Saturday, October 24, 2009

PSA: Guide to Guys

What I think is most interesting about this article is not so much that the website was quoted in the NYTimes, and not so much the advice in it, but the fact that there is no corresponding "Guide to Gals" for men to read.

It's almost as if the authors are subtly hinting that one of the gender differences they're proposing is that women will want to read an article about what men are thinking, but that men wouldn't care to read its equivalent. And perhaps it's the most valid one. (That might sound sarcastic, but it's not.)

Guys? Any thoughts? (Don't get too "emotionally overloaded" attempting to answer, please.)

1 comment:

Curious Monk said...

Wait, there's stuff going on inside the ladies that they DON'T talk about?


heh. seriously, though, I would guess that because men communicate so very little about their internal worlds, it actually is pretty likely that men would think that if women aren't saying it, being as they say so much anyway, then it isn't important to them - so why would anyone need a guide?

on another note, i do think the article makes men sound almost inherently weaker when dealing with emotion, which i don't think is necessarily the case -

it's more like those who haven't spent their first 18 years of their lives articulating those inner worlds just eventually don't have the same vocabulary to do it with.

a common therapeutic technique for men is simply to get them to write down what they're feeling minute by minute; a client once said the result was like living with color for the first time. it was an entirely new world for him.

i would also guess, generally speaking, that men simply don't prioritize emotion to the same degree that most women do. results matter...how anyone feels about it? meh. so why talk about it?

and then, of course, there's me. but i'm already longer than your post and the article it was about.