I’ve done all seven of these. More than once. And until today, I would have denied every single one of them under oath (well, maybe not under oath, but you get the point).
Every man I know does at least all of these without question, and the three are just a daily occurrence or happen on a particularly bad day. Women have always suspected as much. We’ve just gotten very good at acting offended when caught.
What follows isn’t a guess about what men supposedly do. It’s a confession, written by someone who’s done the repositioning in a crowded elevator and lived to regret it.
Read on, and you’ll never look at a man stretching, sniffing his finger, or staring blankly into a car window the same way again.
1. The repositioning
When something’s dangling between your legs all day, it ends up in some properly uncomfortable positions, and a quiet, strategic repositioning becomes necessary.
The hand-in-the-pocket method is my go-to: subtle, deniable, done in under two seconds.
But on a bad day, when the discomfort is bad enough, I’ve had to excuse myself, find a private corner, and do a full stretch-and-shift just to get things sitting right again. It’s not elegant.
It’s not something I’d ever explain to a stranger. But every man reading this knows exactly what I mean.
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2. The smelling
If I’ve just adjusted myself, scratched an itch somewhere I shouldn’t mention in polite company, or finished the repositioning above, I’m going to smell that finger. It’s involuntary at this point, a reflex I’ve stopped fighting.
And here’s the part that gets us caught: even when I notice you watching, I won’t stop, I’ll just disguise it.
A scratch at the upper lip. A sudden need to rub my nose. Anything that gets the finger close enough to do its job without admitting what its job actually is.
3. The love brain freeze
The moment I spot a woman I find truly attractive, everything else stops. Walking, talking, thinking, it all pauses while my brain reboots and stares. I’ve walked into a glass door because of this.
A friend of mine clipped a utility pole with his shoulder and tried to play it off as intentional. Somewhere out there, a dog has been startled mid-walk because the man holding its leash forgot he was holding a leash at all.
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4. The target practice
The fact that a man can pee while standing up is never enough. We always have to practice our aiming every time we pee and we’ll always have at least one target in mind whenever we see a new toilet. And we’re always training, as if this were the next sport to make it to the Olympic games!
5. The quick look
We mock women for using shop windows, car mirrors, and rain puddles to check their reflection, and then I turn around and do exactly the same thing.
A quick glance into anything remotely reflective tells me whether I look fine or whether I need to fix something before I walk into a room. The only difference is timing: I do it the second nobody’s looking, and I’d deny it on the spot if you caught me.
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6. The love for stench
Then there’s the matter of my own smell, which I’m fully aware is occasionally unpleasant and somehow still satisfying.
I’d like to blame evolution: somewhere back in the cave-dwelling days, men marked territory the way dogs still do, and maybe a flicker of that instinct survived the transition to indoor plumbing.
Whatever the explanation, I will defend the smell of a sock worn for three days straight, or the kind of fart that clears a room, as something close to personal pride. I don’t expect anyone else to understand it.
7. The spontaneous erections
They just happen. You’re talking with a girl about the recession and the fact that both your parents lost their jobs and – BAM! – your little fellow pops up thinking it has an opinion too. They just happen and we don’t want to talk about them!
There’s no warning, no logic, and absolutely no good way to explain it in the moment. I’ve learned to just keep talking and hope nobody notices.
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Bonus: The Car Concert
There’s an eighth one I never see anyone mention, and it might be the most universal of them all: the car concert.
Alone, at a red light, I am not just driving. I am headlining. Full vocal range, hand gestures, a key change I have no business attempting. And it works exactly as long as nobody else is around to see it.
The second a car pulls up beside me, I clock them out of the corner of my eye, mid-note, and instantly transform into someone who was just clearing his throat. I have never once been convincing.
So there it is. Eight things, not seven, because honesty got the better of me halfway through writing this.
They’re weird, occasionally gross, and every one of them is true. I’m not expecting an apology from the men who’ll read this and recognize themselves immediately, but I am expecting at least one of you to text this to your girlfriend with the caption “this is literally me.”