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Why Love Is Such a Mess Contributor: Warren Farrell
I’m going to be sharing with you a little bit an overview first and then sharing with
you the core of what I’d like to share. I’m going to be talking about today why
in the past every society that survived; survived by preparing its sons to be disposable, whether
disposable in war, or at work. In other words, every society that was healthy enough to survive
became healthy by preparing its boys to be unhealthy (since death wasn’t that healthy).
We will look today how this contributes to both sexes falling in love with members of
the other sex who are the least capable of loving. And then we’ll wonder why we are
in such a mess. We’ll see today why men in industrialized nations are psychologically
about a half-century behind where women in industrialized nations are. About where women
were in 1960. And how they can change, and why that must change. I’ll look at the evolutionary
shift that’s necessary to create not a women’s movement not a men’s movement but a gender
transition movement. Making a transition from the old rigid survival roles of the past to
more flexible fulfillment roles of the future. In the context of love I am going to be looking
at how we can make a transition in a sense from role-mate to soul-mate. [You’re going
to see some of the summary of that – in a little piece of paper you should be sitting
on or having in your hand at this moment]. The core question here for us is how to spiritual
leaders lead the evolutionary shift to this generation? We’ll look at four gender transitions
and I think it’ll be necessary for spiritual leaders like yourselves to facilitate:
1. The woman’s transition from rigid survival roles to flexible fulfillment roles, which
is already well under way. 2. The boy’ and man’s transition from
rigid survival roles to flexible fulfillment roles;
3. The society’s transition from infrastructure that support rigid survival roles from the
past to infrastructures that support more flexible fulfillment roles that balance fulfillment
and survival; 4. Everyone’s transition from the old survival
communication to empathy communication that allows us to make the first three transitions,
not with blame of each other, but with love for each other.
Every time someone speaks a different truth that we increase our empathy rather then we
increase our vitriol. Because of the 1 hour time constraint I’m going to be giving you
only the “tip of the iceberg” explanations of why love today is such a mess. And yet,
paradoxically, why it is better than it’s ever been before. And also why we’re missing
such enormous opportunity to make it a lot better than it has been or is.
Let’s start with my comment about why in the past both sexes fell in love with members
of the other sex who are the least capable of loving. I don’t want to let something
as intriguing as that fall by the wayside. It starts with the fact that the purpose of
life in the past was not love. It was survival. It was not patriarchy or matriarchy. It was
“survival”-archy, if you will. It was the need to survive. And, you can get a lot
of that from that little hand-out that I’ve passed out. To survive the first commandment
to the Pentateuch of the Bible. What was that first amendment? It was be fruitful and multiply.
So men fell in love with what type of women? Women who are fertile; women who are young
enough to be fruitful and multiply for the next number of years. So to this day, men
do not today of course have any addiction to young women (laugh). Or beautiful women,
certainly, if we’re spiritually evolved we’d completely erase that from our psyches.
And women fell in love with men who were successful enough to protect them. Of course, that doesn’t
happen today either (laugh).. Problem is, with this method, women get better at love
as they get older. So boys and men falling in love with 15 years old girls, with falling
in love with females who is the least capable of loving. Conversely, women who fall in love
with boys and men who killer-protectors missed out one a part of men that were nurturer-connectors.
We’re beginning to see that part of men today, often after divorce, when a man suddenly
realizes that the only person left to love him is his children and suddenly realizes
how much love he has in his heart for his children, we see him connect to his children;
we see our grandfather connect to our grandchildren in a way that we never knew a man was capable
of. So both members were programmed historically to fall in love with the members of the other
sex who were the least capable of loving. That said, a women’s traditional role gave
her a lot more love advantages than a man’s traditional role gave him. But, that doesn’t
mean that a woman loves a man more than a man loves a woman -- an important distinction.
Before I explain that, let me do a quick survey here to make sure that we’re on target.
I ask you to stand up if you are a mother. Remain standing if you are mother who worked
outside of the home more than 40 hours a week each year of all the first three years of
your child‘s life or of your children’s life. Ok so we have about 6 or 7 of the women
standing. Very nice. Stand up if you are a dad. Remain standing if you worked outside
of the home more than 40 hours a week each year of all the first three years of your
child‘s life, or of all your children’s life. Almost all the men remain standing.
I see it. Sit down. Thank you. How do dads learn to love their family? Let’s say you
are my family. Dads learn to love their family by the father’s Catch-22. We learn to love
the family by being away from the love of the family. Here is the work place. We learn
to love you by being away from you. Women learn to love you by being with you. Their
love energy is connected, nurtured; their source of income if they’re married to a
man who is reasonably successful, their source of income is dependent upon their nurturing
more, their loving more, their connecting more. Our source of income is dependent upon
disconnecting. If we stay home and take care of you, we are disrespected. If we go out
and disconnect from you, we are respected. We get our love by being disconnected from
love. Women provide an emotional womb akin to love, but I’d like us to look at men’s
being disconnected from love as men providing a financial womb. That took men away from
their purpose –loving and supporting the family in order to achieve our purpose loving
and supporting the family. Men love the family by being disconnected, women love by being
connected == that’s what I mean by “women’s role had the love advantage”. Women’s
traditional role from the past also has an emotional advantage. In love, when a man and
a women divorce, a men is ten times as likely as a women is after divorce to commit what?
Suicide. A man, after the death of his spouse, is also ten times as likely as a woman is
to commit suicide. It gives you a sense of what happens to men we’ll talk a little
bit about this later when we have emotional problems that we can’t express. So for men,
our traditional, real weakness is our façade of strength. Let me work on why is this the
case. When a traditional man is vulnerable, it actually increases his vulnerability. He
might ask, for example, a colleague for help at work. And the colleague seeing that he
has been asked for help by this other person who might be equal to or above him goes to
the boss and lets it go around that he was asked for help by him, the colleague. Than
the boss begins to increase the sense that the colleague has some competence that he
doesn’t have. His willingness to ask for help, express vulnerability has just increased
his vulnerability. No wonder guys can’t ask for directions. In contrast, when women
talk to women friends, there is a code when women talk to women friends. The woman says,
“I’m really have in trouble with my husband. If that trouble looks like It’s going to
create a divorce. The women assures her that she really felt that she had married somebody
that she really never quite understood why she married him because she was really worthy
of somebody even better than that. Each woman tells stories about how they are frustrated
with their own husband or flaws that they saw that husband from the past. And they give
each other support to make that transition. So when a woman expresses vulnerability, she
becomes stronger. But from the support she seeks and receives from other women, from
support groups from the church, from areas of faith, and from her spiritual practice.
A successful man than learns that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Not
when the going gets tough, the tough go to spiritual conferences. Or when it going gets
tough, the tough go to a psychologist. Basically, men learn success means learning to repress
feelings, not express feelings. The setup for suicide. Men’s face of invulnerability
makes us care less about men. When a baby is born, a baby is completely vulnerable.
What does it do, brain chemistry wise? It releases our oxytocin. And it makes us want
to even be willing to die to protect that baby. When men don’t express their vulnerability
we have no oxytocin released. We have no ability to sort of reach forward and want to help
them. So when men die, we don’t care as much. When men die in a car accident the penalty
for the person creating their death is 54% less that it is when a woman dies. When a
man though is an offender in a car accident the penalty is 60% greater than when a woman
is the offender in a car accident. So we tend to care more about saving whales than saving
males. So few people know, for example, that men over 85 are 1350% more likely to commit
suicide than women over 85. If women over 85 were 1350% more likely commit suicide,
would we know that? Yes, fortunately, we would know that. So change this to make a transition!
I think there are four gender transitions that need to occur.
So let’s look at how spiritual leaders can lead to create these four gender transitions.
The first gender transition is women’s transition from the rigid survival roles to the more
flexible balance between fulfillment and survival. I mentioned a few minutes ago that women are
about 50 years ahead of men in this process so let’s look quickly, umm, Mark mentioned
that I was part of the women’s movement and what I saw as part of the women’s movement
was that women’s movement moved through and support women through the three stages
of progress that men haven’t gone through. The first stage really is equivalent to what
men did. The first stage was saying to women you need to do more than just nurture at home,
you need at least have the equal opportunity to be able to have power in a sense of earning
money, to be able to have power in a sense of having status. And so the first stage of
the women’s movement was about women creating money, creating status, having to option to
doing that and that was sort of… a lot of the women’s movement leaders said wait a
minute that alone makes women “imitation men”. And that has limits. So the second
stage the women’s movement said we want women to also be respected if they are home
taking care of their children; we want women to be respected if they are out working at
the work place; we want women to be do some combination of both just because they make
a choice, they shouldn’t have to do everything; we want women to have what? – Choice, options.
So the second stage of the women’s movement was women having options. The third stage
of the women’s movement was… I guess maybe the best way to share this is really understanding
that power is not about imitating what men, or climbing ladders. It's really understanding
that power is about I guess may be the best way I can explain this is about control over
one’s life. And when I was explaining this to a group, one of the women in one of my
groups raised her hand and said, “I think I am getting what you say, I don’t think
I like hearing what you say relation to what my own life is about, unfortunately I agree
with what you say.” Let’s abstract here. Can you share what your story is? And she
said, “Yes, I am a medical doctor. But could I share with you, Warren, like how I became
a medical doctor? I said, “Go ahead.” Then she said, “My dad is a doctor. And
my older brother was clearly going to become the doctor of the family. And my father was
paying attention to my older brother all the time. He always paid attention to me, but
it was like I was a black and white TV and he was the color TV. And the attention to
him was always a bit more focused. He was always preparing my brother for medical school,
making sure his math, his science was done, he was doing all the right preparations, looking
at the colleges, the graduate schools. And one day my brother at the dining room table
said to my Dad. “Dad, I want to share something with you. I want to tell you something that
I think is going to be upsetting to you but please hear me out. And my brother said, “Dad
I want to tell you I really don’t want… I really want to be a writer, not a doctor.”
And my father was so disappointed. I could see the disappointment on his face but I can
see him try to cover the disappointment up. And so I made a joke to just break the tension.
I said, “You know, Dad, I always wanted to be a doctor.” And suddenly my dad looked
around me with a type of respect and a type of surprise and a type of relief and a type
of admiration that I had never seen in my dad before. And I couldn’t tell him at that
moment that I was just joking. But, each day he came up to me and he said, now he started
taking a real interest in what I was taking and what I wasn’t taking and helping me
with my homework. I felt sorry that my brother was now being left out... he was becoming
the black and white TV. But at no point in time could I feel comfortable being able to…
I did not want to lose this attention, I didn’t want to lose this focus, I didn’t want to
lose this affection, I didn’t want to lose him saying to other people: My daughter, she
is going to become a doctor and so I couldn’t ever feel comfortable letting him know that
the real truth was I didn’t want to become a doctor either.” So she said, “Finally
I figured, ok, I will away to college, I’ll be free, I’ll be come home on vacations,
I’ll be able finally to tell him. But now he was preparing me with pre-med courses and
pre-science courses. I hated them, but I was good enough at them to get to the next level.
And by the time I was a junior year in college I was already getting acceptances from med
schools and then I went into the med schools and then I couldn’t… I knew that if I
went through med school and graduated I couldn’t do very well without getting… If I didn’t
do well, I wouldn’t get a residency and an internship in a place as nice as where
my dad lives so I couldn’t come back and be close to home. So I really focused on working
and I got a good residency and a good internship and I was able to return to my community and
be near my family and make a good practice and have a good reputation. And I am realizing
when I am hearing you talk now is that I don’t have power. Do I?” How many feel that she
doesn’t have power? How many feel she does have power? She has power and she doesn’t
have power. She has power by the society’s evaluation of power. But from her perspective,
she never became who is she wanted to be. So options are not just about women saying
they have choice or men saying they have choice. Options are about doing the spiritual journey
of looking inside of oneself to discover who am I a prisoner of. Whose approval am I a
prisoner of? Is it the approval of my social group, my parents, my spiritual group, my
Ken Wilber? No matter who it is, It all makes us flourish …the social part of us makes
us give up ourselves, tempts us, seduces us, is a siren giving up our true selves. And
thus we do the spiritual journey to discover real power, the power of control over our
own lives. Let’s look at that from a historical perspective right into today. Today, millions
of middle–class and upper-class women are in stage three, doing the spiritual journey.
Almost every woman here is in some version of stage three. We’ll see in a moment that
today men are basically in stage one. Where women were in 1960. Think: Mad Men (laugh).
The question is how did women get so far? And men remained so stagnate. The women who
made the most progress for what? Poor women or middle/upper-class women? Middle/Upper-
class women. In industrialized countries or developing countries? Industrialized countries.
So women who are middle class and upper-middle class in industrialized countries were married
to men who were what? Successful or unsuccessful? Successful enough to be able to allow the
women to go to a psychologist, be introspective, raise expectations about their marriage that
would ultimately lead to their divorce (laugh). Why divorce? Because the women who are best
able to afford the psychologist were the ones who selected a successful man, that is, men
who were what? Expressing their feelings or repressing their feelings? Repressing their
feelings. And women can’t hear what men don’t say. The successful men learn that
earning money led to earning love. Why did they learn this? Because, earning money led
to earning love. However the flaw is that it didn’t sustain love. Not with women’s
new definition of love that the woman thought desired real communication. This though doesn’t
erase the fact that the women best able to grow spiritually and psychologically were
the ones who had selected to marry men who were the least able to grow. That’s divorce.
Or one slice of divorce. Now let’s look at this in a lager context.
The context of what I would call the “family boat”. Basically, prior the women’s movement
we had sort of the type of equality. Women learned to row on the right side of the boat
that was raise children. Men learned to row on the left side of the boat which was to
raise money. After the benefits of the women’s movement, what happened for women? Women learned
to be able to raise children or raise money. They learned to be up to row on either side
of the boat. Men learned to still raise money. So we have this type of thing. Women are raising
children now or raising money they can row on either side of the boat. But let’s say
there is a recession and the recession happens and the woman is able to row on either side
of the boat. The man loses his job the woman can move over rowing this side of the boat.
Now with a women exercising her newfound power to row on raise money side of the boat, the
left side of the boat. And the man not able to row on the right side of the boat. With
both of them rowing the left side of the boat the boat goes in what? Circles. This is not
a beautiful feminine circle. This is the circle that hits the rocks. These are the rocks of
recessions. And what is a recession? The last recession was called a “man-session” or
“he-session”. Why? Because what percentage of people who lost their jobs were which gender?
78% of the people who lost their jobs were who? Men. Males, boys, men. If we don’t
help both sexes row on both sides of the boat, we will have a family boat that will be more
vulnerable to the sharp rocks of recessions. Caring for children or preparing for the whole
of neglected children in a women’s soul as breadwinner, women a sole breadwinner family
requires, though, some unfinished work in women’s development as well as significant
unfinished work in men’s development. In the past half-century, we’ve done a really
good job socializing men to be proud of our wives and daughters who have full time careers.
We’ve done a poor job socializing women to be proud of husbands and sons who are full-time
dads only. The evolutionary shift then? The shift begins with women knowing that when
children are raised predominantly by dads in an intact family they do, the children
do extremely well in 30 different areas of measurement. In all the social areas, in all
the psychological areas, in all the academics areas and in all the physical health areas.
Women, the single biggest predictor of the empathy in a child is a good, fully-involved
relationship with a dad. Not because dads have more empathy but because dads require
the children to think about somebody other than themselves to a greater degree. It is
the, when you give empathy the child learns to receive empathy, not to be empathetic.
Boundary enforcement is more likely to force the child to think of someone else other than
himself or herself. I can’t go more deeply into this, but the workshop I’ll do this
much more deeply on that issue. As wives work more, women and children today are often more
a need of men who are “nurturer-connectors” than “killer-protectors”, but both sexes
rowing on both sides the boat requires both sexes learning to love and respect each other
when they do it. One thing that’s often helpful for women to hear is if women said,
we really respect love and be *** with men who walk on their hands. Mark and I would
be organizing hand-walking contests within ten minutes, and within ten days, ten weeks,
ten years we will be trying to walk on one hand and outdoing each other. When women care,
we care. Gender transition two. The boy and man transition
from rigid survival roles to flexible fulfillment roles. This section is going to be pretty
shocking. If I say the boys and men are fifty years behind girls and women, that implies
that there is a potential crisis. Is there? Let’s look. Let’s look at men’s and
boys’ emotional health first. When our sons are pre-age nine, boys and girls commit suicide
at equal rates. Between the ages of ten to fourteen, boys’ rate is twice as high as
girls’. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen it goes to four times as high as
girls’. Between the ages of twenty and twenty-four it is between five and six times as high as
girls’. That’s half the disaster. The other half of the disaster is that we don’t
know about it, that we don’t seem to care about it. A dimension of that you could just
get a sense though that as the male role becomes more defined, as male expectations become
more defined, the fear of not being able to live up to what we’re expected to live up
to becomes so great that we can’t handle it, that we check out. Let’s look at education.
We all know that boys are behind girls in schools. But we don’t realize that they
are two to three years behind girls in the two most crucial areas: reading and writing.
And if those areas are not mastered, almost nothing else can be learned as effectively.
Jobs. Our sons are not being prepared to do jobs where the jobs will be. Schools are cutting
back on vocational training, and when they do institute it, it’s vocational training
for the previous male jobs of manufacturing, of carpentry, of woodshop. It is not education
for the future of male jobs, where jobs will be robotics, health, education, blueprint
reading. Next… Fathereless-ness. A third of boys (and girls, by the way) are raised
today in father-absent homes. In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce more that half
of boys don’t finish high school. You don’t even want to know the data about what happens
to boys if they don’t finish high school. Physical heath. Life expectancy in the United
States between men and women used to be in 1920 in the United States just 1-year gap
between males and females. Today the gap is 5.2 years. These are just a few of the tips
of the iceberg of the crises that are so far pretty much unacknowledged. If a boy does
manage to overcome these barriers and he’s successful becoming married to a wife who
is also successful, something happens when they have their first child. His wife tends
to ponder when she is pregnant for the first time three options. Option one is work fulltime.
Option two is to be fulltime involved with the child or children. Option three is to
do what? Some combination of both. By the way, the Census Bureau finds that that is
40, 40, and 20. Forty percent of women with children work full-time. Forty percent are
at home with the children full-time. And twenty percent work part-time. Men though, not to
be outdone, we have three options also. Option number one is work full-time. Option number
two is to work full-time. And option number three is what? Work full-time or if he is
a working-class man work two jobs, yes, or if he’s an upper-middle class or middle-class
man work overtime. So these married men want their children to support what happens is
that men begin to earn more proportionally to women and then we say “a-ha”, this
shows that there is a pay gap and men have the power. They earn more though largely because
once children arrive they feel more obligations to earn more. They move in to the father’s
Catch-22 of learning to love the family by being away from the love of the family, increasing
their income to now support two or three people whereas before their income only had to support
one person. Is there is any evidence to what am I saying? Here is just one piece, one sliver.
Women who have never been married and never had children earn 117% of what men who have
never been married and never have children earn. Women who have never been married and
never have children earn a 117% of what men who have never been married and never have
children earn, even when you control for number of years in the work place, the age, and the
education. Men’s definition of power has become feeling obligated to earn money someone
else spends while we die sooner. We are all advanced enough to not buy that is a real
definition of power but rather power being control over one’s life. So pay is paradoxical.
The pay paradox is this: pay is about the power we forfeit to get the power of pay.
For example, we forfeit the power to develop a spiritual life to get the power to pay for
our children having a spiritual life. The pay paradox then is pay is about power we
forfeit, forfeiting our own spiritual life for the power of pay the power of options
to do other things. The first step of this transition involves understanding male power
versus real power. As I mentioned before, real power is control over our own lives.
The people at our workshop yesterday we did a workshop experience in which I asked all
the people in a workshop to find the glint in their fathers’ eye and what that glint
was created from? It was usually art, helping other people, being in nature, traveling,
almost all with people contact and than we looked at the fact that most of our fathers
did something that earned more money than people contact would provide. They were the
engineers, they were doing things not that created the glint in their eye; they had forfeited
the glint in their eye, their dreams for doing what earned more that would allow their children
to create their dreams. Men who are in the past generation knew this so well that they
didn’t even allowed themselves to entertain their dreams because they knew it was going
down a dysfunctional path. Virtually every society that survived I’ve said before,
let me take us to a related issue. The first step in our gender transition for boys and
men is confronting our society’s dependency; it’s dependency on male disposability in
work or war. Virtually every society survive therefore if it’s dependent we have an unconscious
investment in training our sons to be disposable. Let’s look at whether that unconscious investment
is at play today. Are we requiring our sons to be willing to register for the draft? Yes,
we do. Only our sons. Whether being disposable protecting our country form any enemy, or
disposable protecting our homes from fire. Whether being disposable on construction sides,
building homes, offices or similar or in coal mines, heating our homes or offices or similar.
Whether it’s by making a killing in the hunt or making a killing on Wall Street. Some
societies like Japan at least have in it acknowledgement for making a killing in Wall Street. They
call making a killing… that stress at work that comes when you are trying to perform
at the level of CEOs and so on, or even what they call “salarymen” in Japan they call
it frequent “death at work” – “karushi” - they have a word for it called “death
from overwork”. In the United States 92% of deaths in the workplace are of men, but
that’s only the tip of the iceberg because it doesn’t count for example, all the fire-fighters
who contract black lung disease or other forms of problems that then manifest when they’re
not in work. Like girls, our sons are social animals. Historically
we socialize our sons to be disposable, we taught our sons to call it glory to die in
a war like the civil war movie called Glory. Even today, let’s see if we ourselves, participate
in this process. Do we cheer boys and men who win at sports like the Decreate Dengery?
Think football, X Games, Ultimate Fighting Championships, think ice hockey, think rodeos,
think car racing. If a quarterback I am always surprised when I watched college football
or hears young kids younger than my daughters are… If a quarterback in college throws
with a dislocated shoulder we call it courage rather than call a doctor. As adults we praise
men for volunteering to die. What am I talking about? Look at every community that’s small.
In a community there are volunteer what? 76% of all firefighters in the United States are
volunteers. Almost 100% men. What is their pay though? Their pay is praise. Their pay
is respect. Their pay is social bribes to protect us at the expense of their life. Boys
who successfully protect a society by risking death are called what? Heroes. It actually
says it all in the etymology of the word “hero”. Etymologically the word “hero” derives
from the word “serow” s-e-r-o-w from which we get our word “servant”. And also our
word “slave” and our word “protector” etymologically derive from the word “hero”.
Think of a “hero”, think of a car, police car saying “public servant”. He is a public
servant who is in some way a slave to protecting us. He is a slave because the social bribe
before the age of consent to make him need and want respect is what he is a prisoner
of. Since all humans are social animals, calling boys “hero” is a social bribe to risk
death so the rest of us can live. Now, who teaches this to boys? The people who teach
this to boys are probably more than anybody else are the two most potent forces in a boy’s
life: his parents and cheerleaders. What‘s a cheerleader to a boy? Just think about the
cheer leader you know you were in junior high school and you were finally beginning to feel
the hormones grow so we see that the cheerleaders are out there, are they cheering for the people
who are in the listening squad. Are they cheering for the boys who are the empathy squad? No
they are cheering for the boys who are risking spinal cord injuries, concussions, dislocated
shoulders. And they are saying, “First in 10, do it again! First in 10, do it again!”
And then the boys watching those cheerleaders, you’re damn straight they’re watching
those cheer leaders, but they watch them mostly from here down and from here up (but to up
to here) as Mark said, “body parts”. But they are also learning that those cheerleaders
do more than just have their bodies be available. Their love is available to the boys who are
most likely to be willing to be disposable. So the boys are beginning to learn that when
I subject myself to concussions, broken bones and spinal cord injuries, if I am strong enough
to succeed at doing what I need to do goal-wise I will get love. He learns to associate being
physically abused with being loved. Have girls advanced beyond that? Has the women’s movement
helped women advanced beyond that? You’re damn straight the women’s movement has helped
women advance beyond that. But we haven’t even thought of the question for boys and
for men. It’s not just parents and teachers who are doing this, our school system supports
this, taxpayer money supports this, therefore we all support it. If you don’t support
it by taxpayer money raise your hand I’ll have the IRS talk with you. At what age does
a boy learn to associate being abused with being loved? Prior to the age of consent.
Think Pop Warner football starts age eight. The same age that some countries in the Middle
East send their boys off to the front lines to strike fear in the part of the people killing
the other side that they are killing a boy. If a boy in the United States can be said
to have a choice to comply with a social bribe, he has no choice but to abide by the legal
mandate to register for potential death at the age of eighteen to be available for first
call, on militaristic resources should we need that. The irony of traditional masculinity
is that what a society does to socialize a boy, to contribute to a healthy society is
the opposite of what it does, what it needs to do to socialize a boy to be healthy as
an individual. Men’s weakness is our façade of strength. For example, when a man reflexively
rescues a woman or puts out of fire, he generates testosterone, but that generation of testosterone
upon an emergency calling weakens our immune system. It increases our adrenaline to do
that, our epinephrine. But that makes us vulnerable to blood clotting and therefore to heart failure.
This new permission that I am asking us to consider, a permission for boys and men to
take care of their health, the permission that would lead to there being a office for
men’s health, instead of seven offices for women’s health and none for men’s health,
is part of our evolutionary shift. Until we confront our dependency on male disposability
we can’t give our sons permission to discover their spiritual and emotional lives, to progress
to where women have come to today. Our sons today are still being treated largely as human
doings once they have children. In order to get social respect we need to have our man
to be human doings, now I am asking us to release our men, our sons to become human
beings. Because I am running late on time, what I
am going to do is just give you a quick Clif Notes of the gender-three transition. Gender
transition three is the society’s transition from infrastructures that support rigid survival
roles. Three of the most important infrastructures, I’ll talk about later at the workshop but
I can’t now, is a male birth control pill, think of what freed women most in the 20th
century. Women should not have the responsibility for birth control alone, men should be sharing
that, men should be invested from the very first day in the shared decision to create
a child. Paternity leave in Sweden is at 80% of pay and therefore when that happens divorce
and separation has gone down in Sweden since paternity leaves have gone up in companies
had been finding that men want to be involved with their child that’s the new perk. And
team executive positions are an extremely important development that I don’t have
time to get into now, but that’s a crucial aspect of the gender transition three.
Gender transition four. Everyone’s transition from survival communication modalities to
empathy communication modalities to allow us, the Achilles’ heel of all human beings
is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive. Especially when
that personnel criticism is from a loved one. And especially when that loved one is giving
it badly, of course by definition, anyone criticizing us is giving it badly. Survival
communication is in our genes. When somebody criticizes us it signals to us a possible
enemy, so we respond to the enemy by getting up our defenses, or ideally, killing the enemy
before the enemy kills us. Not that any of us have wanted to kill a partner when they
criticize us. We… for ten years I’ve been working on creating a workaround to our natural
biological response to respond to criticism defensively, without a workaround to that
natural response we cannot make our transitions gently. So the crucial aspect of their work
around is understanding seven mind sets and understanding two disciplines: the discipline
of loving each other and the discipline of appreciation each other. The art of appreciating
each other and the art of being able to love each other. Falling in love is biologically
natural, sustaining love is biologically unnatural. Until we learn how to be able to associate
being criticized by our loved one with being loved, we will not make that transition effectively
with each other or as a society. I can’t, don’t have the time here to share how it’s
done, but one mindset to end with, that one mindset is saying inside of ourselves and
then bringing it to the emotional level as well as the intellectual level, that each
time our partner criticizes us, the more I hear our partner more fully no matter how
what they say, the more my partner will feel a safe environment for saying what she or
he needs to say, the more they feel a safe environment for saying what they need to say
- the more they’ll feel loved by me, the more they feel loved by me - the more they’ll
feel what? For me. That’s the type of work around that needs to be ingrained and in the
psyche and getting into our cellular structure. So that’s the four gender transitions that
we need. This isn’t love in our past, dominated by the need to survive they created a division
of labor and a division of interests between the sexes. It isn't love at present dominated
by a women expressing their feelings of discontent and men putting our heads in the sand, hoping
the bullets will miss. But it can be the future of love. I am privileged to share a sliver
of my life work with you who are so needed to facilitate the four gender transitions
to the future of love. Thank you.