articles

Interesting articles about men:
first: The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural way of seeing and doing things, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.

second: The Apex Fallacy: An Interview with Dr. Helen Smith

third: an interesting blog....

Why Are Women More Liberal than Men?

October 30
~Of course, there are many conservative women and liberal men, but as a general rule, men tend to be more conservative and women more liberal. Dennis asks why.
~Dennis speculates:
1. masculine thinking is macro- broad and general. (Ex: a car crash- what, where, how)
feminine thinking is more micro- individually focused. (Ex: a car crash- who)
Both ways of thinking are needed.
2. Compassion vs Standards.
Women are more compassion oriented,
vs Men who are more standards oriented.
~Caller says: women are more emotional, and that's why they sympathies with individual stories and problems. And since the woman is a nurturer who cares for others, they also want the State to take care of others.

Men Who Don’t Want Sex

Oct 22
~Dennis has dealt with the issue of husbands wanting sexual relations and wives not; now the reverse situation is discussed – women who want sex and their husbands don’t.

Marriage: how much work should it take?

~Oct 15
~Should marriage be hard work? Work, yes. But constant hard work? That’s debatable.
~Dennis asks, "If marriage is daily hard work, then why would you want to get married?"
~caller says, "the biggest test in a relationship is if you can go on vacation with them for 10 days and still enjoy being with them." The applies to all relationships, not just marriage.
~caller says, "Children are hard work, but they are worth it." Dennis say, "yes, children are worth the hard work it takes, but it's different. One reason to get married is to have a refuge from the world."
~At times, it will be hard work. But if it's a daily hard work, then it can become discouraging.

Date Your Spouse for the Rest of Your Life

~Sept 24
~You worked hard to win over your spouse when you were dating. You should keep up the good work during your marriage. Love and respect must be continually earned.
~Why assume that your spouse will always love you? Your actions have a cause and effect.
~In marriage, you learn a lot about another person's issues, but you learn a lot about your own issues too.
~This can apply to friends too. Be kind to your friends, or you could lose them through attrition and time.
~Marriage is work. But it is not really hard work. It's work that pays off if you give it some effort.
~Treat your spouse as well as you treat strangers; with respect and kindness.
~A caller said that as a tennis player, she could tell whether the mix-doubles teams she played against were married or not, because 9 out of 10 times, if the couple was mean to each other, they were married to each other. And that is sad.

Does it matter? Singleness vs Marriage.

Sept 17
~Dennis talks to Kim Calvert, editor and publisher of a new magazine celebrating the single life, Singular.
~Dennis argues that the ideal for society is marriage. Kim argues that it doesn't matter, both are equal.
~Dennis says marriage helps mature a person and helps them become deeper. Kim says that can happen but doesn't always guarantee it.
~Kim says people shouldn't look to marriage for happiness; Dennis agrees.
~Even though they are both divorced, Dennis hopes to remarry someday; Kim could go either way.
~Kim says "I’d rather be single for the rest of my life than be unhappy with the wrong person."
~All things being equal, Dennis argues the best life has to offer is to be in a happy marriage.

skews towards men

Sept 10
~Dennis begins by addressing an accusation by a listener that the Male/Female skews towards men. Dennis pleads guilty and explains why this is so….

• 1. Men are simpler. Less complicated than women.
• 2. Dennis is a male, thus can give insight about men that he can't about women.
• 3. A Woman who understands the male nature of her husband will have a happier marriage.

~Men need a defined role in the family. It can be breadwinner, or homemaker. Whatever it is, men respond better when their role is clearly defined.
~Men want wives, not competitors.
~Most men are not jerks. They don't marry with the intent to be unfaithful.
~Men need to be recognized for their achievements.

Role Models

August 28
~Dennis talks briefly with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, eldest daughter of the late Bobby Kennedy, and delegate to the convention, about the difference between boys and girls and macro-role-models.
~This wasn't a Male/Female hour, but interesting points about starting values and beliefs.

difference

A friend just told me a good analogy between men and women:
Men are like waffles: they are good at compartmentalizing everything in life.
Women are like spaghetti: everything in life is intertwined and connected.

Men want women to be more traditional - and women 'are HAPPY to be the housewife'

from www.dailymail.co.uk
Last updated at 8:02 AM on 28th August 2008

It was the feminist dream of the 1960s – a world in which men and women share the load equally.

But it seems the fairer sex has all but abandoned the struggle. According to research published today, most men want a traditional wife – and women are often only too
happy to oblige.

In turn, it claims that the husband women most desire is a ‘retrosexual’ – meaning they are more hunter gatherer than a ‘metrosexual’ stay-at-home father.

History repeating: Wedding bliss in the 1950s

More than 1,500 adults were asked about the attributes that they ‘most valued’ in a spouse or partner. Their answers could have been taken from a manual to happy married life in the 1950s.

At the top of the men’s list was ‘taking care of the home’, followed by cooking, cleaning and great parenting.

Only 16 per cent said they value ‘financial stability’ in a woman – which means most men put domestic bliss above a wife who calls the shots in the boardroom.

The research from.the Yorkshire Building Society found many women are making equally conventional choices.

Nearly 40 per cent said ‘financial stability’ is one of the most important qualities in their husband and they rank gardening as more important than an ability to cook or clean.

Tanya Jackson, corporate affairs manager at the building society, said: ‘A lot of women used to think they wanted a metrosexual man.

‘But then they realised they were fed up with a man who spent longer in the bathroom than they did.

‘Many women now feel they actually want a hunter-gatherer and they will look after their man in return.’

Figures from the Office for National Statistics bear out the claims. More than 2.1million women say they do not work because they are ‘looking after their family or home’.

Only 193,000 men gave the same answer – a figure which has fallen by 6 per cent over the past year.

Opinion Reading

Heteroflexible: Girls kissing girls is the latest trend

Imagine that you hear that your 18-year-old daughter was kissing another girl at a party last weekend. What races through your mind? "O my gosh, she's exploring same-sex attractions. She must be a lesbian."

Hold up, Mom and Dad. You're showing your age. Chances are, your daughter's not fixed on the pretty young blonde she's locking lips with. There may be something entirely different and unexpected going on.

"Girls making out with each other to turn on guys is the latest craze at high school and college parties," according to the online magazine Salon.com.

Still don't believe it? Listen to this summer's monster hit song, "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry. It's an international phenomenon -- topping the charts all summer in America, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. A few weeks ago, Perry was a headliner at the Warped music festival at Canterbury Park in Shakopee, belting out the song's provocative lyrics:

I kissed a girl and I liked it,

The taste of her cherry chapstick,

I kissed a girl just to try it,

I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.

It felt so wrong, it felt so right.

Perry cagily maintains that her song is about drunken curiosity regarding same-sex attractions. But her music video, which features gyrating women in lingerie, is clearly designed to give the male libido a jolt.

We baby boomers like to think we invented and defined the sexual revolution. But our offspring are tossing out the categories we took for granted, including the view that "gay or straight" is preprogrammed.

Young women whom Salon.com interviewed about the girl-on-girl trend said they had initially kissed other females to get a free beer at parties or on a dare from guys. But they soon saw it as a way to signal to males that they are "sexually open and adventurous."

"It was like, look, I'm the center of attention!" recalled one 16-year-old.

The 16-year-old, who first saw girls making out at a party and later tried it herself at male urging, added, "And the kissing itself didn't really bug me. From then on, it became a normal thing to do."

"It makes you feel more attractive," said another girl. "You're turning on a guy, and he thinks it's cool."

Staged bisexuality is now the norm for what is being called the "post-gay generation."

Salon reports that "the term for the 'I'm straight but I'll kiss girls' mentality is 'heteroflexible,'" according to Deborah Tolman of (where else?) San Francisco State University's Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality. Salon also has its headquarters in San Francisco.

'The erotic new trend'

Female bisexuality is "the erotic new trend (everyone's trying it)," announced Marie Claire magazine in 2006.

A 2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appeared to confirm this. It found that while 1.3 percent of women identified themselves as homosexual, 11.5 percent of women ages 18 to 44 -- and about 14 percent of women in their late teens and early 20s -- report at least one sexual encounter with another woman.

Only about 4 percent of women, ages 18 to 59, reported such an encounter in a similar survey in 1992.

What is fueling this trend?

One factor is the huge popularity of Girls Gone Wild, a DVD franchise that films alcohol-addled females' sexual encounters with other women at college drinking revels. Same-sex kissing has been glamorized by celebrities, including Madonna and Britney Spears.

One of the biggest influences, however, may be Internet pornography, which has dramatically altered young people's ideas of mainstream sexual behavior.

"Girls aren't kissing other girls because they want to," Pamela Paul, the author of "Pornified," told Salon. "They're doing it because they want to appeal to boys their age. And for boys their age who've developed sexually alongside Internet porn, their sexual cues are affected by the norms and standards of porn. And that's girl-on-girl action."

The result? Rampant cultural confusion.

Straight girls 'playing gay'

Chicago Tribune sex columnist Jenni Spinner, who is a lesbian, maintains that Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" song "sets gay rights back." In nearly every "gay dance dive," she has complained, "the joint has been infiltrated by a gaggle of giggling straight girls, playing gay for a night because it amuses them."

Women who kiss other women to attract guys are making it "difficult to distinguish between the behavior of someone who is legitimately sexually interested and someone who wants to impress the boy across the room," according to New York magazine.

Increasingly, young people are transcending sexual categories altogether, the magazine points out. They are coining terms such as "pansexual," "bi-curious," "bi-queer" and "metroflexible" to describe their fluid sexuality.

This is the brave new world that the sexual revolution unleashed. Has it liberated our daughters, as originally promised?

One young woman interviewed by Salon says that, for her and her friends, it comes back to an age-old desire to be cherished by a man.

"A lot of girls who do want long-term boyfriends will still settle for the hookup [triggered by girl-on-girl kissing] because it gives them that temporary feeling of being taken care of and being close to someone," she said.

"It's sad to see that this is what it's come to -- that guys will raise the bar and girls will scramble to meet it. Women just want to know what they have to do to get these guys to fall in love with them."

Katherine Kersten • kkersten@startribune.com Join the conversation at my blog, www.startribune.com/thinkagain.

Bonus Reading!

(Special Article: Since it relates to "male/female" issues, I thought I'd put this here too)

Real Men

by Mike S. Adams

Author’s Note: Having broken one or more of the following rules in no way excuses a man from following them in the future.

A divorced friend of mine was complaining to me recently about the pool of women available to him here in the coastal Carolina region. His specific complaint was that too many (I think he said “all”) of the women were carrying too much baggage to have a successful relationship. I’m so tired of hearing “men” make this complaint that I’ve made it the subject of today’s column.

The thesis of my rebuttal is really simple: It is not entirely fair and accurate to say that most adult women are carrying a lot of “baggage” or have a lot of “issues.” (Remember when people used to have problems, not issues?). It is much more accurate to say that most adult women are profoundly wounded and scarred by the things that “men” have done to them when they were not really acting like men. Below, I’ve listed a few examples:

Real Men Do Not Go To Topless Bars. I wrote about this topic two years ago in a column called “I Had a Dream.” But, it is worth repeating that topless bars are little more than fronts for organized crime. This includes the punks who operate the strip club near UNC-Wilmington. These people take women with low self-esteem – often victims of sexual abuse – and get them hooked on cocaine that is sold in their club (again: an organized crime front). To the extent that “men” frequent these places, they fund the destruction of the life of someone’s daughter. This is a disgrace and no such “man” can even remotely be characterized as a Christian.

Real Men Do Not View Pornography. I recently asked an Obama supporter whether he ever viewed pornography on the internet. He said he did “occasionally.” I asked whether he would ever want his daughter to star in a porn flick. He said “never.” When I reminded him that the porn star has parents, too, he vowed to reconsider his continued viewing of internet pornography.

Something that “men” who view pornography do not realize is that it trains the mind to be sexually stimulated by seeing images of many different people nude and engaged in certain acts. Eventually, the viewer becomes unable to be stimulated by just one person. Thus, a “man” who views pornography is much more likely to hurt his wife by engaging in adultery. And when he’s caught, he’s much more likely to hurt his children with a painful divorce. Those who believe that porn affects only the viewer are simply uneducated, dishonest, or both. Where there is pornography, there is also co-lateral damage.

Real Men Do Not Have Sex With Women They Do Not Intend To Marry. I once read a survey indicating that the number of sex partners a woman has in a lifetime is only a fraction of the number of sex partners a man has in a lifetime. This can be explained by two factors: 1) men lie in an upward direction when asked how many people they’ve slept with and, 2) women lie in a downward direction when asked how many people they’ve slept with.

This becomes a problem later on in marriage when a woman is unable to forgive herself for having a lot of sex partners. This guilt is biologically, and not culturally, induced. And once a woman has lied about her past to a prospective husband, she cannot communicate with him about her guilt. The couple begins to have problems whose true origins are never addressed.

The only solution to this problem is for men to stop having sex with women they do not intend to marry. Men have it within their power to stop contaminating the future-wife pool. A little self-control can do a lot to strengthen a dying institution.

Real Men Do Not Engage In Post-Marital Sex. Saying “I used to be married” is a pretty lame excuse for engaging in post-marital sex. And, if you have children, especially girls, there’s a really good reason to avoid it. Put simply, if you have young girls and you start having sex after marriage your girls will find out about it from your ex-wife. Of course, your ex-wife will have learned about it from your mutual friends.

There’s a good chance that your young daughters will still look up to you even after a nasty divorce. They may want to marry someone with many of your qualities. Don’t send the message that they need to sleep with such a man in order to get his attention.

Real Men Never Relinquish the Role of Spiritual Head of the Household. God did not give the Ten Commandments to a woman. Nor did He send his only begotten daughter to save womankind. If your potential spouse has trouble understanding this, you need to reconsider your relationship. And once your children are grown, your leadership obligation continues. If your child has strayed spiritually – whether into paganism or atheism - it may or may not be the result of poor modeling on your behalf. Regardless, men have an obligation to fight for their children’s spiritual redemption. A man’s willingness to do so determines whether he leaves behind a legacy that glorifies God or one that glorifies Satan.

In a future installment, I will deal with the issue of “real women.” That installment will talk about the things women are doing to hurt other women. “Real Women” will include, among other things, a comprehensive discussion of fake boobies, why I don’t like them, and how they contribute to global warming.

Modesty

August 20
~What happens when women display their bodies? Males look. But men don’t necessarily want to be governed by their libido.
~Women need to be aware that how they dress will effect how males regard them. Often women, especially young women, have no clue.
~Dennis distinguishes between "men" and "males". Male is your nature. Men is your behavior, in contrast to boys. You can't control your male nature, but you can as a man control how you respond to your nature.
~Males are aroused when they see more female skin.
~Women should not be afraid to dress in a way that shows their figure, but should be aware that the more skin exposure will create a different reaction from males than less skin exposure.

more on the visual

Friday Bonus from Open Lines....
(start at 8min, 40sec.)
~when does a man's preoccupation with the visual become a betrayal of his spouse?
~discussing the difference between a husband looking through Self Magazine, Victoria's Secret, and Playboy.

The Power of the Visual

August 13
~ The Power of the Visual Men are stimulated by the visual - the glimpse of a leg or a bare shoulder of a woman can excite a man. Women don't have this preoccupation and have a hard time understanding it.
~ Like how men can't understand what childbirth is like, women can't understand the power of the visual stimulation.
~ The majority of people who purchased Play Girl were gay men.
~A wife called in and wished that her husband would just accept that he is visually aroused instead of denying it and being ashamed of it.
~Men can be aroused by an anonymous leg, but it means nothing.
~It's one thing to notice, but it's another thing to act on it.
~Being aroused is very temporary, so if a guy sees a pretty lady on the street, he may be aroused temporarily, but by the time she passes by, it's forgotten.