Women are beautiful specimens of life who are gentle and tough, and admirably so. Contrary to what some idiots believe, there’s no difference in the inner strength of a man or a woman. Neither sex is inherently tougher than the other. That’s not to say there aren’t major differences between the two; differences that are glaring when you were raised like I was: an adventurous, bike-riding, hockey-playing, sexy-ladies-in-bikinis-sitting-on-supercars poster-hanging boy…that was raised in a family dominated by women. A bunch of them. It was like an issue of Y: The Last Man, but in a two bedroom apartment, with even more familial estrogen living on the floor below, always threatening to flood its way up to my level at any moment.

When your life is wall-to-wall vaginas that are related to you, with no real father figure in sight, it changes your definition of normal. You end up getting used to things that some of your male friends don’t understand.

No, no! You’re spreading it!

The Hair…My God, The Hair

Vacuuming when you live with one woman can at times seem like a futile game. Try as you might, you’ll never totally rid the floors of your home of the thick strands of hair. Living with any amount of women over one makes you seriously consider collecting it all and at the end of the year presenting your family with a hand-knitted carpet made of their own hair to replace your tile floors, which would make everyone in your family retroactively notice all the signs they should have picked up on after you are revealed to be the infamous Downtown Strangler.

The horrors of living in what essentially amounts to a hair salon dumpster are only made worse by your favorite and most relaxing at-home footwear. Your favorite slip-on sandals may have cushy souls that hug your feet like sweet angels that ease your foot down to the floor with every step you take, but the bottom of those things look like the bottom of Sasquatch’s bare feet on pube trimming day. It’s just a mash of stringy blackness that might have a pulse. It’s as though you found a community of tiny squid and then went Godzilla on them, crushing them in to a paste of tiny inky tentacles.

Even with the sea of hair polluting the floor, living in a family dominated by women somehow also means you are…

And then they expect YOU to do your fair share!

Saying all women are clean freaks is a huge generalization. My girlfriend is one of the biggest slobs I’ve ever met and I hope her place is such a mess that she can’t find her computer to read any part of this sentence other than this next one – I love you, darling! Nothing to see here! That said, women are the cleaner of the two sexes, from my experience.

It’s not because of some pathological need to be clean or any trumped up BS like that. It’s because women, moreso than men, see the value of not living in their own waste. It’s also probably because a lot of men only resort to cleaning when finding their shoes starts to look oddly similar to a confused lone survivor shambling through the rubble of an alien attack on New York. When a man cleans it’s hard to tell if he’s cleaning or if he’s making some temporary room so he has more space to pretend he’s fighting ninjas.

The many women in my life cleaned because that’s how you live. It’s what you do when you’re an adult that has some semblance of a set of priorities, none of which include “ensure my home gives me tetanus and looks like a fetid lake filled with dysentery doing backstrokes in the kitchen.”

If my home were ever a mess because of my lack of upkeep, I would then suffer through something that may be a fate worse than death…

Thar she blows!

Reality Show-Level Drama

Do you know why reality shows about a bunch of women yelling at each other are oddly entertaining? Because when you cram a bunch of women in to one house for extended periods of time, none of them will ever confront the other about what’s bothering them about everyone else. Reality shows have producers that ignite the drama when the footage is lacking excitement. In real life, there is no producer lighting a fuse, so the drama just sits inside of everyone, waiting for the fuse to spark naturally, like a lightning bolt in a dry forest. Small skirmishes may break out from time to time, but for the big reality show-type drama, waiting for the spark can take years.

In that time, allegiances are forged, reasons to hate are devised, plots are…plotted, or whatever plots can be. Women hold in these little bits of anger for years until it all pops one day in a hell storm, and little searing bits of shrapnel fly out, made of seemingly insignificant little moments from over five years ago. It’s like Game of Thrones but less about control over a large landmass and more about why someone “always has to be such a bitch all the time. God!”

When you are the only guy around to view it all, it is glorious. There’s no need for TV and books when you’ve got a Chinese fireworks display of insecurities and boundary issues exploding almost every night. But you have to be careful not to get dragged in to it. Or, worse yet, be the reason for the explosion. If you are, you’ll end up like me after I got in to a fight with my older cousin when I was 9. She ripped my Ninja Turtles poster off the wall and tore it to pieces. I still cry about it. It was signed by Leonardo.

This gets infinitely less hot when you’re related.

Female Nudity Is Common Place

Yeah, seeing your female family members naked is gross. But if you’re living with them and you were not fortunate enough to have had your eyes burned away during a friendly neighborhood game of Toss The Boiling Acid, you’re bound to accidentally walk in on some nakedness at some point — and it will jack up your brain.

I can never wipe away the image from my retinas of my aunt standing bow-legged and topless as she carefully squeezed in some drops of Visine after she showered and didn’t shut the bathroom door. Like the nuclear-charred silhouette of the embracing couple on a wall, that image of my aunt is scorched too deeply in to my eyes for my tears to wash out. I am cursed with this image, along with about 400 similar images.

By the time I started learning about anatomy in school, very little was knew to me. I may not have known all the names, but I had seen all the parts. When all the other boys were snickering at the sight of a breast, I was the cool guy telling them to calm down and act like they had actually seen a pair of…whatever those things are called because I didn’t know yet. This, oddly, made me seem more mature than all the other boys, which made me something of an elementary school ladies’ man. So seeing your female family members naked has its advantages. But the therapy bills are nuts.

Just be honest about it.

Women Are Just As Gross as Men, But Are Less Upfront About It

They pee, they poop, they fart, and they and a little bit of poop comes out – all of those things are gross and women do all of those things because they’re human. Gather a bunch of women together and wait for one of them to fart, the rest will laugh just like any other human because farts are funny to most sentient creatures. That’s the gift of sentience – we use our higher brain functions to laugh at really stupid things, and women are no exception to the rule, even though there are probably some less than intelligent men out there that would like to believe otherwise.

The biggest difference is, women tend to be a little more subtle with their grossness. Again, it’s a generalization; there’s probably many women out there that will fart on their friend’s dinner at Applebee’s in full view of the little league teams eating their victory ribs. Women will be gross when at the right time and place. For instance, I remember when my reality was destroyed and I realized women are actually really gross, or at least have the capacity to be so.

In high school I walked in to the girls bathroom once — tampons everywhere. It was horrifying. Just vile sickness wall-to-wall. It was a page out of Buffalo Bill’s dream journal; a true nightmare. Years later, I understood the brilliance of that charnel house. That disgusting bathroom was the perfect metaphor: female grossness was hidden in a private room men were not allowed to enter. In that moment I realized that women tend to be gross in their personal spaces, not in public. It’s a matter of common courtesy and respect for the general public.

I then thought back to my home life and all the grossness I had seen, and all the grossness I hadn’t seen from these same women when we had company or were out in public, as opposed to nearly every man I have known, who will scratch his neither regions while looking you dead in the eye and carrying on a conversation–which, I hear, was a skill that Ed McMahon was kindly asked to stop showing off while hosting Star Search.

Luis Prada is a writer and editor at Holy Taco. His work can also be found on Cracked, FunnyCrave, The Smoking Jacket, and GuySpeed. If you visit his Tumblr page, The Devil Wears Me, he will give you a non-refundable virtual hug. (Subject to geographical limitations, like whether or not you’re near him.)