Show off.
A man can get ready to go to any event, whether it’s a barbecue or a funeral, in ten minutes or less, often in the same clothes for any of them. There are few women on the planet who can do this in under an hour. The advantage is that you can watch an additional 50 minutes of the game before you have to make a move, while your spouse is wrestling over over what lipstick matches her underwear.
Men don’t wear “outfits”.
Men’s wallets don’t have to match their shoes, nor do their belts.
Men don’t have to shave their legs or underarms unless they’re competitive body builders or professional wrestlers, or some sort of metrosexual.
Men don’t feel the need to pluck chin hairs or eyebrows. In fact, we often encourage them to grow.
Equipment adjustments are often done in public, and everyone understands.
Based on female expectations revealed to me over time the main benefit in my experience is the awesome mental powers that allow men to know what a woman is thinking and feeling and what she expects in any given situation without needing to hear her speak or otherwise communicate her desires. Especially talented men even have pre-cognitive versions of this of this ability and will know beforehand what a women expects and desires.
Being a man is amazing! It’s like a I’m a wizard or something.
I thought that men are supposed to be a bunch of dull grey clones, while women are the ones who possess real magnetism and creativity. But don’t take my word for it - here’s proof. 
Given that every baby has exactly one (biological) father and one mother, the average number of offspring per individual is the same for men and women. The standard deviation, however, seems to be significantly different.
As far as all the dressing up shit goes, if you remove men, women have about the same interest in clothes that men do. All the painting the face and the deforming shoes and shaving your cookie are all due to the fact that men are highly visual and sexually fetishistic, and hold the power to decide whether we are desirable, acceptable, or invisible, based on our appearance.
Without men around to judge us most women would probably wear baggy pants and tee shirts and sneakers every day everywhere. Granted, there might be pink, and bunnies.
Things I envy men (besides the obvious having all the power stuff): upper body strength, being able to visualize objects in space, being so easily forgiven and accepted for being inconsiderate, and being able to hold their liquor better.
Yes but women invest more in children than men both physically and mentally. That is why they are the choosier sex. I don’t think the fact that women can get laid easier necessarily is a good thing, that is just a side effect of the fact that they are the procreation gatekeepers due to the fact that they invest more in children.
As a metaphor, that is like saying if two people walk into a store and one has $100 and the other has $10, the person with $100 will get far more attention from the store employees. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good thing, that person has more to lose from a bad decision and more people are lining up to take their money.
You do have a point that if a woman wants a kid, it is far easier than if a man wants one. Assuming they are both willing to lower their standards.
On the plus side, a smart woman can use her sexuality and fertility to make a lot of money. Men can’t do that.
Leslie, Lindsay, or Kelly?
Sometimes I wonder if the “woman driver” is born of this. Men really do have better senses of direction, and so probably get lost less often, and find driving a less frustrating experience, and maybe make fewer stupid mistakes because they’re distracted by being lost, or just their high frustration level. One of the best drivers I know is a woman, and she has an impeccable sense of direction, better than most men. My husband is a better driver, and he has a good sense of direction. I don’t, and driving is just about the only manual dexterity task my somewhat klutzy husband does better than I do.
I wonder if women are so used to discomfort from tolerating monthly cramps, our greater propensity for headaches, and all the crap that goes with having kids, that when we have heart attacks, it’s sort of like “Eh, something hurts. What else is new,” while men, who are crybabies when they have a paper cut, go IMMEDIATELY to a hospital for anything that might be a heart attack, which means they are usually there when they actually have a heart attack.
If it does, you are either doing it wrong, or you have mastitis, and need to see a doctor.
Also a good way to get HIV, if she wants that, too. Most women use sperm banks is they want a baby and don’t a sperm-maker around. So it’s really an option for the upper middle class and above.
I worked with disabled people, and mental retardation seems to affect more men than women-- noticeably more. Walk into a special ed. classroom, and you will see about 3 boys for every girl.
I don’t wear make-up, and so even if I’m going to take a shower to get ready for something, I need a 1/2 hour, tops. 'Course, I usually make sure I have the clothes ready the day before, in case I have some laundry to do.
Are you sure about that? I’ve often heard that women dress to impress other women.
Given the number of clothing designers who are gay men, it’s a mystery who women are dressing for, and what the clothing crap in all about. I’m wearing a ratty T-shirt, sweats, and bare feet right now. Also, no bra.
men don’t have periods
men don’t get pregnant.
men can pee much easier with a penis
There are a few places where I envy men.
Safety when traveling is a big one for me. I often travel solo, and there are a few things that men can do that I can’t do as easily. For example, I always choose a hostel with an in-house restaurant in case I can’t find anyone to go to dinner with-- if I were a guy, I wouldn’t be as worried about taking a short stroll at night.
Clothing is so much easier for me. You basically know what you are supposed to wear to work. For women, unless you need to wear a conservative suit, the range available is just too wide to navigate, and you risk offending people by being too sexy or too prudish. It’s hard to win, and even if you don’t really acre, it’s still hard not to play the game because you have to wear something.
Being pregnant SUCKS.
Big time.
I envy women in many ways. I think a man can be envious of women for getting to be pregnant, and having the strength to do so. That’s not to say it doesn’t suck, I just totally admire that about women. I see women work until they are ready to “pop”, and I admire that strength.
A lot of these examples are social benefits, which I wasn’t really looking for. I may be the minority, but I think women should be able to wear whatever the hell they feel like. Not shave their pits or legs if they don’t want to. I know it’s not exactly a choice for most women who are looking to get ahead, and to me that’s sad, but these are social norms…
I guess I’m looking for cases where men excel on there own without the help from our male dominated culture… Which, as I stated earlier, is part of what depresses me about being a man. I KNOW women have a lot to offer internally that men don’t. I hear about it all the time.
I don’t mind people listing the social benefits, but I would love to hear some other things we’re good at too. I also think that if there’s anyone who would like to start a thread about what benefits women have, it would be very interesting to read that as well.
My experience in the military showed my something that men can do that women are terrible at, and it may be a learned behavior, or not, I really have no idea, but men are able to work with other men (or women, as the case may be), who they don’t like, in order to get a job done. Women are terrible at this. They can’t see the big picture, somehow, that if they’d just focus on the job, it’d be over, and they wouldn’t have to deal with the person they don’t like anymore.
If a DS would tell us to do something, the men (and me, plus one other woman; I don’t know why us in particular) at AIT, where I was in a mixed platoon, when we were told to do something, the men, no matter whether they liked one another or not, just got it over with, while the women shot eye darts at the people they weren’t going to stand next to, or “help,” which is somehow how they perceived doing an assigned task the whole group was responsible for.
Getting stuff done at basic, in my all-woman platoon was like pulling teeth, because you couldn’t pair off women who didn’t like each other; you couldn’t even have them stand next to each other in a fire line (I was a squad leader, so I found this crap especially annoying).
It wasn’t that in all other contexts men got along better or did less in-fighting than women. They could be just as nasty and gossipy. But they understood that refusing to work with someone toward a necessary end, that couldn’t get done without a group effort was just cutting off the branch they were sitting on. Women either couldn’t see that, or didn’t care. And if they didn’t care, that was even worse, as far as I’m concerned.
So there you are.
Don’t. We’re just doing what we have to, and it sucks. There was nothing I wanted to hear less when I was pregnant than that some man envied me or wished he could have that experience. Maybe there are women who serve as surrogates for free, for sisters or close friends, and you can admire that. That’s like donating bone marrow, maybe, but I would have done just about anything else, other than be pregnant, it was just the only way to go about having a baby. I’m very glad it’s over.
I’ll give you your other points but I think this one is hyperbolizing just a bit too much. There’s quite a big jump between “women can get pregnant and men can’t” and “women take *forever *to look pretty and men like teh sportz durr”
Way I see it, my wife bleeds out an unfertilized egg every month, and can’t create a child until and unless I feel like granting the touch of life. And she’ll lose even that knack loooong before I lose my knack for making the magic happen to women, who invariably fail if left on their own but sometimes get helped to success by men.
OK. I’ll give you two that I’ve noticed.
Men are better with tinkering. Give a random guy a problem, no matter how small, and if he halfway cares about it, he will spend hours and hours trying to fix it. Whether it’s a computer program that has a bug or why the car runs funny. A random woman is more likely to ask someone for help or decide it’s a problem that can be neglected for awhile so that more pressing matters can be addressed.
Not all guys are like this. My father isn’t like this. But I still think this a very “masculine” trait.
Another thing that men are better at: not giving a fuck. Now sometimes this isn’t good and they can get in “trouble” for it. But when implemented under the right conditions, you end up with true innovation and genius. Every time I have heard something akin to “What will people think?”, a woman is saying it.