Fay Voshell

I loved this.

What Are Men Really Thinking?

Even my favorite writer C.S. Lewis had a rather jaundiced view of women. He essentially said they ruined male camaraderie by reducing good discussions to trivialities.

Schopenhauer was even worse.

As for some medieval monks, well...Their behavior was similar to C. Women were temptresses to be studiously avoided.

Bridging the gap between the sexes is always difficult, often most so in marriages. But if the attempt is not made, we wind up with misogynists and/or radical feminists. I might add the conservative church is not too good at encouraging male/female relationships other than marriage.

A WORD FROM JACK KEMP:

When you ask a woman how she feels, she gives you a long, detailed answer. When you ask a man how he feels, he replies, "With my hands."

Women's brains, not surprisingly, contain twice as much of the emotional bonding hormone oxytocin than does a man's. That fact surprises no one.

From Wikipedia:
Oxytocin (Oxt; /ˌɒksɪˈtoʊsɪn/, /ˌɒksi-/) is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide. Oxytocin is normally produced by the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary. It plays a role in social bonding, sexual reproduction in both sexes, and during and after childbirth.
END The only mammal where the male brain has as much ocytocin as a female brain is that of a prarie dog, a breed that mates for life. But a good, loving relationship can raise a man's oxytocin levels. But women are more naturally nurturers and males are more naturally hunters and protectors (by force, if necessary).

Many decades ago, I saw a cartoon in which two women were watching a NY Yankees baseball game (the batter had a Yankee pinstripe uniform). One woman said to the other, "Baseball is such an easy game to understand once I figured it out. You see this batter? He has a wife and three kids and lives in New Jersey!" It was a funny and accurate description of her worldview and what she thought was most important - which was NOT whether the Yankees had enough home run hitters to get them to the World Series that year. And she had a valid point which would be lost to many - but not all - men.

A note from Tim:

Yeah; it's tough to hold the sexes together (and it's not for lack of trying but as you say, the effort has to be made. Too many people seem to prefer the battle of the sexes to doing the hard work. Anger is easier, and it may even provide some sort of temporary pleasure, but it's much better to do the work and take satisfaction from the accomplishment. Broad and easy, as the Bible says, is the way to damnation...

Science fiction writer Larry Niven once wrote a novel about an actual war of the sexes. Set far in the future, the human race had divided because it was discovered that it was possible to make children essentially immortal (prior to puberty). The result was that boys all congregated together and girls had their own areas, and they killed each-other in battles. These WEREN'T children, but had bodies that were not capable of reproducing and had no sex drive. Their minds were very advanced, although motivated by different drives. They kept some adults as breeding stock.

It was a thoughtful novel. What happens when sex and family no longer enter into the picture? The girls got wiped out because they made a mistake with their technology, but the boys were in pretty bad shape as well. And both had been fighting interstellar colonies that saw the immortal children as a horror.

Men and women are flip sides of a coin, and that is a GOOD thing indeed. Part of the allure of women to men is the mysteriousness of their nature. If we were all alike it would at best be boring and probably end in vicious warfare. That is, of course, precisely what we see now as feminism has done it's level best to turn women into men and men into women, and by extension put us all at each-other's throats.

Jack Kemp replies:

Of course the feminist male bashers who snarl at men opening doors for them and the lack of civility in a G-d-less culture harm human relationships.

In the 1980s, I got on a company van that took workers from the data center to the company cafeteria further south in Manhattan. I got one of the last seats in the back. Later a coworker, a very pregnant (8.5 months) systems analylist named Ann got on the front of the van and I thought surely one of the young men in their twenties up front would give her a seat. In 20 seconds, I watched in amazement as not one of them got up - as I then called out to her and gave her my seat in the back. Telling this story later to a retired policeman, he replied, "When I was a boy had not have given my seat to a pregnant woman, my father would have smacked me in the head."

A WORD FROM DANA MATHEWSON:

This may be because it's only been recently that societies -- and only a relative few -- have considered it "a good idea" to educate their women.

Considering Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and a few others I could probably come up with, one might think the others have a point. . .

AND MORE FROM TIM:

The idea of universal education is largely a new one, both for males and females. It used to be that the hard physical labor and dangerous jobs were done by men and women did the more time consuming and family oriented stuff. That was out of physical necessity. With labor saving technology and improved social organization (police and military, for instance) it became easier for women to compete with men in a number of jobs. It got easier for men, since he no longer had to chase down Mastadons or whatnot, but it increased competition. Since the industrial revolution women have been pretty much at parity with men on what they could do; it doesn't matter who screws a nut on a bolt, or programs a computer. And education used to be reserved for men back when the work in the household was so time consuming. When you had to wash by hand, weave your own clothes, cook meals from absolute scratch, lug water and firewood, etc. there wasn't a whole lot of time left over for studies.

The men who escaped working in the fields or the mines or factories would receive an education out of need. That is the thing people often don't understand; so much of what is now thought "blind prejudice" had been rooted in economic pragmatism. There wasn't some evil male patriarchy that met on evenings to plot ways to keep women down; it was, rather, economic forces driving the male and female roles to a large degree. And frankly, until the modern era, it was better to be in the female role for most of society, because while there was a lot of work and it wasn't exciting it was worse to be a coal miner, or a steel worker, or before that a field hand or other laborer. Women were more comfortable, lived longer, and were treated better, by and large. If you asked a Mideval woman if she felt she needed a "career", to be more than what she was, she would have looked at you as if you had two heads. It was no picnic being a woman back then but even less so being a man.

And of course there were queens who were every bit as powerful and successful as any King.

So all these feminists who are mad at men really need to grow up. Nobody gets a free ride (except maybe the Kennedys and possibly Hillary Clinton) and any slight perceived by them is more imagined than real - and often when real is a result of their own bad moods.

By the way, Dana, remember the Star Trek where Kirk's feminist ex girlfriend switched bodies with him? She found out it was a lot harder to do what she thought she wanted once she took that short cut.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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