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I have been a member of the male sex my entire life, actually longer, since my masculinity - such as it is - was determined when I first acquired one of those dust bunny-like creatures, the Y chromosome, nine months before I was born.

Despite my lack of a disinterested point of view, I will readily admit that men are the grosser sex. We don't smell as good as women, and we tend to scratch ourselves in places where we shouldn't - even on national TV, in the case of professional athletes. With the exception of maybe Cary Grant, whose gentlemanly manner was as close to perfection as any man ever achieved, it's hard to understand what women see in men at all.

The exception to this rule - I won't say it proves it - is yawning. Perhaps because men have so many other faults to make up for, they seem to realize that when they open their mouths involuntarily to public view the polite thing to do is to cover them. That's what I was taught by my mother, and apparently somebody told other men - except for the out-and-out louts - to do the same.

I've come to believe that there's a secret women's handbook of manners floating around somewhere that says "Because we are the more delicate sex, and leave the room when we feel a giant taco burp coming up, we are allowed to yawn uncovered for great lengths of time in public. This is our 'free space,' like the middle square in Bingo. Have fun with it!"

It has taken me a long time to formulate my feelings on this point, but after years of control-group testing, surreptitious observation and late-night reveries fueled by red wine, my research points to one inescapable conclusion: women are less likely than men to cover their mouths when they yawn.

This week was something of a tipping point. I have a walk of several hundred yards from my office to the train station, across a plaza where one can have an unobstructed view of a person walking in the opposite direction for a minute or more. Yesterday I saw a woman emerge from the subway, start to yawn, and maintain a full, open-mouth position for a count of 14.6 seconds. This is the etiquette counterpart to football's "good hang-time," the ability of a punter to kick a ball high in the air, giving his special team precious extra seconds to run downfield and pummel a speedy kick returner like a pinata at an 8-year-old's birthday party.

Last week, as I was riding the MBTA's Green Line, I sat opposite an attractive young woman and her boyfriend/fiance/husband. They were on their way to the airport, apparently at the end of a vacation, looking at the pictures they had taken around Boston. The woman began to yawn at the Boylston Street stop and - I swear - didn't stop or cover her mouth until the conductor pulled into Park Street, several blocks away. Park Street and Boylston Stations are the nation's two oldest subway stations, built at the end of the 19th century when ladies who felt a belch coming on were sequestered in an upstairs bedroom or sent to the seashore until it had passed out of their system.

One of the great breakthroughs of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg's "Uncertainly Principle," teaches us that the act of observation modifies the thing observed, so that absolutely precise measurements are impossible. I suppose it could be the case that women deliberately extend their yawns when they see men watching them, thinking, "Maybe if I show that creep my molars long enough, he'll stop staring at me."

The other possibility - actually, it's more like a certainty - is that the woman you see yawning her head off in public today was kept up the night before by a man snoring like a sawmill at the mouth of roaring river.

That's our free space, and if you don't like it, you can take your bingo card and go sleep on the couch.

- Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer whose works include The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, 10 published plays and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn (Joshua Tree Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor.