Men and women’s perceptive differences are deeply rooted.  It started with Adam and Eve.  God laid down the Law.  Eve did the opposite of what she was told.  Adam, who wasn’t paying full attention in the first place, went along with Eve.  Then the bill arrived. 

The Feminine Perspective

During high school, I dated a woman whose best friend eventually became my good friend.  Being “pals” at 16 with an exceptional young woman afforded me a very unique perspective.  I found myself immersed in a foreign culture.  I was around a cadre of young women ages 16 to 22.  They were all very smart.  They were the girls that always knew the answer, in the classroom.  They all got full academic scholarships to college.

Away from school, in a relaxed social setting the cadre provided startling insights into what women like and don’t like about men and each other.  At times I found myself in information overload; challenged emotionally and intellectually.

My friend Kathy, the alpha one female of the group, is one of the most brilliant people on the planet.  We spent a lot of time together, during the last two years of high school and the summer before we went away to college. There were always young women at her house, when I arrived or she would take me all over town to meet them.  I was typically the only male in the room.  Having been raised by social Nazis, I had been trained to be quiet the first time I met ANYONE.  I also had enough sense to stifle my brazen personality, in front of groups of strong black women.  As a  consequence, the women thought I was “shy” or “timid”. Because I was hangin with Kathy, many of her friends assumed I was a total wus.

The cadre of young women Kathy introduced me to, were intellectual, political and assertive.  The cadre could comfortably discuss the decline of western society or Marx or the latest social trend.  A few of them also took great pride in discussing their emerging sex lives in agonizing detail. They seemed eager to get a reaction from me.  The more stoic I appeared, the more graphic they became.  I would be sitting there gnashing my teeth and making sure I did not to stand up.

The first time Kathy took me to meet the “bad girl” of the cadre, I wanted to jump up and have sex with everyone in the room.  May was stunning in intellect and hot in ass.  She was the only baby momma of the group. At our first meeting, May sat in her living room, while her grandmother was in the kitchen cooking, and calmly described having anal sex with some guy she had met.  May looked me in the face the entire time she told the story.    No one had ever talked to me that way before.  She was working me over and knew it!  I had never given much thought to doing it that way before!  I was just preoccupied with doing it.  May teased me in a similar manner for the next 7-8 years.  She used sex as a weapon of mass male destruction.

Another of Kathy’s stand out friends was Gailen.  She was about twenty; the veteran of the crew.  “Free Spirit” would be an apt description for her.  She was thin, dark and handsome.  Gailen was tough and streety.  The other girls were not.   She was my personal favorite of all of Kathy’s friends. She always wore mini skirts, no stockings and no bra.  When she  spoke startling things flew out of her mouth.

One time, when Gailen walked into the house, the cadre was assembled in the living room watching television.  She looked around the room and inquired:  “What’s up?”  There was a pregnant pause.  We all looked at each other.  No one spoke.  Gailen looked at me and declared: “Y’all musta been talkin bout Kathy’s favorite subject: dicks!”  Kathy turned bright burgundy.  My mouth fell open.  I looked at Kathy.  She could not look at me.  Gailen had revealed a girl on girl topic that I had never been privy to.  When we got together we talked about school, politics, music the arts, not dicks and pussies.

From that day forward, I developed a more sentient view of my friend Kathy.  I had avoided viewing her in a sexual framework before.  I would not allow myself.  Over time, I had placed her on that pedestal just below my momma.  It never occurred to me that she did the nasty let alone thought about it.  We were downtime friends.  When we weren’t with our current love interest, we were together.  Soon after we met, her best friend Daria, that I had dated, returned to the safety of her old boyfriend.  Kathy and I began spending a lot of our downtime together.  Daria would hang sometimes and sometime she wouldn’t.   Kathy and I enjoyed each other’s company, with or without Daria.  We had a wholesome interest in one another.  We shared many intellectual interests.  We were at her house or my house or someone’s apartment, the theatre, the movie, riding around Windsor or hanging out at The Ibo Cultural Center on Saturday.  I never allowed myself to objectify her, except for that one time when I got her out of bed and she came to the door with her robe on and inadvertently exposed Miss Bushington to me!  The fact that she could be that casual around me was ultimately a testament to our friendship. 

It never occurred to me to think about the mechanics of Kathy’s likes or dislikes, when it came to men.  I knew that she liked poet warriors; brothers that worked out at dojos, wrote poetry and were inaccessible.  I was more of a working class renaissance man with a car and disposable income.

I have had a sexual curiosity for all but 5 or 6 of the females I have known on the entire planet.  Those 5 or 6 females had special status with me.  They were sacred and asexual.  I met Kathy, in the classroom, at the beginning of my burgeoning intellectual phase.  The first time she spoke in my presence, something more significant that what the teacher had to say came out of her mouth.  She had me from day one.  She was an Egyptian Goddess pontificating in blue jeans.   Kathy’s friend Daria, with her big titties, her long mini skirted bare legs, her salt and pepper afro and her attitude was equally captivating but destined not to sustain my attention.

To this day, Kathy and I vibe on a regular basis.  I love her dearly. She introduced me to the world of women and academia.  She challenged me to think outside of the box.  She forced me to be introspective.  She challenged me to think not react in stereotypical ways.  She made me take journalism classes.  She literally drug me to the S.A.T and the National Merit Scholastic Aptitude Test.  She is the reason I can sit here and articulately tell all my personal business.  She saved me from my chauvinism and nudged me toward a more androgynous mindset; exposing me to universes I would have never thought to explore.   

The World of Women

Unlike the hoards of gen x girly men, men of my generation had very limited understanding of the “world of women”.  If you had sisters, you could not model your interactions with other women based on your familial experience.  If you had no female siblings, you were clueless.  The sperm donor that lived in the house with you was constantly advocating his testosterone driven point of view.  In retrospect, with the help of the Playboy Forum, men came to understand that that point of view was hopelessly flawed.  As a race, man have never understood the complex being known as woman.  Woe man.

Back in the day, male baby boomers still had something that mimicked rights of passage.  Most men raised in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s or 70’s were force fed the notion that you had to make money, support your habits and “take care” of women. 

“Taking care” of women born and raised in America has always been emblematic because men are rarely capable of “taking care of business” in the area of woman wrangling!  We never read the manual or ask women for directions before we start the engine and pull away from the curb.

I was fortunate to be raised by a “liberated” centered woman from the rural south, so I never harbored the delusion that women are “manageable”.  My father knowingly pushed my mother into a more assertive role then struggled to keep up with his Frankenwoman, til the day he died.  My mother skillfully stuck to her agenda, which helped me and my siblings stay grounded.  My donor was a great father while being a terrible husband.  He had good intentions during his lucid moments and had the good sense to go to work. When his dick and ego overpowered his thought processes, our secure nuclear family went south.

Men want to deny the laws of physics.  When we knowingly fuck up, we never factor in that equal and opposite reaction, until it kicks us in the nuts.

Witnessing my parent’s struggle, then hooking up with a cadre of alpha females inexorably changed my culturally driven biases toward females and my male centered way of thinking.  I started paying attention at an age that still allowed me to objectively process what I was taking in.  The cadre,  the hoards University debutants and female co-workers brought me the rest of the way.  I was in my thirties before I got the lessons and could put them to good use.

The Roots of Enlightenment

I was the first of my teen wolf pack to break away and start dating.  It caused me to be ostracized by my mens which further catapulted me into feminine pulchritude. 

Daria was the first woman to turn my head.  She was aloof and seductive.  Most 16-year-olds are naively sexual.  Not she.  She wore her clothing, the style of her hair and her perfume with deadly intent.  When she walked in the any room, the air changed.  She stole me away from my first girlfriend Katie.

I was seduced and summarily disposed of as quickly and callously as I had done my sweet young Katie.  I later consoled myself with the nurturance of Kathy and her entourage.  I evolved emotionally and intellectually as Kathy et al assaulted my wolf pack tendencies.  The cadre invited me in a world that most heterosexual male baby boomers would never be exposed to.  That exposure forced altered my point of view.  The symbiosis empowered me, for a short while, anyway.

None of what I learned from the cadre prepared me for my college years.  Social intercourse, at the University, was monumental and disproportional to anything anybody encountered at home.  I was usually too distracted to be clever.  I was chronically overwhelmed socially, emotionally and chemically! 

Deciphering Woman Speak

10 years into my professional career, the lessons that my mother, the alpha cadre and my female co-workers taught me began to gel.  Women process things very differently than men. Women are more androgynous and adapted than men.  The short of it is: women are intuitive; men are too pragmatic.  Women nudge.  Men push.

Women tell you all you need to know, if you are paying attention, over the course of 2 or 3 conversations.  They will tell you what’s going on; what you should be attending to; what you should ignore and most importantly; when they are ready! 

Men blurt things out in a barrage of verbosity.   Men speak in parable.  Men expound euphemistically.  Men make liberal use of adjectives like “shit”, “bullshit”, “fuck” and (my personal favorite) “muthafucka” to describe a range of emotions and concepts.   It takes women days, weeks, sometime decades to decipher what men are trying to tell them.  It takes so long because women think more than men.  Men say right up front, right at the beginning, what is on our minds, then we never bring it up again.  Or, in reflection, men hype up events greater than their actual circumstance.  Women buy into men’s hype, then due to overthink women model the hyped version of men’s behavior.

Women don’t trust men.  Overthink sometime causes women to believe the opposite of what men say to them!  The outcome: women reprocess our hype and replicate men’s hyped up versions of an action or ritual with a vengeance.  The things men say we do are replicated by women more efficiently than men could ever master, in a bizarre role reversal.  Men respond and never figure out why we get it all wrong!

Because women don’t trust men, they won’t tell me what’s on their mind, in a straight fort manner.  Men have to resort to getting women excited or angry to get them to tell you what’s on their mind in a succinct manner.  Men later come to regret hearing the truth this way.     

The Truth About Men

Contrary to popular belief, men can be very touchy feely and sensitive.  We just don’t always know when to be or when not to be.  Over our life time, we may never learn subtlety in word or touch.  Men have lost the instincts for most things primal.  Some men think they have to boink other men or assume feminine roles to be in touch with our feelings. 

On the savannah, we used our ears, eyes, nose and instincts obtain food  and to avoid being eaten. We paid attention.  Nowadays, we miss what’s going on 5 feet away from us!  We seem to be perpetually “looking the other way” when it comes to women.  We typically have to have a dress thrown over our heads before we pay attention.  Unfortunately, a very small portion of the female population is willing to flip up that skirt, to get a man’s attention.

Because women are paying attention they expect men to be attending also.    Modern man has too many distractions to attend to subtle cues.  Evolution and man’s quest for commerce have caused men to loose primordial skills.   The half naked woman, who dresses to be comfortable, will get a man’s immediate attention and be summarily harassed.  The fully clothed sexually repressed buttoned up to the chin biting her lip and crying for affection female, sitting at the bar shaking her crossed leg and chain smoking will not register in the male psyche.  Nobody gets served in either scenario.

From Eden to Bizzaroville

That time when men had to get up at the crack of dawn, hunt, eat, fuck and then go to sleep at sunset, is long gone.  Modern man can’t run up behind a female at the water cooler, do it to her doggy style, then run off and beat his chest anymore.  So called civilization and social compacts have created severe penalties for that kind of conduct. The more societal we have become, the more likely you are to get your ass kicked, be chemically neutered or killed for violating sacrosanct social contracts.

Agriculture, mechanization and economies of scale have caused girly men to become le nouveau alpha male.  The social order has become convoluted.  Chest thumping has been replaced with ciphering.  Excessive testosterone is only good if you aspire to be a professional athlete or are undergoing a female to male sex change.  Because of the social engineering that created the “nerd affect”; there is a conspicuous absence of true alpha maleness, in the western world.  The effete pseudo intellectual is today’s male role model.  The media portrays the ideal man as a metro sexual or openly gay man with an MBA.  Gender roles have reversed or have become so skewed that culturally, western men no longer understand rites of passage from childhood to manhood.  The new message is: it’s fashionable to be a nerd.  The media conspires to promote the cult of the milquetoast personality. 

Swimming Against The Current

The leader of my cult, made his transition, shortly after my 18^th birthday.  Thereafter, I sought out any role model I could find.  My man man tendencies had a good foundation but were not set in stone.  My adoration of my mother, and the cadre would not allow me to adopt certain dysfunctional characteristics of my XY legacy. The confluence of genetic, cultural and social forces created a new me.   By the time I had matriculated and worked in female dominated offices for a few years, I morphed into a Neanderthal with lesbian tendencies.

I am a caveman with good writing skills and an appreciation for the things I know women really like.  I have evolved.  My 21^st century social repertoire consist of; wining, dining and a little clubbing of a willing female over the head, then having her for dessert.

I learned to listen to what women say they want and have tried to glean what they really want!  Fortunately or unfortunately, only my ex-wife, a few women I’ve dated and the readers of my blog know this about me.  To the rest of the world, I am a thuggish mesomorph, sleep walking up and down the hallway, oblivious to all the candy in the cubicles.

I wrote this piece after one of my naive female co-workers observed, that I appeared to her to be “tired and sleepy”.  I hear this at least twice a week from delectable minions, at the work place.  I would be tarred and feathered, then fired, if they could read my mind.  At work, I am like Yogi at the park.  I would love to gobble up the contents of their picanic baskets but the ranger of professional comportment, is always lurking about.

It behooves me to appear disinterested, solely for self preservation.

In relaxed social settings, women of my casual acquaintance accuse me of being “up to something”. What a dichotomy.  In my mind I am always the same person.  In the work environment, I am viewed as disinterested by my female co-workers.  Translation: “he’s safe”.  Away from work, when we all have drinks in hand, women-whose primitive instincts are tuned into the right channel-are telling me in woman speak that they want to get clubbed the Neanderthal way!

Recognizing what women are REALLY saying offers me no advantage what so ever.  Typically the women that think I’m “tired and sleepy” are the ones that would likely run me out of the room in a naked dyadic encounter,  but what’s life without challenges?  The women that accuse me of being “up to something” are “on the money” but have yet to figure out the “price of admission” and are subsequently “out the box”.

I am a student of anthropology and sociology, so I’m in constant search for that woman capable of making me utter that primal scream.  I majored in psychology, so, I also understand that that woman avails herself once every 1000 encounters!  She is hard to find and even harder to get naked.  When I am fortunate enough to run up on one of these women, at a glance, they rarely understand that I am the man for the job.  I fall victim of the dichotomy I mentioned earlier.  I don’t fit the image they have in their heads about “that guy”.  The only problem is: “that guy” already has a boyfriend.

Modern women and men are doomed to misunderstanding each other.  We will waltz by Elysium in our search for something we don’t need or can’t afford. Instead of listening intently, we attend to our agendas.  We only listen when we are sufficiently detached or emotionally challenged.  It causes us to be disconnected and leads to disruptive relationships. 

Men and women need to pay closer attention to one another.  Attending can be very disarming and equally rewarding.  It takes people a long time to learn how to attend.  It takes others even longer to comprehend the attention.  As one becomes more attentive, the world about you takes on a different appearance.  It empowers you in ways that I cannot begin to describe.

My friend, my confidant introduced me to her world, in our youth.  After I was comfortable in her space, I invaded others and expanded my own.  My life transformed, because I learned how to be more observant and open to other’s ideas.  We can all do it.  You just have to practice, practice, practice.  That is the challenge for our species in the 21^st century.