could provide men with (cute and bubbly) robot personal assistants, who will scurry at The Boss’ first directive, and pour coffee, and compliment them on their ties, and admire their new putters, etc. These robots could even clip the ends of The Boss’ cigars and then declare how it loves the smell of cigar smoke and could it have just one teeny little puff? Then (still scurrying) it could go off to make sandwiches for poker night.

The new self-lowering toilet seat is a huge step in the right direction. We have been much too harsh on the men who neglect to lower the toilet seat, insensitively calling them lazy or stupid or themselves insensitive. What has happened when they leave the seat up is a severe case of TP. Apparently just getting a glimpse of their lumpy skin brings on an attack; they are so busy admiring themselves they cannot REMEMBER to lower the seat. (Plus, if they touch the seat, they might have to wash their hands -- something to be avoided at all costs; it’s so DEMEANING.)

Now, I ask all of you to help this cause; please contribute any suggestions you might have. We’ve all had enough of this injustice; let’s give the poor bastards a break.