As the wise philosopher Andrew “Dice” Clay once said: Gather a group of women and you will discover that they are MUCH dirtier than the men. The women tell him everything, and they do it in excruciating detail. On the other hand, they have this crazy idea that men are also telling their friends the dirt about their relationships and sex life. For the ladies, it’s happening at Cosmos; The boys in the locker room.

That would be great, if it were true.

For one thing, the men talk very little in the locker room because that would require looking at other guys. That’s not something men want to do when they’re half naked. It’s not that men don’t talk. They just do it in other places, like the Frisbee golf course, on their surfboards, or while drinking at a sports bar.

And it’s not like guys don’t talk about their relationships, particularly their sex lives. They just don’t say as much as women. Hard to believe? Tell me, when was the last time you saw a woman walk into a room only to have a bunch of men laughing? Probably never, but it happens to men in relationships all the time.

It may seem strange that a genre whose members have no problem burping or scratching their crotches in public has a code of ethics. But we do, at least when it comes to “locker room talk.” These are the rules:

If you care about the woman, don’t mention her to the guys, NEVER.

That’s because every conversation a man has with another man is based on this concept: How much ammo am I giving my friends to use against me later? When a guy has a meaningful conversation with another friend, he finds that everything he’s said, positive or negative, is thrown back at him if the relationship ends badly. Smart kids learn from this experience.

“In college, I met a girl and had one of those wonderful first dates. You know, the kind where you feel like you and the woman don’t have to say anything, you just understand each other,” says Hugh Billingsley. , a software engineer based in San Diego. “I made the mistake of telling my college roommate, ‘I really feel like she could be the one.’ The problem is, by the third date, all the romance was gone and she basically dumped me. One! I really feel like she could be the one, like a pirate’s annoying parrot.”

Billingsley’s case is not unique. I know a guy who once had a very hot first date with a woman he met at an open mic night at a coffee shop. The next day, still feeling the glow from the night before, he stupidly told his brother everything. A week later, the guy was singing in the cafeteria and got excited when the girl showed up. Unfortunately, the brother introduced himself to the girl as my friend’s brother, adding, “Do you sing? I heard you’re really good at hitting those high notes.”

Mi didn’t get a second date.

In short, if a man talks about his current love with his friends, it is to say: “Yes, I met this girl”, “Yes, we are getting married”, “Yes, we are going to have a child”. or “Yes, we are getting divorced.” Otherwise, she never appears in the conversation.

“To be honest, the less a man tells his friends about the woman he likes, the better,” says Stephen Douglas, a Southern California mortgage broker. “If you are happy and he is not, your happiness is like twisting a knife in his heart. If you are miserable and tell your friend, he feels that your bad luck will rub off on him.”

That’s why the only time a man talks about his sex life with another man is if something extraordinary happens, usually something extraordinarily bad.

Here is an example of something we would share. One of my friends was recently dating a woman and after three weeks they finally decided to move on. It was then that he decided that he had “something important” to tell her: he didn’t have a left hand. He had never noticed the missing appendage, so she felt compelled to point it out before they undressed.

His telling me about this may seem in bad taste, but it was something quite extraordinary (don’t you think?) that he was dying to tell someone and it’s not something you confess to a priest. I would like to tell you more, but obviously the boy likes him a lot because he refuses to give any more information.

While it’s one thing for a man to talk about his own sex life, men who really want to know the intimate details of another man’s sex life are usually married.

Sad but true: Some married men want to live vicariously and get a taste of what they think they’re missing out on. It’s true that the average bachelor’s first instinct when he meets a guy like this is to exaggerate such conquests to give the married man the false impression that he’s living a wild and crazy single life.

However, since married men usually can’t keep any secrets from their wives, their stories ruin the single man’s chances of making up with the wife’s single girlfriends. It usually only takes one experience like this before a guy learns to shut up and avoid talking in the locker room altogether.

David B. Moye is a writer from San Diego who learned all about the human psyche during his 11-month stint as a phone psychic.