If you haven’t seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video, above, watch it — it’s fascinating.
The video — which has sparked some controversy — suggests that women are unfairly self-critical about their appearance. They tend to describe themselves in a way that is much less flattering than others would describe them. Why? Could it be that women view themselves as being compared to some ludicrous standard of female perfection, and never quite measuring up . . . and therefore they downplay their own, true attractiveness?
Men don’t seem to have this problem. Most men don’t seem to think that they should look like the models seen in Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Why not?
If you’ve been to a wedding in the last five years, you’ve probably seen an IFDC. It forms when high-spirited young women forsake the need for a partner and rush the dance floor, forming a circle. They bounce up and down and clap and do some secret dance unknown to anyone over age 30 while one circle member after another moves into the center to cut a rug. The participation in the circle is 99% female; rare, indeed, is the Y-chromosomed human who has the confidence in his dancing ability to break into the circle. And so the IFDC goes on and on, unbroken, a living thing, throbbing and shrieking as each new favorite song comes on.
Predictably, no male — except perhaps an unlucky waiter — will be present for the affair. In fact, if they have any say in the matter, neither the groom nor any man in the family will be anywhere in the vicinity during the shower or for a reasonable interval before and after. Their Bridal Shower Avoidance Syndrome has kicked in with full, testosterone-laden force.
The 
For generations, men have bemoaned baldness. They think women find bald men unattractive, and third parties think chrome domers are pathetic. Now 
Every guy knows this, whether they’ve had the brutal misfortune of receiving a shot to this extremely tender area or have only witnessed it happen to some unfortunate wretch standing nearby. Why is this so? 
It’s interesting that, even as they talk about gender equality, our world leaders still cling to old-fashioned, sex-specific forms of greetings. Angela Merkel leads an economic powerhouse that props up countries like Greece and is supposed to figure out a way to bring fiscal sanity to the Eurozone, yet every time she goes to a summit meeting she’s got to put up with getting smacked on the cheek by every head of state in attendance, like she’s their favorite granddaughter.
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You sheepishly admit that you didn’t talk about any of that stuff — or anything else of significance, besides. And your wife, arms crossed, fixes you with a withering glare of disbelief — causing you to shrivel inwardly with intense embarrassment, realize for the first time the full and tragic extent of your brutish insensitivity, and vow that you will finally become a decent, nurturing member of human society.
But there is a deeper answer. Any guy who grew up in America probably has been forever influenced by Jonny Quest. Jonny Quest was a ’60s cartoon, shown in reruns forever, that featured the teenaged hero, his mystical, turban-topped friend Hadji, his father Dr. Benton Quest, Race Bannon, a combination bodyguard and tutor, and the irritating dog Bandit. Every week they had amazing adventures and barely avoided certain death. They rode in hovercrafts. They made it into sleek planes just before spears thrown by Zulu warriors clinked harmlessly against closed hatches. They escaped pterodactyls and swamp creatures. The YouTube video below of the show’s opening and closing gives you a sense of what the show was like.
In any case, the study debunks the canard that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would mean that men think about sex 8,000 times in a 16-hour day. Instead, the study found that the male subjects reported thinking about sex between 1 and 388 times each day, and the female subjects admitted to thinking about sex between 1 and 140 times per day.
We’ve all seen fake smiles — in school pictures, on the faces of clerks taking orders at Starbucks, from politicians, and in countless other scenarios. It turns out that people are better at detecting fake smiles in photos than in real life, because we tend to study photos more closely. And the key indicator of fakiness is not the position of the grinning mouth and bared teeth, but the eyes. A muscle around the eye called obicularis occuli contracts when a real smile flashes across the face, giving the eyes that crinkle that separates the real deal smile from the pretenders. Most people who aren’t actors, con men, or psychopaths just can’t control that muscle.
Studies also indicate that women smile more than men. The theory is that girls are encouraged from an early age to be more expressive emotionally than boys. Girls also learn faster than boys that a good fake smile can be an appropriate, polite, social response under certain circumstances — like when Gramma gives you a lame gift for your birthday. In view of that, it also should not be surprising that women tend to be more adept than clueless male brutes at detecting fake smiles in others and accurately determining what a person’s smile really means.
