Respecting men for their bodies, and women for their brains

[Xue Sheng]

Well, that's the conundrum in the differences between gender. Women think we're being obvious, and men don't see it at all.

It may also be cultural as well. My wife is from China and does not always hint or use subtlety she goes STRAIGHT for the complaining

Actually that is only partially true, she does not hint or use subtlety she just tells me what she wants for her birthday or what she wants done around the house and I am good with this, I take direction well.

 

[thardey]

You guys are right about this, and us ladies should know it. We always hint and use subtlety, and then we complain when we don't get what we thought we were hinting so strongly for on a Birthday, or Christmas or something. Or, when we don't get help with something around the house. It's because we don't just come out and say it!

Well, that's the conundrum in the differences between gender. Women think we're being obvious, and men don't see it at all.

Ah, but who gets to "cross the border" so to speak. To us boys, it would seem to be much easier to be straightforward and honest, and to put it honestly: Blunt.

However, then the women get stuck with a higher fear of rejection. (Welcome to our world.) If a man "misses" a cue, she may figure that either he is dense, and so not worth her time anyway; distracted, because if he was paying attention to her he would have picked up the clue, which means she would always be competing for his attention; or simply not interested right now. But she's not rejected.

If she comes right out and asks, then she could be rejected. On the other hand, all women appear to have the ability to be blunt, if not the courage. Many good men don't have the ability to be subtle, or at least, to properly interpret the subtlety of women.

Of course, it's the bold man indeed who can approach a woman who hasn't given him an invitation of some sort. Same would go for women, unless men learned to give subtle invitations (that would be food for comedy, right there!) So, to help women be bolder, men must be more subtle, but to help men be more subtle (per Lang's post), women must be bolder.

In other words, I've thunk myself into a corner.

 

[Jade Tigress]

I ran across this on CNN yesterday.

Women interpret others’ emotions more quickly and accurately than men do — except when the emotion is anger, which men recognize as readily as women. Brain-imaging studies done at Stanford University have found that women use different neural pathways than men when identifying emotions in others.

Female brains showed greater activation of deeper, subcortical brain structures, like the thalamus, the limbic structures, the brain stem, and the cerebellum (which are connected to emotions), while males showed more activation in the frontal- and posterior-cortex areas (which are associated with reasoning). “This implies different emotional-intelligence capabilities for women and men,” says Louann Brizendine, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of the new book The Female Brain (Random House, $25, www.amazon.com).

In a study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in 2004, 90 percent of men and women correctly identified expressions of extreme sadness in pictures of women’s faces. When the researchers showed them a more subtly sad face, the men’s identification dropped to 40 percent but the women’s stayed at 90. In other words, men seem to understand emotions writ large, but more restrained cues can go right past them.

Takeaway: This may explain why women often find themselves crying to (or yelling at) their partners. “It’s an adaptive behavior for females to cry in front of a male,” says Brizendine, “because he often doesn’t get it until you’re in tears.”

This part of the article addresses emotions, but I think it can be applied to subtleties in general. Men are generally more straightforward than woman are.