Mansplaining explained
As if you had to ask
I love Guy de Monpassant’s short stories. He resumes the human condition. Almost anything that has happened to men and women he has written about it. That doesn’t prevent us from writing our stores. Guy has a way of explaining the ups and downs of human beings. Men like to try to explain things, especially to women, with various success.
Men don’t keep journals. Women keep diaries and journals and take apart conversations and dissect their feelings forever; men don’t. Men keep our feelings locked up, we rarely cry, unless a man comes from a society that allows it. For the most part men lead a lonely life. As far as my experiences go, I think we are afraid of being weak, and vulnerable in front of other men. I was thinking about this when I wrote the last thing about social drinking. Men sit side by side, women sit face to face. This is probably something to do with testosterone and the need for men to compete agains each other. A man who looks another man in the eye is probably going to provoke a fight. Where as a woman who looks at another woman is seeking to establish cooperation based on emotional intent. A man can look a woman in the eyes but it is a different game they are playing.
In this era of women’s liberation and ‘me too’ movement, the rules are changing. Yet they stay the same. Dr Baron Cohen has posited an interesting theory of autism. He believes that there is a male and a female brain, and that a woman can have a male brain and a man can have a female brain. But what he really means is that if some one possesses a ‘super male brain‘ it is the cause of autism. The male brain at its purest form is unable to process the emotional signals that most of us can understand. Being bereft of this ability - not having ‘theory of mind’ - means that an autistic person can not understand the un-spoken emotional signals. They test this by showing pictures of just the eyes and mouths of people and asking what is the emotion expressed in the photograph; people with autism rarely get it right.
Women live in a wonderful world of emotions and feelings. Men barely have access to this world, because we are not programmed to understand. Men have testosterone and other epigenetic influences that impede us from understanding. Think of a hunter who is going to kill the baby animal, and think about what a woman would feel and what a man feels - not much.
I was asked how to seduce a woman, and I thought about it, and I came up with this; “You have to understand what a woman wants and then give it to her.” Simple but complicated, because understanding a woman is impossible, and those who do are the big winners. A man who can listen to women is a gem that women cherish.
But men are men. Which means this; we have to keep our emotions locked away, we have to put a brave face on what whatever we face. We have learned not to wear our hearts on our sleeve. We are constantly being judged by women. We are constantly competing with other men, both romantically and in work. No hugs or even a pat on the back waiting for us, that women give each other. Yes, we look like we have it all, but it can be taken from us in a moment, and we know it.
