I was reading Tracy Clark-Flory’s “In defense of casual sex” over at Salon, about which I may have more to say over the weekend depending on how sun-stroked I wind up taking my kid to the beach.

But her third-last sentence, unrelated to the general topic of the essay, is that her current boyfriend is remarkable in part because she’s “never felt the need to challenge him to an arm wrestling match.”

Which only reminds me of a piece of advice I was just recently giving to both my brother and my brother-in-law: never get into an arm wrestling match with a woman. You cannot win. I know this from experience, and I would have known it from logic if I were not so enthusiastically refreshed on the occasions when I learned it from experience.

Men, guys, boys: you will be challenged by those of the female persuasion. Maybe even often, if you’re flirting right. This challenge will almost always come up as a sort of jokey-flirty thing. You need to find a jokey-flirty way to avoid taking the challenge. Try protesting that you would surely lose — because you would, in a way, either way — and ask her to spare you the humiliation. I will say it again — you cannot win.

If you arm wrestle a woman, in a bar, in front of all kinds of other people, there are four possible results I can imagine, and let us look at how you lose in each case:

1). You quickly and convincing pin her arm down, therefore, according to the rules of arm wrestling, “winning.” However, according to the rules of real people everywhere (including the bar you’re in), you “beat a girl,” which is the same as losing. Also you look like an asshole, in the same way and for the same reasons that a phys-ed teacher gleefully slam-dunking over a four-year-old’s head in a game of one-on-one basketball looks like an asshole. You do not win. Not really.

2). You lose. By definition this is not winning. In this case, additionally, you have been “beaten by a girl,” which makes you look like a wimp to exactly the same degree as beating a girl makes you look like an asshole (worse, you could also look like an asshole at the same time, too — just ask Bobby Riggs). This is true no matter how enlightened your audience may profess to be, and no matter what they say to you about it after the fact.

3). You let her win. By definition, again, this is not winning. But in this case, you look like a patronizing jerk who has made a big show of approaching competition with a woman in the same way you would a game with a child. Plus, secretly, everyone will wonder if you made a big show of losing on purpose because you were afraid that you couldn’t have won if you had tried.

4). You win after a hard-fought battle. This combines the worst of result 1) with the worst of result 2). You beat a girl — tough man! — and, at the same time, you almost didn’t. And while the veins were bulging out of your neck and you were grunting and wrenching in your effort to win, everyone had ample time to consider just what an inadequate flyweight you are.

So the rule is this: Do not arm wrestle a woman. Ever.

Photo by Dan Bennet, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Tags: Arm Wrestling, bad ideas, physicall challenges, Salon, Tracy-Clark-Flory

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Posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 9:13 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.