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Dr Leonard Sax published his landmark work, Why Gender Matters, in 2004. It discusses the differences, physiological and psychological, between boys and girls, with a particular focus on how it can apply to learning styles and teaching methods. I recently re-read it, and purchased his recent updated edition that takes into account a lot of new research. Of particular interest if not particularly pertinent to today's post: girls and women tend to have a sense of smell that is orders of magnitude more discerning than boys and men. The way he described the results of the study was that women can smell something, and then every time they smell it again, they get more and more attuned to that smell, increasing their reaction to it. I'm kind of massacring the retelling, but women can have that smell reinforced up to 100,000 times their initial reaction to it, while men will not experience this kind of olfactory reinforcement one bit. Think about it like this: A mouse has died in the ductwork. You, a man, catch a whiff, and shrug it off. It will dessicate in a week or so, no biggy. You're not ripping up drywall to get at it. Your wife, however, constantly has the smell reinforced, again and again. Every time she's in range it's like she's on the Basra road in 1991, in the middle of a charnel house scene of bloated bodies under the pulsing Mideastern sun. Your dismissive attitude is not appreciated. That was one of the physiological differences he talks about in the book, and there are tons more. This is not some sort of manifesto supporting the patriarchy, folks, it's just really a interesting concentration of thought about significant research. Well, on the psychological side, Dr Sax talks about the differences between typical friendships between boys and between girls. Long story short he defines it like this: Boys tend to have side by side friendships. They are shoulder to shoulder, engaging in or appreciating an outside event or activity. There is little personal emotional investment in one another. Boys (and men) don't tend to share their feelings or secrets with one another. If the male of the species are shoulder to shoulder in their friendship, girls and women tend to be face to face. That is, their friendships are about sharing with one another. The focus is on investing time in the other person. I used the phrase "tends to" when describing this because I recognize, as Dr Sax points out, that people exist on a spectrum. Without getting too granular about individual people, I think his analysis matches what I have typically seen in my day to day life. How does that add up when it comes to relationships between men and women? Particularly romantic ones? I think one could support Harry's argument from When Harry Met Sally, in that men are incapable of being friends with women without incorporating some acknowledgement of sexuality. (that's a nice way to translate what he said). Of course, I recognize the spectrum of sexual identity throws a wrench into the works, but if we are discussing otherwise sexually compatible men and women, he makes a point that can be debated. So if you apply that to a married couple, what do you get? Very often, you get the woman facing in toward the man, and the man facing out toward the world. I think Terry Real articulates that when he discusses narcissistic prototypical male behavior in a committed straight relationship. I say this because the man is looking out at the world, and the woman is pouring emotional energy into what she perceives as his cold shoulder. Men, this may seem great when initial attraction is carrying you forward and she is carrying the emotional (and very often the day to day drudgery) weight in the relationship. But much like the mall Santa in Elf, you are sitting on a throne of lies. Neither of you will be happy in the end. I'd like to think I was faced inward toward her for big chunks of our decades long marriage, but I know that it was more likely I was a comet, zooming out into the recesses of our emotional solar system for most of our relationship, with periods where I was whipping around her, facing squarely at the glory of her love for me. With this transition to a total power exchange, or as near to total as is possible for two separate people, I find that I have locked into a close orbit with her. We are face to face now, and it is glorious. I grok her feelings, her thoughts, her desires. I know when to just hold her hand and be there for her, and when to leap up and get upset for her. We are connected on a fundamental level that makes me feel more emotionally content than at any other point in my life. What a gift submission has been for me. Of course, there are many paths to this connection folks. You don't have to put the collar on, but getting to this point is something I would hope everyone can experience in their lives. It is sublime.
