The joke asks, "Which sexual position produces the ugliest children?" The answer, of course, is, "Ask your momma!"

I thought it was hilarious, and every man I've asked it of cracked up, and could hardly wait to run off and ask his buddies. Why should guys find such a cruel joke so funny? A woman would never think of asking such a question of another woman, so why would a man?

Fact: men bond by talking shit about each other. Men still, on some primal biological level, see all other men as "the competition," and react accordingly. We're all not so far from believing we might have to tear the next guy's throat out with our teeth. Men watch a PBS special on TV, and when they get to the part about the male lion killing a lioness' cubs so she'll come into heat again and HE can mate with her, they'll say, "So...?~'

It's all about reproductive fitness. The lead-in joke says, 'You're ugly, AND stupid, it's doubtlessly genetic, and I'll get to mate more often than you!" Men will only admit to admiring each other by confessing in a roundabout way that they feel threatened by that next guy. Men appreciate it when another man is intimidated and/or threatened enough by them to insult them. The last thing a man wants to hear from another man is that he thinks he is handsome. We don't even like to hear it from our dads.

We bark like dogs because we're afraid that the next dog might be getting laid more often than we are.

This primal need to snarl and bark may be part of why watching TV sports is such a draw: it allows men to safely externalize this driving male aggression, and it gives men something mutually interesting (but displaced, and, so, safe) to talk about with other guys.

You don't have to kick the snot out of the next guy. You can both sit together (but not too close, of course) in front of the video fireplace, hoist a few, and watch a bunch of steroid-enhanced professional snot-kickers do just that against each other. And you and your erstwhile competitor - now beer swilling chum - can safely bond by exchanging notes on comparative snot-kicking.

So be glad, very glad, that such safe substitutes are there.

What WAS I talking about, anyway? (See: Getting Loster, also this issue); Ah, yes! The seeming cruelty of male humor as dominance-establishing head-butting.

I'm reminded of a short piece by the late great science fiction author Robert Heinlein in which he discusses the ordeals of a young naval cadet (probably himself) at the mercy of the relentless hazing administered by upperclassmen. At one company dinner, one upperclassman publicly asks him a seemingly impossible-to-answer question, "Cadet, do you think I'm handsome?"

Clearly, the cadet is in a tight spot: he cannot tell his superior that he's ugly. Nor can he tell him, at the beginning of the twentieth century at a military academy, that he's good looking. Mulling this for that elastic eternity of moments, with the whole table listening and watching intently, he arrives at the only possible safe answer, which temporarily wins him the grudging acceptance of his tormentors: "Sir, your mother must think so. Your girlfriend must think so. But, respectfully, sir, I just don't see it."

And then there's the classic fourth-grade question, "Did your mother have any children that lived?"

So, as long as we men are jousting sarcastically with each other, calling each other impotent toads and concernedly asking what horrible accident happened to the next guy's face, we're biologically healthy and still in the hunt. Or at least we think we are.

Men aren't really immature assholes, we just act that way because we're scared that our genes might never find their way out of our jeans.

And now, the second half...