by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I have a gender bias problem.

This is difficult to admit. Serious efforts have been made to change my attitude about gender equality. The AOC and the CJA and CJER and several other alphabet agencies that watch over us judicial types—trying to turn us into judicious types—have wasted a lot of heavy-duty, industrial-strength thought soap trying to convince me the two genders are equal.

They’ve failed. I’ve kept quiet about it a long time, hoping that someone else would say what I’ve been thinking, and I wouldn’t have to crawl out on this limb alone. No one has, so here I am . . . all by myself . . . saw in hand.

Men and women are not equal. We can say they are ’til the cows come home but it’s not going to change anything. I’ve absorbed all the science, I’ve read all the commentators, I’ve spent hours listening to people try to raise my consciousness about the equality of the sexes. But to no avail. I remain convinced that gender equality is a myth.

The undeniable fact is that women are vastly superior. It’s not even close.

I’ve known this all my life. My earliest memory of contemplating the issue dates back to fifth grade. I can remember looking around the classroom on the first day and concluding there was very little academic competition from members of my own gender. But Maureen McCafferty and Bernice Liebig . . . they were smart.

I knew I was a better kickball player, but even at age ten, I was pretty sure the course of our lives would not be determined by kickball prowess.¹ Which is unfortunate because it’s the last thing I can remember being better at than women.

They’re smarter than we are, more rational than we are, prettier than we are, better organized, and—in general—a whole lot braver.² And the worst of it is they play us like we’re violins with penises.

We spend our whole lives doing stuff we’d never do on our own because some woman has somehow outmaneuvered us. We start out to eat a pizza and watch the hockey game, and we end up mowing the lawn and going to a charity ball. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life looked into a champagne flute without asking myself, “How in God’s name did she talk me into coming here?”

The simple fact of the matter is that if our gender were a species, it would have died out before the great auk. The only reason we’re still around is that women need us to reproduce.³

I was painfully reminded of this dismal state of affairs a few weeks back. After watching BOTH of my local granddaughters quarterback their flag football teams to victory, thus spectacularly eclipsing any of my own gridiron feats,⁴ I ventured into the kitchen to attempt a birthday cake for my wife.

The sophomoric psychology here was painfully transparent. Having just watched football added to politics and science and business and all the other things that make you wonder why we’ve allowed men to screw up the world when there were these other beings who could have run it so much better, I was determined to try to “make men great again.”

This was going to be some kind of reverse-macho, in-your-face, anything-you-can-do reassertion of male primacy. It turned out to be The Bay of Pigs with frosting. Lots of frosting.

It should have been a slam dunk. I mean, we’re talking birthday cake, here, folks. This is not particle physics. This is not even haute cuisine. Any woman with opposable thumbs could have accomplished this task.

The directions were written on a box. In English. American English. American English stripped of two-syllable words. If your reading skills could handle “bake,” “eggs,” “milk,” and “stir,” you should be able to do this.

I had all the implements at hand: measuring cups, spoons, bowls, electric mixer. Of course, I had to ask my wife where they were, since I visit the cupboards where cooking utensils are kept about as often as I visit Uganda.⁵

Still, it shouldn’t have been all that tough. Unlike the folks at SpaceX, I didn’t have to engage in any complex mathematical operations like converting parallelograms into meters or kilometers into gallons. I just had to read and follow directions. Those are skills girls master in the third grade while boys are out in the backyard kicking field goals over sawhorses and perfecting their belching technique.

But they proved too much for me. After deftly splattering cake batter into three rooms with the electric mixer, I managed to turn on the oven—also change the clock and turn on a fan I didn’t know existed—and pour the batter into two nine-inch pans.⁶

Unfortunately, at the conclusion of the baking cycle, the cake batter chose to remain in the two nine-inch pans. All my efforts to remove the newly-solidified batter so it could be stacked into birthday formation were thwarted. It would not come out.

I reacted like any twenty-first-century stereotypical male: I turned the pans upside down and shook them, banged on them with a wooden spoon, and cursed them for the miserable quislings that they were. All in all, it looked pretty much like the ape creatures in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My daughter came over and took pity on me, explaining that I had failed to spray the cake pans with something called “Pam.” That’s why the cake stuck to them.

I informed her, rather testily, that I was quite sure the cake pans were Teflon and that nothing—especially nothing as technologically pedestrian as cake—was supposed to stick to them.

Her response was typical of the eloquence of her gender. Instead of disabusing me of my notion that any pan whose bottom was not silver must be coated with Teflon, she simply pointed to the cake pans and shrugged. That shrug said it all: “So much for your spaceships and asteroid-blasters, Rocketboy; now, would you like me to show you where we earthling women keep the spatula?”

I was not yet defeated. One thing our culture has not failed to teach its males is the importance of saving face—especially around females. So, having coaxed one layer of the cake out of the pan by demonstrating my complete mastery of both spatula and vocabulary,⁷ I adroitly carved the less cooperative layer into precise geometric sections consisting of a half, a quarter, and several . . . nuggets.⁸

Then I began the process of gluing these portions to the lower, more-or-less intact bottom layer with chocolate frosting. This was a task that demanded the precision and spatial savvy of an engineer and the delicate touch of a surgeon. It also demanded two cans of frosting and much more patience than my gender is capable of summoning up over anything that can’t result in a double bogey.

The result was an Everest-like conquest. Also an Everest-like cake. Specifically, it resembled the Lhotse face after an avalanche.

Roughly half the cake looked like a cake. The rest I like to think of as my interpretation of a cake. Kind of a baked-goods homage to Picasso.

Unfortunately, I was not able to induce my family to eat the cake until they’d stopped laughing. This almost turned it from a dessert into a breakfast.

But my humiliation was not yet over. Before serving the cake, I had set about proving once again my complete inability to handle “woman’s work” by trying to wrap my wife’s birthday presents. After twenty minutes, I emerged from the bedroom, sweating like I’d just run in the Belmont Stakes.⁹

The result, besides enough discarded wrapping material to paper three walls, was a pair of festive shapes I have since learned to identify as a rhombohedron and a trapezoidal pseudosphere. Unfortunately, judging by my wife’s laughter, she is not sophisticated enough to appreciate any gift-wrapping result other than a rectangular prism. Perhaps that indicates a chink in distaff armor.

But if so, it’s a painfully small one. Certainly not big enough for me to wedge my ego through.

I write this in the forlorn hope that some champion will come forth from my gender to defend us. I confess my own defeat. But maybe some guy will step forward to refute me who can repair a John Deere, scale El Capitan, and captain a SWAT team.

That would be nice. Because those are all things I’ve read about women doing this week, and I’d like to be reassured that men can do them as well.

In the meantime, I have to go listen to a lecture on gender bias. The state pays for judges’ errors and omissions insurance if we listen to people try to convince us the genders are equal. Forget the insurance, I’m going because I want to be cheered up.

BEDS NOTES

1. A conclusion that seems still to have eluded many members of Congress.
2. Compare your reaction to your last cold with your wife’s approach to surgery.
3. For now. Most of my gender does not see in vitro fertilization for the existential crisis it is. And of course, I am mostly talking about different-sex couples; lesbians have evolved beyond the scope of this article.
4. I’ve thrown two spirals in my life, and one of them was intercepted.
5. And with an equivalent level of enthusiasm.
6. There was a short delay while I tracked down a ruler to measure the pans.
7. I used words that left marks on the wall.
8. Euclidean nuggets.
9. If I’d been a horse, the stewards would have ordered me to the test barn and my trainer would have walked me for an hour before putting me back in my stall.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.