Men, it’s time for you to do your part to save the planet. Put on a sundress. Oh, it may feel a little weird at first (and you’ll probably hate your knees), but give it a shot. After all, that’s what women do starting around Memorial Day, and that’s why we’re not always wasting energy, cranking up the A.C. And you are. And we turn it down. And you turn it up. And we – freeze. Women lose out because men sitting in suits (and computers sitting in offices) are prone to overheating. They demand cooler air and, usually, they get their way. It is a man’s (and computers’) world, after all. There is a difference, however, between “cooler air” and “Happy Feet” cold — a distinction most males don’t seem to get. Maybe it’s because they’re dressed wrong, but maybe it’s because all this air-conditioning has made them utter wusses, afraid of their own sweat.

As if Stanley Kowalski was a Gilette Cool Wave Clear Gel man! There is no shame in summer shvitzing, fellas. Real men do. Why do you think we call them “hot”?

“Guys are really screwed up,” the president of Bambe Levine Public Relations, Bambe Levine herself, said. “After the first daffodil comes out, they figure it’s time to put on the A.C. Why is every bus in New York cold? Why is every supermarket, every apartment lobby?”

And every commuter train, too. “MetroNorth seems to think it’s okay to have the A.C. set to 40 degrees, so I have to dress for a snowstorm,” commuter Sari Conway said. The other day, “I thought I was going to have put a sweatshirt over my head because my face was so cold,” she said.

This is not just mildly annoying. It’s as painful as waiting for a train in the winter, with the added indignity of it *being* summer.

And it’s not like the gender divide is imaginary. A survey by Bryant Heating and Cooling Systems found that four out of five males age 21 to 44 prefer to keep their home cooler than their spouses do. Meanwhile, 60% of women agreed: Ladies like it warmer.

If one sex is destined to be miserable no matter what, doesn’t it make a lot more sense for women to be cold when it’s cold out and men to be hot when it’s hot?

This wouldn’t just save arguments, it would save energy — maybe even the planet. A.C. accounts for a sixth of all the electricity used in America, more than all the electricity used in heating. More than all the electricity used in *India.* It’s a wasteful luxury and it has been from the very start.

“The first comfort air-conditioning system was in the New York Stock Exchange,” the author of “Air-Conditioning America,” Gail Cooper, said. That was in 1901. The system was so pricey, only the richest of the rich — or the deadest of the dead — could afford it. The first public health A.C. had been installed a year earlier, in the cadaver room of New York Medical College, Ms. Cooper said. Since it was the only cool room in the school, that’s where graduation was held.

Ever since then, air-conditioning has been spreading its clammy hold over what once was a season of sun and sundresses.

Give it back.