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"Why won't you attend wedding and baby showers?"

I get that question a lot. I have lots of reasons. For starters, I don't enjoy them. I work in the office and my wife handles the domestic front, thus making much of the stuff received at baby showers something of a (boring) puzzle to me. I also detest the androgenizing of America, from women sportscasters in men's locker rooms (or no one in men's locker rooms) to men using skin care and beauty products. But here's my real reason: When growing up, showers were for women only. Until I know why showers were for women only, and especially as long as the showers deal with things that have little interest to me, I'm staying away.

Is the foregoing merely the rambling of a crank? Possibly, but how about a little science to back-up that crankiness? I found this in a recent issue of Psychology Today: "Put aside Simone de Beauvoir's famous dictum, 'One is not born a woman but rather becomes one.' Science suggests otherwise, and it's driving a whole new view of who and what we are. Males and females, it turns out, are different from the moment of conception, and the difference shows itself in every system of body and brain." The author then spends 2,500 words to explain the sea of changes that separate men and women, concentrating most on important differences between the sex's brains.

If men and women are that different mentally, perhaps it makes sense that my wife finds certain things enjoyable that I don't and (she'd hasten to add) vice-versa.

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