I just don’t think guys are big readers in general. Maybe adding an audible part to your post would get more men on board??

Sharon

You Rock Star!

Stay tuned for the macho pictures…

This was a funny one – I love your sense of humor. I’ve actually wondered about the male versus female thing.

Most of my gigs are corporate so they are a mixture of men and women, with about them being half and half.

But I did notice that most of the people who comment at my blog are women. In fact some of my strongest, most vocal supporters have been woman.

I even had a woman who calls herself one of my “fans” create a “Stephen Hopson Fanclub” at Facebook! Go figure. What do you make of THAT?

Great writing – I smiled all the way through. I’d love to see what happens if you decided to slather one post with pictures of monster trucks and dirt bikes. See if that would draw out the macho men.

Cheers…

Peace.

Cheers.

Men and different from women. If you need further proof, 1) find someone wearing either a kilt or a skirt. 2) lift said kilt or skirt. 3) Observe whether the underwear has that useless flap that men’s underwear have. 4) If you didn’t have permission for step two, dodge the punch and/or kick.

I’m not saying that the differences between people posting are purely biological… Personally, I think it has more to do with whether a person’s underwear has that flap or not, than how the brain is wired. Even though testosterone is a powerful hormone, blokes like me, who don’t get shots, have had all their lives to get used to it, so it’s not an excuse.

Here in the Land of the (increasingly not-so) Free, boys are taught to swallow their feelings, and if they have a problem, just fix it. Girls are taught to understand their feelings, and if they have a problem, then manage it. We’re not born knowing how to fix or manage problems, and puberty is a series of hormone changes, not a mystical key for knowledge and skills locked away in our genetic code. (Talents are genetic, not skills… I can be genetically disposed to running fast, but unless I develop my talent of running into a skill, then the genes mean nothing.)

So, our problem solving skills have to be taught, and our parents are the first ones to teach us. No matter how fair and equal each parent tries to be, we’re working against our own upbringings if we’re trying to teach our children how to work through their problems using both fixing and managing styles.

Then comes the next big teacher: Our kids head off to school. The most influential person there? Not the teacher him/herself, but our peers. Armed with the prejudices of our parents, each of us as children went out into the early years of school and systematically strove to make everybody else just like us… At least, we did that with the people who looked like us.

So, what’s under the skirt/kilt matters more than what’s in the brain, when it comes to forming our problem solving skills. Of course, the brain still has a say in what the body does, and it’s possible to learn different skills, but the underlying habits and paradigms are set by society.

Back to the skills themselves:

Fixing vs Managing… When a guy has a problem, we fix it. If we can’t fix it, we fix something else, and wait for that problem to be fixed. Obviously not the best strategy, but if we examine the root from which society taught men their problem solving skills, i.e., hunting, it makes sense. If we can’t kill an animal, we’ll go and kill another one.

When women have problems, they manage it… Back to the root of society, when women would wait for guys to bring back food, they’d have to deal with the wounded, sick, young, and each other, so they learned to communicate effectively, delegate responsibility, and set up an elaborate pecking order based on appearances. Again, not the most efficient style of problem solving, because things don’t get fixed, just managed.

When the guys get home with a fresh carcass on their backs and a bag full of fruits and berries, the women share their feelings, the guys mistake the venting for asking for things to be fixed, so fix them, get frustrated (and hungry) and go off to kill something else. The system worked wonderfully, because the things that needed to be fixed got fixed, and the things that needed to be managed got managed.

Then we learned agriculture, and it all went downhill from there.

Please note: There is no beginning to the following cycle, I just picked the part that I had the hardest part understanding as the first part.

So today, women vent to their men, men mistake the venting for asking for things to be fixed, and get frustrated. Men fix as much as they can, and yearn to go hunt, but since they’re now tied to desks and come home each day, there’s nowhere to escape to, so they escape into themselves. Women see that escape as shutting down completely, which worries them immensely (after all, the only reason to shut down is because you’re mad at the person you’re shut off towards, right women?). The woman now tries to get the guy to un-escape, driving the guy further away. Then, when the guy is finally able to look at the world outside of himself, his woman in now free to vent again… But again, the guy mistakes the venting for asking for things to get fixed, which just repeats the cycle again.

It’s nobody’s fault… or rather, each person is equally to blame.

The solution: Guys, don’t fix everything. Listening _is_ fixing, in this case.

Gals, don’t draw men out of their silence. Guys don’t vent under pressure.

And here’s a handy translation for when you ask “What’s wrong?” and your significant other says “Nothing.”

Woman saying “Nothing:” I want you to really listen to what is wrong, so I’m making you pay attention by making you ask more questions to draw out what is wrong.

Man saying “Nothing:” I have a problem, but I can fix it myself given time. If you keep pestering me about it, I will feel worthless, so please give me time to deal with this on my own.

Just imagine the confusion that has been caused by these two completely different definitions of “Nothing.”

And sometimes, it really is nothing.

Wow, I sure got off on a tangent.

I’m 24 years old male. I like the motivation you give and plainly to be honest I keep reading because you’re the type of guy I kind of look up to. There I said it. I know I don’t know it all. Most times I just feed from the articles off to to another task, no post, just feed and gather the perspective.