788. Gender Differences Revisited — Group P

1. Sex and responsibility help men achieve their goals. Devotion to others and life tending toward the spiritual help women achieve theirs.
2. With regard to unmarried sexual activity, women are whatever they decide to be. Men are whatever they have to be to have access.
3. Two conquerors compete and struggle. He seeks sex, and she seeks marriage. The first to conquer shapes their future relationship together.
4. Unlike men, women tend to change whatever and whomever they find as inadequate—oftentimes parenting husbands as boys.
5. Unlike women, men draw a line between what is their business and what is not, between what they should change, and what they should leave to others.
6. When a man wants comfort and understanding, he turns to any woman. When a woman wants those things, she turns to a specific man.
7. Men look for taste bud satisfaction when eating. Women use food to help satisfy the necessities for life.
8. When women sour on their marriage, they turn against men. When men sour on their marriage, they turn against marriage.

Finally, may your blessings in the new year be so great they obscure the defeats and bad times of the year ending today.

433. Response to Viewer — Item 1

Jessica prompted this post when she asked: “Other than gratitude…how does a woman show respect for a man?” Many posts address respect after marriage, so this is mostly for singles.

I had two short and one lengthy reaction. First, men don’t seek respect as women know it. They seek whatever confirms their self-respect. The difference is big.

Second, one doesn’t think about ‘showing respect’ for a man. One has it or not, and it shows in their attitude, which flows out of their heart.

My third response is more complex. Women can generate respect for men or a man in many ways. To do so, they should: 

♥ Respect men by doing what feminists condemn, so women might try the opposite of what feminists preach. (For example, see Dark Side of Feminism posts in CONTENTS page.)

♥ Exploit their natural female preference for indirectness and abandon whatever they may have picked up of the male preference for directness. Men prefer to figure things out compared to having them presented on a platter. However, indirectness requires patience and fails under ‘right now’ pressures.

♥ Recognize his dominance as dependable. It’s his nature, however much he reveals, and women can’t change it. By exploiting his dominance, a woman shows respect. If his dominance offends or appears unacceptable, then dump him.

♥ Identify domains in their relationship that the man claims as his responsibility. Don’t interfere there. Accept his leadership in those domains, and identify the domains left for her sterling leadership. Clarify responsibilities to eliminate confusion and conflict. (Women are the relationship expert and best qualified to accomplish this latter task. Honor his various roles, and it adds to his self-respect. He earned it.)

♥ Rely on him as important before marriage and vital afterward. He sees his role as producer, provider, protector, and problem solver. Her endorsements show respect. 

♥ Act independent and free of him before marriage. The harder a male works to capture a female, the more his self-respect grows with each step of progress.

♥ Act dependent on and beholden to him after marriage. Monogamous devotion and dependency on him shows respect. He no longer expects to have to earn it, because he earned the max before he married her. After marriage, her gratefulness for who he is and what he does is the indirect reflection of respect that he expects.   

♥ Compete with him before marriage but cooperate afterward. This role reversal is critical to catching and keeping a man. By her affirming and filling both roles, she broadcasts respect for him.

♥ Rely not on gratitude. It has limited effects, because men don’t need it like women do. Too eager expressions of gratefulness appear phony, and women try too hard and do this much of the time.

♥ Acknowledge this: She will know how to respect a man, after she learns how to keep one.

If she thinks about showing respect, she probably does wrong. She’s trying too hard. Showing respect reflects automatically from her attitude—that is, from her heart—and not from her mind.

416. Toxic Love

Life is the game, love is the trophy. Life has ‘rules’, but love works well without restraints, restrictions, and rules but most of all without competition.

Men expect to compete with men. They dislike competing with women and will not do it long with their own. They discourage easily, because the male nature is made to compete with men.

Men don’t love competitors, but they do find them companionable. So, early marital stages can go well. But with a competitive woman, a man learns quickly that he can never measure up; she always finds a way to win. She overrides or demeans his decisions in domains he considers his own.

A competing wife prevents her man from getting to deep and abiding love for her. She short-circuits his heart strings. She makes their relationship a rivalry, and he loses interest in being responsible. With a weakened sense of responsibility for his domain, his love for her doesn’t grow into the enduring kind that lasts.  

So, he gets fed up, splits up, and looks for another woman. He expects to find the same thing, so, he’ll accept infatuation and lust as prelude to shack up but not true love so essential for successful marriage. Burned once, etc….

346. Weans, tweens, and teens #12 — Puberty

    What we do with what we have before puberty is the fault or to the credit of our parents. What we do after puberty is our own fault or to our credit, because that’s when our own judgments come into play.

The value systems of children at puberty scatter beneath a bell curve. But, I’ll focus on the ends and describe the extremes.

At the low end a few children reach teenage with an empty mind. Having not been nurtured in the weans and led and taught properly in the tweens, mature values were never instilled and encouraged to flourish.

They pass through puberty without learning to live up to adult, parental, and teacher standards and expectations. Then they spend seven or so years vacuuming up immature fun and adolescent values designed to stretch teen independence beyond that acceptable to most adults.

Their minds congeal into adulthood at about age 21. It has a fullness of beliefs: Either those implanted before, or those adopted after puberty, or the mixture that we along the bell curve develop. Such kids grow into what we see as adult immaturity—that is, physical adult but mental adolescent.

Also, the hormones of puberty shift responsibility and authority from others to us. At the low end of the spectrum children don’t hold themselves accountable for their own behavior. So, parents and authority figures that try to inject measures of accountability find their efforts often go for naught. Their influences are mostly rejected, and the children easily become burdens to society.

———————————

The spectrum’s high end represents kids with moral convictions and strong ambitions—albeit still under-developed—about their future adult life. They are guided by someone or something bigger than themselves—e.g., God, parental pressures, dreams, adult opportunities.

They accept personal responsibility. They give themselves the authority they need to do the right things. They hold themselves accountable for inadequacies they should not have. They demonstrate maturity far beyond their years.

Their belief system fills the mental vacuum of early childhood. Without that vacuum, they have little interest in sucking up contradictory values from teen peers. Adolescence for such kids is merely a pass-through phase enroute to what they seek to become as adults. They cause few problems for parents.  

 Most of us grew up somewhere between these extremes.

More about the Weans, tweens, and teens can be found in the CONTENT page near the top.

304. Lifelong husbands—made, not born — Part I

Many complications muck up lifelong marriages in modern America. Five follow.

1.     The wisdom of the ages is lost. Women can’t learn from their moms, because their moms didn’t listen to their moms. It exploded four decades ago. Girls and young women rebelled and spouted slogans with revolutionary zeal: Don’t listen to anyone over thirty, Down with authority, Distrust parents, Ignore authority figures. We’re several generations deep now with women shaping their lives around these adolescent values. What one generation allows, the next practices.

2.     Men do whatever they have to do to have frequent and convenient access to sex. Because many women provide unmarried sex, men are encouraged not to swap independence for responsibility.

3.     The feminine nature presented with pride and charm appeals and turns men ON for female influence about helping fulfill a woman’s hopes and dreams. Our forefathers followed that model. But not modern men. Feminist politics, theory, and dogma turn men OFF for yielding masculine independence.  

4.     Men seek justice. Women seek equality. As women seek greater equality with men, they give up justice. The PC crowd—political correctioneers— destroy justice. PCers and feminists disconnect females from male empathy and sympathy. They reject the separate but equal roles that family life requires for mutual respect, harmony, success, and longevity.

5.     Morality serves women more than men. Women can use it, men don’t need it. Our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage serves women even better. It goes beyond morals to guide men and women into separate but equal roles in home and society. However, ideologies such as humanism, secularism, relativism, and elitism replace morality and religion with values that expand male dominance, serve males over females, and throw away what’s best for families.*

* See the Worldviews page for more about these ‘isms’.

303. Weans, tweens, and teens, #11 — Immature kids

Immature adults emerge from this background: Kids enter puberty with empty minds primed to vacuum up adolescent values that produce these characteristics in adulthood:

·        Action comes before responsibility.

·        Self-centeredness overpowers ‘us’.

·                   Good intentions explain away lack of results.

·        Taking risks overrides common sense.

·        Others must earn my respect.

·        Popularity is more important than character.

·        Symbols are as good as substance.

·        Sex outweighs fidelity.

·        Parental supervision offends.

·        Wisdom resides in my peers.

They get that way from poor parenting in the weans and tweens. The following point to impending immaturity when present at puberty.

They lack:

o   A good work ethic and strong sense of personal responsibility.

o   Religious beliefs and moral convictions that guide them toward living up to something bigger than themselves.

o   Dependence upon parents for wisdom, guidance, support, back up.

o   Respect for authority and authority figures.

o   A foundation of unconditional respect for all people.

o   Ambitions (underdeveloped) for their own adult life. Not necessarily what they want to do, but expectations and preferably dreams of living in the adult world of responsibility, work, mature fun, family building.

They have:

o   Dreams of becoming a teen instead of an adult. They focus on peers, popularity, fashions, outside-the-family activities, and earlier duplication of older kids.  

o   Respect others only for what they can do for the child.

o   Self-centeredness. Selfishness comes easily to them. Their heart is soft for peers, but hard for most others.

o   A mother that did not nurture the child well in the weans, a father that did not lead well in the tweens, or both.

They exit adolescence with convicted beliefs that values learned in the teens are right and proper for adult life. This happens for one reason: They entered puberty with a mind empty of mature adult, albeit underdeveloped, values into which they expected to grow.  

[More about childhood mental growth appears in posts 268, 239, 223, 208, 197, 193, 192, 187, 178, and 177. Scroll down or search by the number with a dot and space following it.]

299. Female dominance: Gone! — Part 10

Women lose their power to offset their mate’s dominant nature when they rely on feelings instead of thinking through with intent to solve problems.

Women easily sense disharmonies, problems, or conflicts in their relationships with a man. Men are far less sensitive to such potentially disruptive forces. Not only less sensitive but also the main culprit, or so women see it.

The ball is always in her court for a variety of reasons, and she has options. Without her initiative and leadership to resolve issues before they compound, her relationship will likely flounder and may fail. It’s in her court because:

·        She’s the relationship expert. Her female nature arms her to counter his dominance when necessary. She has only to play her cards right.

·        He won her by proving himself worthy—or should have. She married him for better or worse, That is, ‘as is’! If he now disappoints her, it’s her fault. Or, so she should assume and more easily forgive and forget.

·        Regardless of his guilt, it’s counterproductive to try quieting his dominant nature. When a man is blamed by his woman, he shifts into competitive mode and treats her as he would another guy—except he can be more forceful with much less fear of reprisal. In competitive mode with his woman, his battle helmet hardens, and he enters discussions with no intention of losing.

·        Leadership operates on principles—primarily responsibility and authority. First principle: Without responsibility, one has no authority to act. If she blames him and expects him to change whatever is wrong, then she accepts no responsibility and has no authority to go further.

·        Blame initially offends him, so she should wait for him to get clued in. She thus yields the power to initiate. When problems become apparent to him, his problem-solving dominance rises to take over. She merely has to guide his efforts to solve her problem.

When she abrogates her role as relationship expert, she loses strength for easing his dominance.

[More on the shattering of female dominance appears at posts 283, 252, 237, 222, 209, 194, 173, 159, and 151.]

 

 

 

 

238. From feminine mystique to feminist mistakes — Part 3

        Patriarchy is natural. Throughout history no matriarchy ever arose, but our American foremothers came closest. Our forebears converted and integrated immigrant patriarchies into a female-friendly, family-centered society.

Our Judeo-Christian value system empowered husbands to dominate workplace and society and enabled wives to dominate home and culture. This empowered our foremothers to promote manly significance and indirectly shape the future without violating the natural dominance of men.

Single men were minor players in cultural development, because most men married or sought marriage. Single women adopted, upheld, and even uplifted the virtues of Womanhood as spreader of all that is good.

Husbands fulfilled wifely expectations for a more civilized life. They tamed Nature, built wealth, managed single male excesses, observed rule of law, customized family-friendliness, and brightened the future for children.

Our American foremothers knew themselves and the male nature; they honored and exploited both. They pursued separate but equal genders.

Generation after generation made the USA more female-friendly. More law and order, security, generosity, compassion, wealth accumulation. Less male aggression, abuse, violence. Greater individual responsibility for family, fathering, husbanding.     

Women harnessed masculine energies to favor female-friendly and family-centered life. Without such wifely leadership, men don’t settle down to help women fulfill female hopes and dreams. As women go, so goes society.

Our foremothers never let up. Mothers tamed boys, girls civilized teen boys, and wives domesticated husbands. And that’s missing today.

[More on old school America appears in posts 218 and 204 below. Scroll down or search by the number with dot and space following it.]