All Women are Crazy but Some are Crazier than Others

By Nick Nafsak et. al.

The battle of the sexes has been raging for centuries. It is a battle that has never been won, will probably never be won and yet, it continues. It can certainly be argued that along the way, men and women have learned to get along, to develop flourishing and remarkable relationships but most importantly, they have gained a deeper understanding into one another.

"All Women Are Crazy – But Some Are More Crazy Than Others" is an offering meant to further that understanding. It presents the notion that at one time or another (though rarely clinically so), all women will be unbalanced, of unsound mind or at the very least, will do something that can and will be considered "crazy." It is not a condemnation of womankind, for the theory asserts that it is a product of biological programming from which women cannot escape. Furthermore it contends that while men may appear to dislike this aspect of women, were they to be honest about it, most would admit they prefer it that way.

Undoubtedly a controversial book, "All Women Are Crazy" takes an unflinching look at the interaction of men and women and dares to declare what few others will say.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Nafsak et. al.
• Release date: Jun 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458038937

Nick Nafsak et. al.

The “virtual” authors of this book exist only in the fertile brain of the Author, which has been, charitably, described as “cyberspace, almost totally devoid of cyber.” Like the late Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti; they have numerous doubles who appear on their behalf, for the appropriate fee, in public. They also answer the telephone in a variety of scrambled voices designed to be disconcerting to even the most determined of telemarketers. Nevertheless, this work is inhabited by real people, men, women, and others, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. If you recognize yourself herein, perhaps you should have your own cyberspace professionally examined.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

by A WOMAN

This is an outrageous book, written, I suppose, by two outrageous people. At least, I suppose they are people, and there may just have been two of them. Or not even two, who knows? Does it matter? Sure it matters, it didn’t just write itself. I hope you enjoy the product. But, like me, I’m sure you will wonder about it. All I can be sure about, for my part, is that no woman could or would have written it. Perhaps it was written or dictated by a couple of little boys?

Whoever wrote it, I don’t think they meant any harm. Most likely it was just something they had to get out of their systems. Men and boys can be so hurtful sometimes, without really meaning to be. So, why pay it heed? It isn’t as though it were written by someone important, like say, Rush Limbaugh or Al Gore. Every woman knows that trying to get an ink stain out of a white blouse only helps spread the mess. So, why, then? Why take the bait?

Because, because it is so outrageous. So provoking. So maddening. So utterly and completely wrong. And because they knew we would. It’s like all the maddening, stupid things men do (now they’ve got me generalizing, too). It isn’t worth an answer, but they make us feel we have to give one anyway. Perhaps this ought really to have been an epilogue. Aren’t women supposed to have the last word? It isn’t hard to imagine what that word might be were this criticism written by a man!

So, what’s the point, here? Is this more than just tongue-in-cheek, (good?) humored give and take? A patronizing come on, even? (Working women know all about those!) What are they (whoever they are) trying to say? Does the title really say it all? So is all the rest no more than supporting evidence or whatever? I’ve thought about this a lot since the manuscript first came into my hands. I have decided, tentatively at least, that these guys (yes, guys) are serious. Mistaken they may be, but they do mean what they say. So, what do they mean? They mean we’re crazy, that’s what-all of us. So what’s crazy? O.K. men and women are different.

What’s new and earth-shattering about that? Yes, I know, a whole library of self-help books to improve relations between men and women has been built upon that foundation. In another context, it became received learning that the Media was the Message. Now it seems, the difference between men and women has become the message; sent by modem or fax from Mars to Venus (and back), presumably. Our minds and bodies work differently. That’s all fact and all old hat. But to say that these differences make us crazy is - well, crazy. That isn’t science, it’s just ill-natured criticism. I am not crazy, buster, just because I am not like you and don’t see the world through your eyes, or react to it like you do.

No matter how hard we try, we often fail to understand each other. Sometimes, we simply don’t work hard enough at it. This produces resignation or a lot of unhappiness. But this isn’t necessarily craziness. To say that it is no more than name-calling. I am not crazy just because I don’t agree with your world view. So why should you think I am? And, here, we come close to the heart of the matter. I’m not trying to turn the tables, but consider this. Suppose I were to write a book titled All Men Are Crazy, but some are more crazy than others. How many of my own sex would subscribe to such a thesis? I do not claim to have conducted any in-depth, intensive studies on this, but I’d bet it would be a whole lot fewer than the men who would, quite uncritically, look at the title of this book and loudly proclaim, right on!

Is this more than a certain kind of prejudice, or is this truly rooted in the male psyche? Men may not believe all women are clinically crazy (whatever that may mean), but few would find it difficult to accept that the way women, generally, see things, do things, is (at times - a useful, necessary caveat) so bizarre, so divorced from male logic as to suggest some kind of mental sickness. This, justifiable or not, is the central thesis of this book. I am content to leave it to others to decide whether or not the authors make out their case.

I cannot, in all candor, recommend this book. Indeed, prudish though it may sound, I was disgusted by it and not, primarily, on account of its occasional, forced, it seemed to me, profanity. It should certainly carry something like the Surgeon General’s Warning and on no account should it be introduced into homes where there are children. No. What disgusted me was the banality of it all. If it was meant to be funny, it isn’t. If it was meant to be taken seriously, it won’t be. Why, then, bother. Because, if nothing else, it must have taken a great deal of effort. This, more than anything else, puzzled me. I didn’t, I still don’t, get the point. Perhaps instead of the suggested Admonition, it should simply have printed in bold letters on its cover, FOR MEN ONLY. Even they might be more than a little disappointed.

If it’s so boring, so inane, so futile, why am I getting so steamed up about it? And why is it outrageous? Not on account of its content, certainly, or the positions it takes. This is a free country, people can write what they choose, and the reader can take it or leave it. You don’t have to like it, agree with it, or put up with it. Any woman, who bothers to read it, will know what has gotten me all riled up. It’s a put-down, masquerading as something else. It’s one of those things you want to pick up and throw at the person who gave it to you. Or at the people who wrote it. I, like a fool, wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Through intermediaries, I addressed my concerns to them, in writing. In particular, I asked the question concerning what bothered me most of all. I asked, what was your real purpose in writing this? Their (?) reply clinched the matter for me: we hoped it might help us get laid!" Good luck!

Disappointed, but sane in Hoboken, NJ

I am fascinated by women who are divas and who are completely self-absorbed and a little bit crazy!

––Candace Bushnell

A bisel? Oi, vai!

––Ani Kabouk

The mind of a pretty girl, he said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. I don’t know. They’re all crazy.

––Brian Howie

(Peacemaster)

If he don’t know, who do?

––Ed

Part The Oneth

Make a habit of saying outrageous things. It matters not whether they be true or false as long as they are memorable. You will then be labeled a philosopher or a charlatan, which often amounts to the same thing.

––Harry Cho Sen

A distinguished, English establishment of higher learning has it that one should never apologize and never explain. While this no doubt makes a certain, political sense for the governing classes (for whose instruction it was seemingly designed) it has not been something that has found invariable favor in our own scheme of things. We like to feel that when we have done something calling for an apology that it should be offered unreservedly and forthrightly in humble recognition of our error. We feel no such compunction, here. Undoubtedly, some will find what we have written offensive, maybe even hurtful. So be it. We feel no responsibility for your feelings, though it is certainly not our intention, even inadvertently, to wound them. While, of course, we would like you to like and approve of what we have written, we recognize that many of you will not. Again, so be it. If you don’t like what we have written, write your own book.

This, then, is not a justification. We see no need for one. We wanted to write this book; it was simmering inside us. So we did it. Books are unbelievably easy to write. The only difficult part is getting them published. Publication is inhibited, frustrated, by insulting too many people, or insulting them too much. Sometimes, manuscripts are not published simply because they do not insult enough people or insult them enough. So much for First Amendment rights! Seriously, we have no quarrel with all this. Publishing anything is expensive business. It should, at the very least, pay its way. Most authors secretly dream of a best seller; if they don’t, they should. For many, it is just a matter of getting what has to be done out of the system. So, while we pass on from the non-justification, we feel obligated to offer the odd explanation, or two. Explanations are helpful to the critically inclined reader. Why do you say that? What do you mean by that? call for sensible, considered answers by those hoping to be taken seriously. And because we do, we have thought it useful to offer, in anticipation, some answers to questions likely to be posed.

We live in sensitive times. We were about to observe, casually, that this has the ring of a Chinese curse about it when, on reflection, we realized that this might, by some, be adjudged not politically correct. Then we reminded ourselves that as we have already seen our efforts characterized as outrageous, we might be thought wimpy if we showed any signs of retreat on this account. So we didn’t. And we hope we shall not in the future. Being outrageous demands that one be consistently so. It isn’t easy. It is all a little like carrying out research on human subjects. It is so easy to be misunderstood. (Oh! For heaven’s sake, get on with it, as the Actress is said to have said to the Archbishop.) Patience, dear reader, patience. At which point, we recollect the old saw:

Patience is a virtue,

Possess it if you can.

Found seldom in a woman,

And never in a man.

And we ponder, was this last line added for political correctness or just to make it scan?

Sensitivity is very inhibiting. People are so attentive to the sensitivity of others that they no longer say what they mean. Or even mean what they say. People are no longer plain-spoken. Weighing one’s words before spewing them forth, is no bad thing in itself. But when it is an artifice, what we have to say necessarily comes out as artificial. We shall not be blunt for the sake of being blunt or outrageous, but we shall not indulge, either, in circumlocutions for the sake of respecting sensitivities. We see no virtue in bluntness for its own sake, but in dealing with sensitive subjects it has become a necessity to announce, in advance, one’s intentions to avoid misunderstandings. That way, we can be sure of grinding everyone’s axe except our own. We, accordingly, elect to face what we believe to be the critical issue head on. Are the authors anti-women? Situating the matter in its current, recognizable context, we might argue that it is perfectly permissible to write about mad cow disease, in all its ramifications, without being suspected of being anti-cow. Indeed, we confess to a distinct fondness for bovines of all kinds from the one that Jumped over the Moon to the one alleged (our sensitivity is showing through?) to have been responsible for the great Chicago fire. We are, not unnaturally perhaps, even more fond of women. To us, they are distinctly more delectable and infinitely more mysterious and, yes, precious, than Elsie or any of her relatives. Yet we draw a subtle distinction here in honor of bovinekind. While, in a certain sense, a sizeable number of cows seem to have become infected with B.S.E., it is a far cry to asserting, boldly, that all cows are crazy, but some are more crazy than others. Permit us, then, to develop the distinction.

The bovine tragedy obviously evokes sympathy among the intellectually unbiased. After all, the poor cows whose brains have been addled did not ask to be fed pellets elaborated from the ground-up corpses of incinerated, infected sheep (however tasty). They were at the mercy of unscrupulous humans brought up on a puritan ethic of waste not, want not. Their craziness could hardly be ascribed to Darwinian origins. Put simply, their madness was not their own fault, anymore than homosexuals of the eighties could be blamed for the original propagation of AIDS as a result of doing what their ilk had been accustomed to do since at least the time of the earliest cave paintings.

Purely for the sake of argument, here, and without prejudging the development of our case, let us suppose the condition of womankind is as our acknowledgedly controversial title suggests. Who, it may be asked, engendered this condition in them? Where is the external agent, the maleficent microbe that propagated this disease in women? All cows may soon be crazy (at least in the UK) although some, eventually, may be crazier than others. But they didn’t bring the mischief, knowingly, upon themselves. Can the same be said for womankind? Patience, dear reader, once more, we shall be getting, eventually, to whether this morbid condition may too, have been induced by man.

Moreover, mad cow disease is clearly an aberrant condition. It is evidently a deviation from the norm. That is implicit in its appellation.That is why we describe it in the terms we do. All cows do not suffer from it - at least not yet. Here, we come to a blatant contradiction, upon which our own thesis uncomfortably rests. Craziness, as we have defined it, is the norm in womankind. So how do we define craziness?

When I use a word, said Humpty Dumpty, it means exactly what I want it to mean and nothing else. The question is, said Alice (that archetypal, little woman to be) whether words can mean so many things. The question is, rejoined Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master, that is all. We may not pay our words as handsomely as the Egg, but we do expect a not dissimilar degree of obedience. There is a big bone of contention, here, and it has some interesting pickings upon it. Some words have a popular meaning, like psychopath or terrorist (these are always popular, especially with those who write scary stuff) and sometimes these same words are used by others to convey a more exact meaning in the context of their own, particular disciplines. All’s fair in love and literacy usage, just so as we all understand when we are talking about the same thing. The word ‘crazy’ is one of those that lends itself rather nicely to a lot of different things. (as Alice might have said). You want to go for a swim? says the Eskimo to his wife. Are you crazy, it’s fifteen below out there, she replies, Twenty five years ago, said the financial analyst, I told them the Dow would go to 5000 in 1995. They said I was crazy, wanted to put me in the loony bin [Author’s note: this is a special receptacle where Canadians save certain of their coins. This note is introduced here (incongruously, in the shape of a coin) so as to give this book Canadian content to enable it to be imported into and sold in Canada. So much for The NAFTA]. O.K. so we made all this up, it doesn’t count towards establishing usage. How about this, then, that someone else made up and published in The Wall Street Journal (an unimpeachable source for our money. Take that how you please).

Yellow Pages Unbound

They say that in the future, you’ll be able to open for busi-ness and have millions of customers stop by at once. They say that you’ll be able to advertise across the country for a fraction of what it costs to reach the same market today.

We say they’re crazy! Because you can do it all right now.

[Closing note: "if you think I’m going to do that without wearing a condom, you’re crazy".]

Our point? Simple. Crazy is as crazy does. Crazy is just another of those slippery words, like obscenity. Hard to define in suitable terms for the purists, but you sure know it when you see it. Problem is, we can all see it differently. What may be crazy in your book may well not be crazy in ours. Like it or not, we each have our own measuring stick. So we’ll just tell you how we calibrated ours. But first, let us make an important point, here. A person who is not otherwise crazy may, on occasion, do something most people would regard as crazy. What distinguishes such cases, which are not all that rare? We say of things like this, at times, That was dumb, stupid, crazy - weird, even - but there was a method in his madness. The aberrant nature of the act held our attention, but beneath it all we could make out a purpose which, however bizarre, somehow made sense. Real craziness makes sense, too, but usually only to the actor.

We believe everyone, male or female, is entitled to their own little bit of eccentricity. We would not label anyone crazy just because from time to time they act a little bit odd. How would we measure what is a little bit, for there is a fine line in all this? We do not propose an exhaustive, situational review at this point, for our position will become sufficiently clear as we proceed. But let us suggest the following for starters. Wearing one brown sock and one black sock, consciously or unconsciously, might strike some as a little bit odd, but who would notice if you were wearing boots? On the other hand, wearing one black shoe and one brown one would certainly mark you out as more than a little bit odd - especially if you went shod after that fashion to a formal business meeting where your attire might be expected to come under scrutiny. There are surely limits to the unconventional and there are those who delight in testing them. But what has to be done before people cry out, You must be crazy.

We hold the belief that those felt to be crazy, in some matter or another, act outside conventionally acceptable, objective bounds of rationality. We believe, too, that all humans are generally impelled to act because of reasons guiding their actions. They may be mistaken, misguided, flat out weird in their beliefs, but there is always a reason for what they do and it can be divined in every case even if it has been obscured from the view even of the actor. Irrational does not, therefore, mean without reason, but rather that the reason impelling the actor is one that a substantial majority of others would find the greatest of difficulty in holding as justifying what was done. While extreme cases make bad law, they are often useful in pointing up critical differences. We appeal to such a device, here. Suppose an individual had a perfectly functional, and to all intents and purposes, normal left hand. Suppose, further, that individual, after some deliberation came to the conclusion that the hand in question was always responsible for acts of mischief that, within the actor’s own scheme of things, were harmful or downright wicked. That would be a good and sufficient reason for the actor to chop off the offending member, if thine left hand offend thee, etc. Most, on excellent grounds, would argue, per contra, that such dismemberment was irrational, on whatever footing (handing?) it proceeded, and they would argue that the self-mutilator was crazy.

Suppose, however, exactly the same action were taken to avoid, say, military service. We might exclaim, I say, that’s going a bit far. We could well disagree, violently, with the rightness or the appropriateness of the act, but few would feel impelled to challenge its basic rationality. Extreme it might be, misguided in every sense, but its purpose would hardly evoke an unqualified characterization of craziness. The matter is not put to rest simply by reason of there having been other less painful or dramatic alternatives to have accomplished the actor’s goals. We can, at least, accept, in this case, a method in the madness although we could not adopt it or sanction it as our own. There is a kind of balance of harms in this that gives the action a rational character that, however, repugnant to a majority somehow takes it out of the crazy category. People are always betting (even the farm) against the odds and, on occasion, even come back from Vegas with a pocketful of winnings. The criterion seems to be: however wrong-headed, does it make any kind of sense. And to whom?

What is irrational to a man may well be perfectly rational to a woman. But there is a common standard that crosses gender boundaries. Sally Field, I think women are different. Of course they are: they’re supposed to be. Men and women do, however, do things that both genders would agree are crazy - or not, as the case may be. If we admit that a woman’s view is legitimate, we must, in fairness, admit the same with respect to a man’s. However, unpalatable such a view may be from a woman’s point of view. So, then, this book is written, decidedly, from the male perspective, according to men’s standards, based on men’s experiences. It does not, automatically, preclude the possibility that some women might share these views of what we shall argue is crazy. But, here’s the rub: all women are crazy? How can you possibly say that? We just did. [Editor’s note. It should not be inferred from the preceding that this book was produced with the aid of one of those awful little machines known as tape recorders.]

As we wrote (yes, wrote) this, we felt the need for the interpolation of a brief, methodological observation. How, the purists will argue, can you make so sweeping a generalization about all women from so small a sample? You haven’t met all women and you are not likely to do so. What about the dead ones and those beyond your reach, just for starters? We make no retraction on this account. Our contention is that being crazy, as we are in the process of explaining, is as much a part of being a woman as having a cunt. [There, that got your attention, didn’t it?] For us, the peculiar kind of craziness, with which we believe all women to be endowed, is as much a psychological identifier as that wonderful, incomparable sexual organ is a biological one. We have observed it [craziness, not cunt, stupid. What do you think we are, perverts?] in females of the tenderest years through the distinctive charms of the intact centenarian. Thus, for us, PMS and menopause are not aberrations. They are simply the tip of the iceberg enabling the knowledgeable and the forewarned to divine the five sixths that ordinarily repose beneath the surface.

Men, of course, do crazy things, some more so and more often than others. Such nuttiness has multiple origins, stimuli, and manifestations. Some are contrarians while others are genuinely sick. Our argument, here, is that feminine craziness is constitutional (not that kind of constitutional). It is part of being a woman. It is as much a part of the female make-up as anything purveyed by the Avon lady. However, incomprehensible to most men, and unrecognizable to most women, it is like Mount Everest, a fact of life. And just as much a part of nature. When you come up against it, you had better be appropriately attired for the experience. What we have denominated crazy, is the very essence of woman. Perhaps they ought to carry some prominently displayed Surgeon General’s Warning? It would be unlikely to be heeded any more attentively by those at whom it is directed than its counterpart affixed to cigarette packages. But, we digress. [At least we warned you that we were about to do so.] Women’s craziness, on the other hand, generally manifests itself without warning. It has a mercurial quality about it. In some, it lies dormant for years, only to erupt, unexpectedly, in obedience to some inexplicable stimulus with all the force of Mount Pinatubo [or Popocatepetal]. Some women, of all ages and ethnic origins, do become mentally ill, in varying degrees, as do their male counterparts. When we say women are crazy we are not referring to such psychoses or neuroses from which they might happen to suffer. They only serve to confuse the issue. Women’s craziness is more akin to that elusive concept, psychopathy. And is just as difficult to define to everyone’s satisfaction. [giving up, huh?] Not on your life! We have not yet begun to fight. [Editor’s note: full of it, aren’t they?]

In our opinion, women’s craziness, as that phenomenon interests us, is not occasional or episodic. It is constitutional, something in the genes. Like the poor, it is ever with us, or, more properly, them. Moreover, we do not believe it can be extirpated without doing fatal damage to the organism. Men, and the women in whom it resides, just have to learn to live with it, and cope with it as best they can. If your woman happens to be Venus de Milo, she may be relatively, armless [sorry, couldn’t resist that!] but, in general, these tendencies are troublesome to all and need to be taken seriously. Women are not only capable of doing crazy things. They do them - frequently. Worst of all, women seem to have no control over their doing of them, or often enough, any real appreciation of their implications. There is not merely a contrast of feminine as opposed to masculine logic at the root of all this. There is a real air of bafflement about the process. It is crazy because what is done simply doesn’t seem to make sense. To the doer or anyone else, women are a constant surprise, to themselves and others. Most of all when it would be plainly, in the eyes of others, more sensible, more reasonable, more in the actor’s own interests, to do things differently.

Let us inject another point, here. Women do not, invariably, act against their own interests or self-destructively, though we would argue that constitutionally they are prone to do so. We have the highest respect for feminine intuition in action. We accept it as a demonstrated fact though we have not the slightest idea how it works. But we do, nevertheless, have a problem with it. We have noted, with no little curiosity, how often the Fair Sex seem to ignore or override what this extraordinary faculty seems to be telling them. It is a little like taking the batteries out of a smoke alarm because you don’t like the sound it makes when it goes off. Women often argue with their intuition or set themselves against it when they don’t like the message it is sending them. Women’s intitution is an atavistic attribute. It has not yet been civilized out of them. Disobedience to what it communicates is crazy. It is like having wings real, functional ones, not Opus-like stubs and using them just to strut. Women’s craziness is a witches’ potion. It is made up of an extraordinary variety of ingredients. Every manifestation of it has the potential for being different from every other. For the casual, the unwary, the unknowledgeable observer this can be very deceiving. Some women do appear to be so unaffected by this condition as to make others seem, by comparison to be totally round the bend. But this is really no more than an affirmation of the coda to our title that some women are just more crazy than others. But we must be careful, on that account, to avoid the tail wagging the dog, (or in this case; if you will pardon the expression [Editor’s note: which we are certain you will not] the tail wagging the bitch). At the risk of being repetitious, (actually we took useful instruction in this from Dr. Joseph Goebbels), women are crazy because they are women. It is not something they can avoid. Nor does there seem to be any cure, though the more severe cases do, on occasion appear to abate or go into remission. For the rest, it is pretty much a case of put up and shut up. Drawing attention to the condition only seems to make it worse.

One of the more striking features of this condition has to do with memory. We have learned quite a lot about memory since the invention of the digital computer. Little of what we have learned seems to have very much to do with women’s memory. Women’s memory has more selectivity than a bagel toaster and, in operation, it is even more erratic. It is capable of registering every shade of brown, and quite a few in between. Parts of it are always crammed to capacity, while others remain curiously vacant. It is not that women, generally, are exposed to fewer memorable experiences than men. Rather is it that the sluice gates seem to work in a radically different way. Most significantly, women do not store raw or unprocessed experience. Everything is subtly altered before being neatly filed away. Moreover, the contents of women’s memories seem to be under a constant process of review and revision. What you sees is, most decidedly, not what you eventually gets. Women’s memory is a special kind of Procrustean bed; everything is neatly tailored to fit the compartment into which it is placed. It is taken out, dusted off, and reshaped as circumstances dictate. For certain things, women display no sense of recall whatever; they have conveniently, wiped the tape as clean as did Rosemary Woods. At other times, a nano-second’s worth of some experience (usually a bad one) will be collected and offered up as evidence with breathtaking and thoroughly convincing clarity. Amazing! Especially to the man involved, who will have a vastly different memory of the whole affair. We have, over a great many years conducted a large number of experiments relating to this intriguing phenomenon. We are persuaded that women’s memories have a sophisticated, self-altering mechanism, regulated by something over which women have no control. It alters what goes in and out so that the woman herself has no recognition of the process and no accurate means of reality testing. But then they have no need of one. They are all endowed with an implicit belief that the end product, when it is called forth, is the gospel truth as it was originally experienced.

Nearly all men are astounded by this phenomenon when they first experience it, its manifestations, and effects. There is a fundamental unfairness about its exercise that grossly offends male sensibilities. All the remembered good is filtered out and discarded by the woman in question and only the bad remains, unbalanced and, often, embellished. This is not selective recall, in the ordinary sense, or even a special variety of denial. It, all too often, assumes the guise of a violent assault upon the senses. It is not a shield or defense mechanism. It is a deadly instrument of assault. It is intended to turn the tide of battle in woman’s favor. It is like running into a brick wall head on at full speed on a Harley Davidson. It is an unforgettable experience. It leaves men subjected to it stunned, baffled, and bewildered. For a lot of men, the only comparable experience is telling the absolute truth before a jury in a court of law and being rotundly disbelieved. The world as man knows it and has always believed it to be, is rudely and irrevocably turned upon its head. The sufferers are never the same again.

So, what’s crazy about all that? This is what. Men live by rules. A little bending, here and there, and even a little avoidance, now and then, is vaguely permissible, but the rule is: