What do women want?
Men are always fascinated
with the question of what women want in order to get a strategic advantage, and
women are also fascinated to see what other women want in order to compare
themselves. But really, can we ever be definitive in our response to this timeless
question? Not really, every woman will have her unique take on what she wants,
and men will not gain all that much advantage reading any single woman's list
of wants, because he is trying to understand one specific woman. So is it a
lost cause to even try? Not at all, any attempt is worth the effort, and that's
just where we are going now.
We could commence with what
appear to be biological imperatives to get some insight into what might be a
few universals. Clearly women and men have different biological roles to
contribute to the survival of the species. Women provide half the genes and are
the ones that pop out the babies and are designed to provide their early
nutrition. Men provide half the genes. Men are also genetically larger and
stronger and appear to be designed for protection and longer range hunting to
provide safety and bulkier food for the vulnerable woman and child.
So at its most basic, when
women are in their time of childbearing and are popping out offspring, they
need men to protect and provide for them. The needs are simple, safety,
security and food. These needs also presuppose that the male has some level of
loyalty to the vulnerable woman and child as well so that he actually works to
keep protecting them and actually brings home the, um, bacon, as it were.
These really fundamental role
variations are driven by biology and don't seem to be any different today.
Women who are vulnerable during their childbearing years still need someone to
provide safety, security and sustenance. However, many millennia of society
have intervened to create evolving contemporary scenarios that have differed
widely over time and around the world. Today we can see almost every
conceivable variation on how women and men organise themselves to live and
survive and thrive.
The needs for safety,
security and sustenance are necessarily going to look quite different in a
western urban setting with people living in a high rise apartment with a
hospital nearby and a supermarket in the basement. Compare this setting to
people living in a mud hut in a semiarid region with long term drought, no
medical care and a reliance on self-sufficiency. Both exist in the same
historical time. So what do women want? It will really be dependent on context.
Women still want a man who is
loyal enough to come back to them so that they continue to be there for safety
and security. They want a man who can contribute to the sustenance of the
family unit, in whatever way contemporary conditions permit. They want someone
reliable so that they can be trusted to be around, not cause mischief and not
bring home diseases from their various dalliances. They should also be
tolerable enough to enable a harmonious time together. In addition, a swag of
good genes would be desirable so that they give the resultant offspring the
best chance of surviving and thriving. Finally, these days, and maybe even
always, a man is more desirable if they are a sensitive lover, whatever that
means in the context of the day. But really, no one wants seconds from a man
that does a bad job.
Your thoughts?
Are men and women really all that different?
Well golly gosh, the short answer is of course yes. Just take a little peek under the outerwear and you can see there are some major anatomical differences but really apart from a few adorable sex related attributes, what is really so different?
Actually not as much as we first think. There are in reality more similarities between females and males than we ever realise. The differences we tend to see are more a result of society insisting on enphasising the differences than anything biology has created. In fact so similar are we that the default human form in the embryo is female. It takes the action of surges of testosterone to alter the strong course of development towards a female baby in order to activate the male pattern towards becoming a male baby.
In the process of becoming a male some female bits are absorbed, and others reorient and reposition and become the bits and pieces typical of the male body. But to do this the human fetus has to be actually sensitive to the action of testosterone. In rare cases this doesn't happen and the female form persists and the baby is born with the primary appearance of a female, while genetically they are male. Their body just doesn't respond to the signlas that their hormones try to activate.
So not only do we have what we can call males, genetically marked by a special pair of sex chromosones referred to as X and Y, we have females marked by two X chromosomes. Then there are varuious other folks who may have X and Y chromosomes but are insensitive to testosterone and are usually raised as girls but are geneticallly male, and then the even wider range of other chromosomal variations such as a single X, or multiple X and one or more Y chromosomes. These variations in chromosomes means that genetically we cannot be totally certain that there are simple differences between males and females. It is hard to classify and hard to draw clear distinctions.
Then apart from that, since most of the chromosomes are similar between males and females (there are 23 pairs of chromosomes in all), with the sex attributes being mainly determined by the single pair of sex chromosomes, we ought to expect that much of the way humans behave and think and feel ought to be similar. That is just what we find. This includes map reading, mathematics, logical thinking, verbal ability, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour.
Statistically, there is greater commonality in the intellectual and emotional aspects of male and female human behaviours than there are differences. This means that in the theoretical case where a baby were to be raised with the family having no idea of its genetic sex (an interesting mental experiement), it is likely that we would find the kiddie grows to display behaviours that we would identify with both typical males and females.
What we tend to find in real life upbringing is that the ways of being we strongly identify with masculinity and femininity are actually products of the context of the culture and society of the time. Hence we also see changes in these gendered behaviours over time historically. Not so many generations ago for example, pink used to be just as much a male colour as a female one, but today, we are deluded into thinking little girls are born with an "I love pink" gene, which is of course nonsense.
Your thoughts?
Welcome
to new readers of Sex Therapy
Not happy
with your performance? Think that searching for some spice is the way to
enliven your sexual performance? Attached and hoping that affair will awaken
flagging abilities? Emotionally dead in a relationship? Run out of excuses to
avoid having sex with your nearest and dearest? Not sure how to break the news
that they don't do it for you any more, or never did? Feel like you are trading your body for money or care or love within a relationship? Feel like all you ever do is please your
partner. and never get any pleasure in return, not even at Christmas or birthdays?
This may be the forum for you to air your stuff, the good, the bad and the
ugly...
Regrets?
I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. In fact I really have none,
and have plenty of experience to draw on...maybe something said here can help
change the way you think about things, and get you closer to a solution. Of
course some of you may think you are beyond help (we all know someone like that don't we?)
but we won't know that till you have a go at sorting out what's troubling
you...go for it! You can do it!
