Where do they live and what do they do that they get kicked in the balls so much that they need that kind of pain tolerance?

Back up slowly while maintaining eye contact...just like with any other angry animal. ;-)
Once she aggressively touches me...Oh IT'S ON! Crazy is no excuse for angrily touching someone. I'm broken, but I took karate for years and have a high pain tolerance, so I'll do my utmost to defend myself.
In case this is what's you're looking for...sex is of no consequence to me. Women can injure men, they don't get any free pass to try. The first person to touch is the aggressor and deserves what they get in defense, almost always.

Yeah. I heard that part.

He makes it seem as if there is something that the medical community could have done to relieve his pain and that the VA docs purposely and sadistically withheld it. I think it was a lack of communication between him and his doctors which is failure enough, but there is probably nothing that could be done to make him pain free. I mean, putting him on strong pain meds will only make him constipated. Chronically, his pain tolerance will reset and he will require higher and higher dosages to obtain relief to the point that it is unsafe to increase the dose because of respiratory depression. I'm not saying his pain isn't real; I'm saying there were no good solutions to solving his problem.

The -caines rely on certain enzymes in your blood stream to interact with them in order to produce the numbing effect. I, apparently, lack these enzymes so at least lidocaine (which is what they usually use at the dentist even though they still call it Novocaine) doesn't work on me.

I had a root canal a few years ago with full feeling despite a ridiculous amount of shots to try to get me numb. I had my finger ribboned with a scalpel a week and a half ago under the same conditions.

It's really not that uncommon to find someone who doesn't respond to the anesthetic, yet nobody believes me when I tell them it's not going to work. That's the worst part. I end up paying for the shit because they insist on giving it to me after I tell them it doesn't work, then they start dicking around and have the nerve to act surprised when it becomes apparent that I can feel what they're doing.

I guess I have a high pain tolerance or something because the root canal for me wasn't anywhere near as bad as people who were numb described it as being. The worst part was the cramp in my jaw from having my mouth propped open for so long. (Insert joke about whores here.)

Not looking forward to having wisdom teeth pulled, though. I hope they can put me out for that and I hope whoever drives me home doesn't make a video.

Cats have an extremely high pain tolerance, especially when it comes to heat. They say if your cat acts like he's in pain, he's really in pain.

A friend of mine from years ago had a cat that jumped up next to the (gas) stove while it was on and accidentally put his tail in the flame. Within seconds the fire had spread up his tail and back (like a flaming skunk stripe) but he sat there cleaning himself like nothing was wrong. They wrapped him in a dish towel to smother the flame. He had minor burns on his skin but he came out fine.

That, and they train hard, have bones of steel, and a super high pain tolerance. Although they're not "hurt", they'll certainly be feeling that tomorrow.

I think I have to agree with Ryjkyj on this one. If something was causing you to scream in pain that much, would you stick through it to the end? She may have zero pain tolerance, but she has the stubbornness of a mule, and I give her props for that.

I'd like to get a close-up of the finished product.

I'm not sure what I think about this whole thing, but I would like to make the observation that the study that was run in Stanford, the so-called "scientific basis" for this entire brouhaha had an exceptionally small sample size. With only 10 male and 10 female test subjects, even pronounced differences in reaction to humour can only indicate the need for further study.

In other words, this experiment however rigorously conducted, is almost useless because it had far too small a sample group.

As for the rest... it is very difficult to say. Hitchens is a very smart individual, but taste in humour is so very very subjective -- I may find Monty Python hilarious, but somebody else may find it meh.

Attempts to objectively quantify female's success in humour are bound to fail. Even if it is true that female stand up comedians are fewer than men, it is simple to think of a dozen possible reasons for that other than "Women aren't funny." 50 years ago, there were NO women in politics, you could have just as easily said then that "Women are poor at policy decisions." The truth is that there were lots of other factors in play, and I don't think many people would disagree that sexism was a very real factor.

Having said all that against his thesis, I have to admit that I'm not willing to just dismiss it as flat sexism the way that several other commenters have. Granted, he does not endear himself to me with terms like "bull-dyke lesbian", but as I pointed out, comedy is so hard to quantify, it may turn out that women really aren't as funny as men. If it turns out that this is the case, I expect several things will be true:

- The gender difference will turn out to be about as significant as the gender differences in say math ability or pain tolerance threshold, which is to say very slight.
- Any exaggeration of this innate difference in ability will be yet another sign of the sexism of modern society.

Furthermore, no matter how much society changes, I expect that Hitchens will never find women funny. Just as my hypothetical person will probably never "get" Monty Python, there is one thing you can never argue, and that is taste.