What do men want?
 

Yeah, okay, get the snorts and snickers out of the way ... and then, not ignoring sex, but taking a broader view that includes it, ...

Why do men say they want a woman who is warm and sympathetic, caring, etc., and then bail the moment she shows these qualities? Why do men decry the concept of the icy narcissistic queen, and then spend their lives chasing her? Do men really need to endlessly hunt but never make that perfect shot?

What do the cellar men want? Do they want a woman who is hard to win over, who remains remote, but who occasionally bestows favors? Do they want a best friend who shares passion and amazing pleasure with only them? Do they want something else again? What do men want?

For me ... I'm interested only in terms of making sense of past failures. I've moved beyond the phase of trying to reinvent myself. I'm just honestly wondering.

Not all men are like that. I know a man who wants a warm and sympathetic, caring, etc woman and stays away from those icy narcissistic queens. I'm sorry that all men that you've met are the bad ones. I may occasionally say men are bastards, but I do believe there are good bastards out there. :D Hehehe....I'm kidding around. There are good men out there. I'm sorry that you haven't met one.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket.

Really, I like a woman smart enough to be funny, but not so smart that you can never tell the same joke twice. Calm but not boring. Pleasant, but not submissive. Confident, but not bossy. Attractive, but not obsessed with her image. I want her to love me as I am. To want to help me improve, but not judge me and try to change who I am. Honest about her feelings, but not whiny or bitchy. Amanda.

Oh, and blow jobs. lots of blow jobs. ; )

Ok, I'm going to say embarrassing things here. Sex is not that important. Affection, cuddling, or simply holding hands can mean so much more. I want someone to be my best friend I can trust with anything. I want someone to accept that "I'm broken" and can't be fixed. I need someone who enjoys a good laugh and loves inside jokes. Looks don't mean that much to me since I'm disfigured and anyone who would love me would be beautiful in my eyes.

For this special woman, I'd do quirky things like surprise gifts. I'd try to pamper her with warm baths, massages, and cooking for her. I'd try to listen and understand her problems. If she has children or grandchildren, I would treat them as my own.

I guess it all comes down to this. I want someone I can be one with

Sarge, that's beautiful.

for now:

• Someone with a sunny disposition but not a Pollyanna.
• A quick wit and good sense of humor, earthy but not slapstick.
• Very smart
• Emotionally intelligent and sound
• Self assured and competent
• GGG

I'm not hip with the kids' lingo these days; what is GGG?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Love#GGG

Urban dictionary is your friend, esp. Dan Savage.

GGG stands for Good in bed, Giving equal attention to your partner's pleasure, and Game for "it", whatever "it" may be, within reason.

Yeah, so to elaborate on what I want... in broader terms (though I am pretty sure dames don't like being called broads)

I like someone I can play with on equal ground. (I didn't say footing, for obvious reasons)
By play I mean verbally, physically, intellectually. And by play with I don't mean toy with. More in the sense of being equals or peers, able to give and take.

After living under siege for so long I am really looking for peace.

I don't often laugh out loud, but this did it for me.

Really, I like a woman smart enough to be funny, but not so smart that you can never tell the same joke twice. Calm but not boring. Pleasant, but not submissive. Confident, but not bossy. Attractive, but not obsessed with her image. I want her to love me as I am. To want to help me improve, but not judge me and try to change who I am. Honest about her feelings, but not whiny or bitchy.

(That's Jackie too. I feel so lucky that she is with me.)

Stated perfectly sir! :thumbsup:

High eighty five

xbox one

Mars/Venus for geeks :p:

Ha! Nicely done.

Actually, I'm a little torn on which I want. Lot of selling points for the Xbox one. When I eventually dig myself out of my financial mire I'll have to have a look at what games are available on both systems. I also need to take into account what J has, given I would like to be able to borrow his large collection of games! I think he's on playstation, so that's why I was leaning that way.

Is it PS4 that now has facial recognition? Or am I mixing up the two systems?

I'm a pretty late starter on consoles (unless you count the original Atari games console with Pong and Skeet ;p). I always preferred PC based games - mainly because of the freedom to adapt and mod and so on, and in order to play complex MMO games.

But...I could go for a console right now. The idea of sitting on my comfy sofa playing Assassins Creed or something on my tv screen definitely appeals.

Playstation is better technically, but yes it's about games and what your friends have.

The xbox 360 Kinect can do facial recognition, the xbox one has a higher res camera that can tell if blush or something, maybe gaze recognition

I just want to smoke some medical marijuana go out dancing and paint some new paintings, and maybe write some new poetry too

I'd advise you to verify which of the old games can actually be played on a new console, you may not be consoled by what you find.

Every man actually wants two women, whether he knows this or not.

Rap wisdom:

To wit:

:lol:

You know, after a lot of thought, I want my wife. She's great. She's given me a lot of what I want, but it took a while. I want to do dangerous manly things like jump out of planes and visit other countries on behalf of my government. I want to drive across country with no apparent plan or destination. I want to make out in the convenience store and have hot sex. I've wanted to become a good husband, father, and Soldier. She's helped with the first two and given me the space for the third. She loves me and will take my good with my bad, what I've gained through 20 years of marriage is mostly intangible and totally worth the ups and downs. Learning to accept her for who she is, and her doing the same has been hard and worth it. Keeping my promises I made at the wedding ceremony has been equally as hard especially with that sickness and health thing...she's suffered much more than I with mental illness and addiction. Sex when we have sex is pretty great, ups and downs there over the long haul as well. What, you expect different? I know I did. Having said all that, if she died, I don't think I would marry again...don't think I have it in me. What I want from a woman would prolly change at that point. I think it would be hard to expect some of the things in a marriage, the level of acceptance and support, closeness, physical and emotional, and space too...from a part time companion. It's way too easy to say fuck you I'm out of here when things are out of sorts.

OK, kind of went off on a tangent there, give me a break though cause I'm deployed and in way too much of an introspective mood.

nah, that was all good joe.

I liked it. And much of it rings true for me.

good one, joe. well said

That's really nice, Joe. You and your lass sound like you have a good and solid relationship.

I liked it too, Joe. I think it's true for long relationships ... the hard work of figuring out and accepting who your partner is, of working on yourself, of coping with what life throws at you ... it gives a history and context to your partnership and a closeness that takes all that time to develop. I completely understand your comment that you wouldn't remarry because you just don't have it in you to do it again. I suspect a lot of us would agree with that.

There IS a difference
 

--Jennifer Finney Boylan, from "Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders"

But...is that difference innate or culturally created?

Is it a natural and necessary aspect of masculinity that 'manhood' is a solitary experience and a natural and necessary aspect of femininity that womanhood is a shared experience? Or are those the roles we have set out for ourselves (at times and in some places), in which we expect silent strength from men and shared warmth from women and so teach our children and ourselves in such a divided fashion?

Yes.

Innate and culturally created arise concurrently and each informs the other. I hate to play the parent card, but when you watch kids grow up you see things that surprise you and have no explanation than "That was installed at the factory."

Oh I don;t doubt that there are different developmental paths. I also don't doubt that a lot of parents will see their youngsters playing out a difference that corresponds with expected gender norms (even if they themselves have doubted those norms are anything other than constructed). But there are also parents who don't see their children play out those differences. Quite possibly a similar number.

Also: you are not watching your children from some external vantage point. You are teaching them, from birth, in ways both conscious and unconscious. They are primed to take messages from the adults (first) and other children (next) around them.

There's also the fact that we almost certainly read behaviours differently according to the gender of the person we're observing. Children and adults alike. What may be seen as one behaviour in a little boy, may be read very differently in a little girl. We are not objective and disinterested observers. We see the world through our own lenses.

My brother's two kids are very different from each other in temperament and personality. There are some similarities but they are very different. Sophie, for example, is absolutely fearless and always has been. The first to try something that seems dangerous and loves physical activities. Amelia was always a little more cautious and less physical.

If they were a boy and a girl, those differences may well appear to be gender based. Just as the difference in how the two girls approach social situations and the way they build friendships. Amelia seemed very much the way one might expect a little girl to be in how she approached these things. Sophie, however, seemed to build friendships and interact with her friends in a way similar to that described by some as typical of boys.

It's the grandparents, it's all their fault, they screw up the kids and send them home for the parents to deal with. ;)

True dat. :p

That's one of the few rewards for growing old.

Sophie is the second child and Amelia the first?

The mm is more like Sophie and the inch is more like Amelia.

More on this later.

OK, help me out here. Genders ARE different. Dana are you suggesting it is some sort of bad thing to be a man or to be a woman? That somehow society just fucks us all in the proverbial head by suggesting that having a penis or a vagina should incorporate "gender roles"? I hope you are not pushing some sort of genderless utopian society where there are no men or women just humans who happen to be born with a penis and a vagina only to used for making little humans with an equal chance to have a penis or a vagina.

There are differences, yes. But the idea that men and women think and process in fundamentally different ways because of biological differences is looking less and less tenable with each passing year of research.

There is far more variance between individual brains of any gender than there is between 'male' and 'female' brains. The differences that do exist between most male brains and most female brains do not sufficiently explain differences in behaviour, and so often subvert the models that do seek to explain those behavioural differences as to render them moot.

From http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...-womens-brains




And from 'Debunking the 'Gender Brain' myth':

There are differences. And, you know, that is fine. It works for us, as a species, as a culture and as a society to organise and understand ourselves in such a way. I think it needs tweaking. I think an understanding that profound differences in thinking, talents and proclivities between the sexes is to an extent a chosen thing. Something we have made, rather than something biologically innate. Because if something is biologically innate then changing it is in some sense unnatural. A step away from what we are meant to be.

That logic, the notion that femininity in particular is a natural and necessary property of womanhood has been used to justify a great deal of oppression and injustice. In our culture this is less impactful - women are able to participate in areas of life which had until quite recently been off-limits on the grounds of their womanhood and natural, innate gender limitations. In some countries it still is the basis of much oppression. Why else must femininity be guarded and controlled? There are still cultures who consider women's involvement in politics to be against nature. And it was only a couple of hundred years ago, a mere raindrop in the ocean of human existence, that our own cultures held such assumptions. For women to enter a male preserve was not just to threaten masculinity and male roles, but to threaten femininity. Women who did so were unnatural.

There is a male equivalent, of course. Men who didn't or don't fit society's model of acceptable manhood.

Like I say: I don't mind that there are differences in broadly male and and broadly female experiences. But they are overplayed. And when they are seen as something carved into the stone of what we are they become a trap. Rather than the mostly workable and mostly helpful distinctions we have arrived at as a society. Vive la difference. For those who are different. But let's not kid ourselves that we are more divided by our gender experience than we are united by our human experience.

I think we can see answers in the gender differences that have existed throughout all time, in cultures that evolved separately without contact.

I think gender differences make total evolutionary sense because a tribe is more likely to survive if there are different skills guaranteed to exist.

I think we see gender differences in almost every species due to that tactic.

And a male human and female human are genetically more different than a male human and a male chimpanzee.

Bit of a red herring, that one, I think.


http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask38

I suspect this is just what Dana is pushing.
She tends to think of humans just as being human.
It's sad when you think about it. But you have to forgive her; she didn't get to push out any babies herself so she has an agenda to push instead.

Where do tomboys and homosexuals fit in your paradigm? Nature or nurture?



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If societal, learned gender roles predominantly determine genderish behaviors, where did society learn them from?

Oh fiddle dee dee...

I have a response to this thread, and i dont think dana will like it much. lol. I will have to open my comp for it though.

More later.

OK, here I am again, and so soon!

I think the one thing we all seem to forget about when we discuss issues of nature or nurture are the hormones. They're so different in men and women, and there's really no one I can think of, man or woman, who hasn't obviously behaved in a way which has been predestined by their hormones. Some minor exceptions would be those with gender identification issues, which research has suggested might be due a hormonal imbalance in utero.

Yeah, plenty of men and women are not slaves to their hormones in that they pick a fight with any man who looks at him sideways or become a blithering mess once a month, but that doesn't mean they aren't affected. They've just found a way to control those urges. To my mind, that doesn't mean they're any less of a man or woman, but they're definitely different, and can be fairly confidently predicted to behave in certain manners in certain situations. The only difference is the extremity of those behaviours.

About the child thing, I think most kids aren't really boys or girls till those hormones kick in. Till then, it's about the parents influence one way or another. We try very hard in our house not to influence the kids into any type of gender stereotype, but the boys have still turned out to be much like boys, and the girl is somewhat undecided. lol She's just a little ratbag atm really. You could dress her in anything and not know her gender by her behaviours.

I agree with foot on this one. I think it's a little from column A, and a little from column B as far as the how of us becoming masculine or feminine in our behaviours, but physiologically, it's pretty hard to beat nature.

Both. A complex stew of factors including the initial set of cards dealt through the brain, the learning experiences that brain goes through, the hormonal landscape, genetic inheritance etc etc etc.

My problem with the male brain/female brain idea is that it gives too great a role to the differences between genders instead of the much greater distinctions between individuals. And it assumes a much greater impact from those differences in terms of behaviour, talents and proclivities than they actually seem to have, judging by much of the current research in this area.

The human brain and the way it develops is significantly more elastic and responsive than that model would suggest.

Nurture necessarily plays a large part. Or more accurately, experience and learning interact with other factors to shape the brain. The notion that women are less spatially aware than men, for example, may be purely down to our assumptions that that is the case. Girls who are expected to develop spatial awareness skills and treated from an early age as if that is the case are likely to be spatially aware (or so it appears from recent studies in learning and development in children).

As human beings we are highly advanced in a number of areas: we are endowed from the start with the capacity and will to learn. Big skulls, helpless babes, we get the starter software, the thing that allows us to reach conclusions about ourselves and our world without having to have a wide range of instinctive behaviours and responses programmed in from the start. And we are sophisticated social creatures. Not only do we instinctively learn, but we instinctively learn about where we sit in and how to interact within our group.

That includes gender roles.



From our forebears. From their forebears. From their forebears. from ourselves and from each other. Because they are, on the whole, useful to us.

I agree, broadly with much of that. The difficulty though is what behaviours and talents we put under the 'nature' tab. To my mind, way too much of it is bundled in there, along with a general air of 'that makes sense what with our hunter gatherer past and all'.

So much of what we see as just the way men and women are because of what they are, has changed and shifted in different contexts, in different places and at different points in history.

I think the biggest problem we have as human beings is the fact that although groups of us display similar characteristics, we're all individuals, so we don't all fit into neat categories. In fact, I'd say none of us are completely one way or another.

When we stop searching for absolutes and become content to let things be as they are, and feel free of judgement and prejudice, life will be much simpler.

In my mind, I see it as a scale from 1 to 100, uber-feminine to uber-masculine. 99% of women fall within the 1 to 75 range, while 99% of men fall within the 25 to 100 range. The 1% of each who are outside their birth range are most likely to identify as transgender. That leaves 2/3 of men and 2/3 of women in the "overlap" range, between 25 and 75.

Statistically, the loading at each end is significant: women on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-feminine end, and men on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-masculine side. Generalizations are indeed helpful when trying to make predictions, at least in the absence of any additional information. But the odds are not so great that I'd ever put money on an individual woman being to the left of an individual male. 50 women versus 50 men, yes. But not one on one.

*nods* yeah. That seems to be very much in line with what the current research shows.

It has always seemed to me that, in the case of sexual orientation, both view points are right, in this argument. I kind of see gender confusion... or disharmony, if that comes off better, as the underlying cause of homosexuality.

In some people, nature makes enough of a difference in their orientation to "make them" what they are, so they end up orienting opposite to the norm. I've seen enough obviously gay kids to believe it.

I also believe that upbringing can have enough to do with a child's orientation. Pretty sure I've seen that too.

So, yes. The answer is Yes.

A few thoughts:

Yes, there are some differences between male and female brains and experiences. But: they are not as fundamental or as innate as is often suggested.

This is the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus myth. And it is a dangerous and unhelpful myth. It says we are so different as to represent almost different species. It reduces the common ground we share and emphasizes the gap that divides us.

To go back to Undertoad's point about genetic difference being greater between human males and human females than exists between male humans and male chimpanzees: really? That's where we're at now is it? Are we really saying that we have more in common with a chimpanzee of our own gender than a human being of another gender?

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The male brain, the female brain. Innate, uncompromising, untranslatable difference.

It flies in the face of almost everything we know (admittedly not very much) about how our brains work, how we process information, how we develop cognitive skills and functions. But it fits with the lived experience of enough people to carry weight far beyond what the evidence tells us.

Time and again, initial studies will come out, get a mass reading in the press and become accepted as incontrovertible proof of absolute difference, and a bestseller book is born (for instance the recent: The Female Brain, followed shortly after by The Male Brain). And so the notion that women are genetically more competant with language, multi-tasking and emotional interaction, whilst men have evolved super computer, highly focused math and map reading brains takes root. It fits our existing prejudices (or rather our own lived experiences) and seems to make sense when set against our hunter gatherer past (about which, by the way, we all assume a certain set of gender roles which may well have been very different). And it comforts us, because it confirms our own sense of what it is to be male or female. Then the book gets revised (as with The Female Brain) and the headline fact about male and female language use and development that got everybody so excited gets removed because further study changes or even reverses the findings. But that gets a lot less press.

There is a comradeship in gender. When we laugh at the comedian who jokes about typical male or typical female behaviour, we include ourselves in that bigger picture, we fit a stereotype we want to to fit. And our partner fits a stereotype we want him/her to fit.

It is the ultimate confirmation bias.

But Men aren't from Mars, and I am not from Venus. And Undertoad does not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with me.

The war of the sexes hurts both sides. Why do we accept and embrace this perpetual conflict? The logic of a male brain / female brain model is deeply flawed. It is neat and tidy and simple. We have different brains, we think differently, we are different. And that difference is an unbridgeable gulf. It's not just a myth it is a dangerous myth.

In countries where there is a commonly held perception that males are naturally more suited to mathematics and science than are females, girls do badly in maths and science subjects and are largely missing from the higher levels of those fields. In countries where that is not a commonly held view, girls and women are well-represented in those fields. It isn't a case of girls not being allowed in (except for a few places), but rather they do badly. They are not good at maths and science.

In one study (which I can't recall the details of now, but will try to find it at some point) two groups of high performing maths students, of mixed gender, were given a maths test. One group were given information that showed boys to be naturally better at maths than girls. The other group was not given this information. In the group that was told boys are better at maths, the girls performed worse than the boys. In the group which was not told this, the girls did as well as the boys.

But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys. That they are less emotionally intelligent than their sisters. That they are socially clumsy, and linguistically challenged. Whilst their sisters (they are told) share themselves and experience femaleness as some sort of warm and fuzzy love club, they're to be thrust out into the world, with their emotions battened down, never showing weakness, silently carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

There are differences between our brains and our experiences which stem from whether we are male or female (or where we are on that spectrum). But there are also differences between our brains that stem from your specific genetic heritage and lived experiences and my specific genetic heritage and lived experience. Why do we put so very much into the thing that divides us a little?

Men: you do not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with your wives and sisters.

Wow. Someone has a lot of free time.


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Someone has a chapter on interpersonal violence between soldiers, to write :p


I really, really have to stop getting distracted with this stuff

This is the point that you have already debunked, I admit, and so I wish you had not used it as your jumping-off point, center point, and end point.

From before:

Turtles all the way down?

Where did the ideas/practices begin, and why do they exist across cultures?

Well dang! Here comes another one, from last month:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1202161935.htm

I don't think you should ignore that, and I don't believe you could debunk this one if you worked it full-time with the facilities and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania.

This post is getting long, so let me address my next point in another one.

Yes. I read about that. I also read a lot of the criticisms of that study and the implications that were drawn from it.

Here's one that rounds up some of the criticism:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...e_imaging.html

If you read the whole article, you'll find lots of links for those assertions and criticisms.

This has some interesting stuff to say about it as well:

http://www.jpehs.co.uk/2013/12/03/br...female-brains/

There are also some really good academic responses, but I can't access them from home (the library license is only from on campus).

This has been fun :) but I'm stepping out of this discussion. I am spending way too much time thinking about this, and not nearly enough time thinking about my thesis :P

We tell them that they should be sitting quietly at a desk for eight hours at a time. When they find they can't easily do that, we tell them they are defective and give them drugs to help them accomplish it. Then, at the end of their secondary education, they go to college at a lower rate than the girls.

This is where we are now. I dunno if it's similar in Yorkshire.

It's weird this insistence on equality of outcome. From my experience it has been a mixed bag.

I graduated three decades ago with a comp sci degree, and over 1/3rds of comp sci majors were women. At that time, in education, there was deep concern that women weren't entering STEM fields. So girls were urged to enter those fields. Today 30 years later, 1/4 of comp sci majors are women.

Right. It went down. In an era when more women go to college, fewer of them go for comp sci. In an era when the M/F ratio in MED school is about 52/48, the ratio in comp sci dropped. In a huge way.

I believe this is a true M/F brain difference; I think it goes across cultures. It's not that girls can't do programming as well as boys. It's that they have preferences, and like many other preferences, they are established before birth. Before society even has a chance to get to them.

If there are brain differences, the worst thing we could do to boys and girls is tell them there are not. The best thing we could do is show that these differences exist and then to educate them about prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping, so that any judging that happens works on an individual basis.

The WORST thing we could do is shoehorn people into professions they don't actually enjoy because we have decided that equality is the only thing that matters.

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." - Aristotle

Y'know, I could write an essay in response to that. The comp science bit especially. But I really, really don;t have time. I'd like to. But I have to be a bit strict with myself.

So I'll just say this:

I'm not saying there aren't differences. But here's the thing: are those differences because one has a boy brain and the other has a girl brain; or is that one has a type A brain and the other has a type C brain, and girls are more likely than boys to have a type C brain, and boys are more likely than girls to have a type A brain?

Because both those paths might lead to a broadly similar outcome, but they have very different implications.