Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know. Barbara Angelis De

explain how the little boy’s desire for autonomy from Mommy still affects the behavior of the grown-up men we love.

      How Men Are Trained to Be Unfit for Love

      “It’s a boy!” the doctor announces, and from that moment on, this tiny male person is treated differently from the baby girl in the next delivery room. Consider these facts, compiled from a variety of research studies.

      

      

Parents of newborn male babies tend to describe their sons as firmer, larger, more alert, stronger, and hardier. Parents of newborn female babies describe their daughters as adorable, softer, smaller, prettier, and more delicate. The parents actually believe their child exhibits these characteristics, even though according to the hospital reports, there is usually little or no difference between the two groups of infants.

      

Parents tend to place more demands on little boys than on little girls, expecting them to be more responsible and take more risks.

      

Parents push boys rather than girls to be independent. They offer less comfort to sons than to daughters when the child is frightened or injured, and they give boys greater freedom at an earlier age than they do girls.

      

Parents encourage boys to control their emotions, and girls to express theirs. Boys are taught that it isn’t manly to feel strong emotions, not only those emotions considered “weak” such as fear or sadness, but even passion, need, and intense love. In his book Male Sexuality, Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld describes how boys are trained to view showing their feelings:

      (They) learn early that only a narrow range of emotion is permitted … aggressiveness, competitiveness, anger, … and the feelings associated with being in control. As we grow older, sexual feelings are added to the list. weakness, confusion, fear, vulnerability, tenderness, compassion and sensuality are allowed only to girls and women. A boy who exhibits any such traits is likely to be made fun of and called a sissy or a girl (and what could be more devastating?).

      These days many new parents attempt to avoid stereotyping their children based on gender. But most of the adult men you and I are having relationships with are victims of this early-childhood conditioning.

      How TV Teaches Us Sex Roles

      As young children, most of us learned how to view ourselves as males and females not only from our parents but from the thousands of hours we spent watching television. There have been some fascinating studies of how men and women are portrayed on TV, and the results are disturbing:

      

      

Male characters are generally shown in ambitious, adventuresome, strong, and dominant roles, while females are cast in dependent, submissive, and weak roles.

      

Males are engaged in exciting activities for which they receive great rewards, while females are involved in activities that support or are less important than the men’s, and for which they receive little reward.

      

Television commercials present women as worried, tense, and concerned about problems such as toilet bowl odor, migraine headaches, and ring around the collar, while men are shown as authoritative, knowledgeable, and macho.

      

The TV Western, a favorite with young boys in the 1950s and 60s, portrayed the all-American hero, the cowboy, as a loner, doing what needed to be done, riding off into the sunset alone, with no commitments, no ties – free.

      Picture the man in your life during the years when he was a little boy, sprawled in front of the TV set watching program after program, and commercials in between, all depicting men as strong, cool, unemotional, always in control, afraid of nothing. Whether his hero was the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman, Maverick, the boys of Bonanza, Peter Gunn, or any larger-than-life cowboy, detective or tough guy, your man knew how he wanted to be when he grew up. By the way, these programs never showed Zorro’s wife, or the Lone Ranger’s girlfriend. No, for these TV role models, intimacy meant having a horse, or maybe a male sidekick, but never a woman.

      In case the man in your life grew up with radio rather than TV, he isn’t off the hook – radio dramas contained the same kinds of stereotypes as TV programs, which grew out of the radio days.

      The Challenge of Changing Times

      By now you’re beginning to understand a lot more about why men are the way they are – why “to be a man” means to hide one’s emotions, to fight off the competition, to struggle against the harsh world and survive, to cling to one’s independence, to stay in control. Men are pulled by habits passed down from generation to generation, and are conditioned by their parents and society, which teach them values that close them off to intimacy.

       By deciding to be the “real man” society has taught him he must be, a man chooses to embody the very qualities that make it impossible for him to open up and experience true intimacy with the woman he loves

      This chart helps illustrate the tremendous emotional challenge men are facing today:

      So here we are, modern women, telling the men in our lives that the characteristics they’ve worked so hard to cultivate are the very ones that drive us crazy and turn us off; and that the characteristics we really want to see them develop are the ones they have been taught to see as “weak” and “unmanly” and have fought so hard to avoid. When you think about it this way, it’s a lot easier to understand why men seem to resist changing, why they feel that we’re pressuring them unfairly, why they appear to be so bad at simple relationship skills that are so simple for us.

       We expect men to be competent in skills for which they have absolutely no training – the very skills, it so happens, that women are best at – the ability to express emotion, to be intimate, to nurture, and to love

      Over the past ten years I’ve worked with thousands of men, and I can assure you that men do want to open up, to learn to fell deeply and express those feelings to the women they love. But the process is a difficult, even frightening one for them, and I hope that, after reading this chapter, you can understand why. The men in your life need all of the compassion, patience, and support you can find in your heart, to help them open theirs.

      The Chinese curse at the beginning of this chapter states: “May you live in changing times,” and these times are certainly changing. The old ways of living and loving don’t work anymore, and we still haven’t figured out the new ways. In the meantime we’re still trying to have relationships, and we’re experiencing a lot of disappointment and confusion in the process. But the challenge of change lies in the incredible opportunity it offers us for new levels of wisdom and new heights of personal growth. This book is dedicated to helping you turn your challenges with men into exciting new adventures in loving.

       2 The Six Biggest Mistakes Women Make with Men

       Do you ever suspect that everything you’ve been taught about how to behave with men is wrong?