I was with friends at a pub recently, engaged, as always, in serious intellectual debate when someone made the claim that women can't make machine gun noises. Not, they clarified on questioning, without an actual machine gun, anyway.
We decided to test the point, which was met with a suspicious lack of indignation, scientifically. With very little prompting, the men at the table launched into their best imitations of firearms of varying calibres as well as some unsolicited heavy ordinance and an occasional distant, vaguely Scottishsounding scream, which was weird, for effect. More than one was so enthusiastic he emptied his imaginary clip and had to reload.
Beaming with pride and soaked in each other's saliva, the male test subjects agreed that their efforts had been frighteningly realistic.
The women's submissions, in turn, varied in quality, but by and large sounded less like high-calibre automatic weapons and more like someone saying the word "putty" a few times with low to moderate enthusiasm.
We concluded they sucked.
I agree - as they pointed out - that it's not immediately clear why this matters. And I admit it's difficult to come up with a plausible scenario where this particular skill would have an application in the adult world. Prospective employer: "Well, you're certainly qualified to be our director of marketing. . . . Oh, one more thing. We'll be opening our next board meeting with a huge fake gun battle. I trust you can do an AK-47." Job applicant: "Tchtchtchtchtchtchtch!" Employer: "Well that's excellent. The last candidate came in here and just started saying 'putty'."
Applicant: "Kaboom! Agh! My legs!"
Employer: "Yes, that's good too."
Applicant: "Blam! Chunkchunkachunka! Die Nazi scum! Dive dive!
Employer: "What? Are you on a submarine now?"
Applicant: "I'm not really sure."
Employer: "Whatever. You're hired."
Applicant: "Nice."
Employer: "You can get down from the desk now. Here's something to wipe your face."
Regardless, the exercise raised some interesting questions. Were we dealing with a unique group of individuals, or was this indicative of a larger gender divide? And if so, what caused it?
Other people at the table had their own questions too, such as "Who cares?" and "I'm going to the bathroom."
On reflection, it seems likely the discrepancy has its roots in childhood.
As a boy, I learnt many of my early life lessons from the very clearly boyoriented shows I watched on TV. Problems, I learnt, are generally simple and stem mostly from evil organizations in interesting costumes bent on destroying America in wildly elaborate ways. The issues they raised could be resolved only through a combination of shooting extremely poorly and kicking people in the face, or, in more serious instances, blowing up secret bases.
By contrast, the very clearly girl-oriented shows which I pretended never to watch revolved mainly around caring and horses. These taught boring, useful lessons such as resolving disputes through communication, valuing friendship and other things that didn't obviously require machine guns.
This divide unquestionably shaped my imaginative play. While I certainly wasn't unfamiliar with wussy pastimes - those colonial postage stamps in the crawl space didn't collect and label themselves - the vast bulk of the games I engaged in with contemporaries involved pretend situations which required us to pretend kill each other, usually with small arms fire.
Obviously, I don't know everything my female friends got up to in their childhoods, but I got the sense from those at the pub at least that violence didn't feature prominently. One noted, for example, that when GI Joe did appear in her creative scenarios, he was far less interested in defeating COBRA than he was in starting a family with a series of well-dressed bears.
As a boy, I had to know how to pronounce the word "tchtchtchtchtchtch!" and they didn't.
Interestingly, the forces that created this split may still be at work today. On a recent visit with family, I brought my five-year-old nephew an overdue birthday gift. As a responsible and caring uncle who doesn't have to live in the same house, I chose for him a car that shot up a ramp and exploded a monster.
One would think that would be entertaining enough in itself, but he nonetheless quickly modified it by removing the monster and adjusting the slope to create a kind of shouldermounted car-gun that can fire Hot Wheels at high speed into one's uncle. It was, objectively speaking, awesome. And he easily provided the sound effects.
Is this a phenomenon that needs to be addressed?
It was noted during our scientific exercise at the pub that the inability to imitate an Uzi didn't seem to have held back any of the women in their lives or careers to any obvious degree. And their amazement at our masterful demonstration was at best qualified: "That was like watching Saving Private Ryan except you couldn't see the guns and they only cast morons," or words to that effect.
Obviously, the day a robot made of other robots attacks their lunar base, they'll be talking a different game.
Tchtchtchtchtchtchtch!
