I’m spending the week with four women; my wife and seventeen year-old daughter, and two of her friends, in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Obviously, they are not my harem or any such thing. Instead, the relationship I have with them is more akin to that of court eunuch to their royal majesties. I have little relevance to them except as their chauffeur, cook, cleaner, muscle man (weakly, but still), and all-around problem solver and blame sink for any challenges or problems they face. While I haven’t actually had my testicles removed so that I might be physically configured in the manner of a traditional eunuch, I am a married man living in these United States of America in the 21st century, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
To a woman, they all love the beach. And by “love the beach”, I mean they love laying around on it, basking in the glow of the warm sun, not unlike the many local alligators on the island bask in the sun between meals, moving nothing except their thoughts in contemplation of their next meal. But the alligators have the good sense to stay off the beach. Not because anyone would bother them—everybody here has pretty much figured out that the gators aren’t a problem if left alone, with maybe a stray yappy dog occasionally sacrificed to the cause–but because there’s nothing there to interest them on the beach. In fact, there’s not much of anything, ever, on the beach except sand. Not even in Hilton Head, which is much more densely populated with wildlife than, say, the Panhandle area of Florida, where the pristine white beaches and clear blue waters are populated by people and not much else. Pretty much all the rest of God’s creation has figured out that the beach just isn’t such a good place to be. But not women.
Women are ostensibly the female version of Homo sapiens. As Aristotle might have pointed out, all Homo sapiens are mammals; women are members of the species Homo sapiens; therefore women are mammals. And Aristotle, who was silly enough to believe that logical premises applied equally forcefully to men and women alike, would have been wrong. Female H. sapiens are not warm-blooded, a prerequisite to belonging to the mammalian club. Females therefore must be either amphibians or reptiles or fish.
If you don’t buy that women are some sort of cold-blooded creature, consider that yesterday when I returned to the beach after having been sent on an errand by the four women with whom I am spending the week in a townhouse (which is substantially nicer than my real house back home) on the Sea Pines Plantation at Hilton Head, all four were wrapped in their beach towels, laying on their rented beach chairs, as if they were suffering through a particularly harsh winter. What had happened? When I’d left them to return to the townhouse to fetch their lunch (a two-mile bike ride both ways, but I love riding the island bike, much more so than sitting around on hot beach sand, so the joke’s on them), they had been positively glistening in the sun. Now, I get back with their still-warm turkey melts (I am a full-service chef in my role as palace eunuch, from short order cook to gourmet) and they’re wrapped up like it’s closer to President’s Day than the Fourth of July.
What had happened? Why, the sun had gone behind a cloud! The temperature was still in the low eighties, and the air, warm-wet-blanket muggy. There was a stiff breeze, as is so often the case at the beach, except of course when it’s really needed to provide some relief from the heat, so the breeze was a pleasant surprise. But not along any stretch of the human imagination could it have been considered cold. No mammal, human or otherwise, would have been shivering or growing a winter coat or wrapping themselves in beach towels for the weather that early afternoon. Pretty much every mammal in God’s creation or contemplation would have been quite happy with the cool interlude after a hot, muggy morning. But not these women. Nor, for that matter, a great many other of them scattered around the beach (to whom I ordinarily pay little attention, as I am not their eunuch, and owe them no services). There were women everywhere bundled up like skinny, leathery-skinned Inuit (do any of the old women know how awful they look after about thirty years of beach worshipping?)
Because women almost never enter the water, I’m guessing that of the three cold-blooded animal types, women must be reptiles, not amphibians or fish. Maybe women are chameleons, as their powers of deception are quite as profound as their inability to generate their own heat. But whatever they are, they aren’t mammals. They are cold-blooded.
Putting female humans into the reptilian category, while they yet have breasts (more than a few of which were prominently on display that day at the beach, at least until the shivery cold lack of sunshine covered them up) and don’t lay eggs, presents something of a problem to the Linnaeus classification system. But Nature’s truth cares not a whit about human classification systems. Ask a duck-billed platypus. Create a new genus or species if the behavior of human females so confounds the classification system. But don’t put them in with mammals. They aren’t mammals.
This should be obvious to any male of the species who has suffered through a winter wearing shorts and t-shirts indoors because the heat is set so high they would otherwise be sweating, or alternatively, to anyone who has sweated through a Southern summer (as your author has many times), wishing to allow the air conditioner to do what God intended it to do, while the women are still so cold when indoors that they wrap themselves in blankets. Women are cold-blooded. They love the beach as only a cold-blooded reptile could love the beach.
As much as men know and understand why most of Nature shuns the beach, they can still be found there, usually standing around with a forlorn countenance, wondering what else there might be to do in light of the conditions, than uncomfortably sitting in the sand and sweating and acquiring a fine layer of grit to chafe their whole bodies. Sometimes, they’ll throw a ball or Frisbee back and forth between themselves, marking the time to which they’ve been sentenced as pleasantly as the conditions allow.
Males of the human species go to the beach almost as much as the females. But only because the females go there, and the males happen to be either seeking a mate for reproduction, or have already been selected by a female for the purpose of reproduction who demands their attendance in such venues. The females dress as provocatively as possible to entice the males to want to join them in their lizard paradise. They would mostly prefer that the men want to do what they are being made to do. But it rarely works to get a rise from them. Men at the beach are like Panda bears in captivity, unable to muster much lust for anything in their imprisoned condition. Men go to the beach because they have to, to keep their cold-blooded masters happy. They don’t go because they want to, and no amount of scantily clad female flesh can mask the reality of their captivity.
Alas, I risk hell in stealing away time from my palace eunuch duties to set out these observations. Aside from their cold-blooded bodies that are unable to generate their own heat, female brains are quite reptilian as well, attuned to danger at all times, and there is nothing more dangerous to the female mind than a man who thinks for himself. I must go before I am caught and severely punished. Probably with a turn-around beach trip.