Men's Riskers

One of many quirks of male thinking (with which I am all too familiar) is our ability to ignore stuff. History is full of famous men who ignored the facts right in front of them and continued to a certain doom. There are famous explorers, like Robert Falcon Scott; famous military figures such as the Japanese hierarchy in World War II; and famous writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn survived, but might easily have not, given the time he spent detained at the Soviet state's pleasure.

In a way, the history of civilization is defined by men who ignored the obvious to the possible detriment of their own life. From the first migration of our species from Africa to Asia 50,000 years ago to the folks who fly the deathtrap Space Shuttle, I suggest that this characteristic of facing the unknown, of taking on danger and embracing risk is embedded in our Brain Operating System, of which I wrote earlier.

The men (and, increasingly, women) who do so are working towards something more than survival and reproduction. Or is it that survival and reproduction actually require us to take risks, even those that might kill us?

We need not look to figures from the past for examples of this, because there's likely not a man you know who doesn't ignore some things. The guy who is a chronic drinker and driver ignores obvious dangers. The man who has indiscriminate unprotected anal sex with many men isn't being rational. The guy who borrows tens of multiples of his net worth to speculate has a relationship with risk (possibly) counter to his long-term liquidity. And yet these activities happen every day, in every way.

I explain the male ignoring mechanism in terms of my compartmentalization theory. Imagine the male mind as a big co-op building, full of floors of apartments of varying size. What we do unconsciously is to simply avoid certain floors. When we are driven to Antarctic exploration, or deadly military action, men prevent the lift stopping at the floors with the apartments containing the facts pointing to likely failure. We block the staircase, and lock the access doors.

Once the downside is quarantined we move to the floor with the apartment containing 'optimism' and 'success despite facts' and 'triumph over adversity'. That's where we can see the light and find positivity to reinforce our blinkered thinking. It will also be the scene of our greatest success overcoming the odds, or the place where failure will make us miserable.

In relationships this is deadly, as you might imagine.

How to think

I don't know about you, but nobody ever taught me how to think. Inside all of our heads is a brain, a squishy weird thing that we only vaguely understand. Sure, it's an electro-chemical device, with different kinds of receptors and processing units. But how it makes decisions is a complete mystery.

I want to propose the concept of our brains having an operating system, similar to the way a computer works. Thousands of lines of code create the pathways for information processing and a method by which external inputs are filtered, distributed and manipulated.

This Brain Operating System came fully installed at birth, but not fully activated. It takes at least ten, and sometimes twenty years for all the modules to work as they should. Importantly, experiences in the world are critical to accessing the full power of the organ/operating system combination. Learning, in other words.

So while experiences, book learning and handed-down wisdom are all part of bringing the immature brain up to full steam, there is little thought as to how to use the operating system once it's up and working. Just like our computer's OS, our BOS can be used in many ways. Knowing how to find these capabilities should be on every school's curriculum, but apparently learning to use condoms and watching "An Inconvenient Truth" is deemed more important.

There are built-in flaws, bugs, idiosyncrasies and even vast unused capabilities in the BOS, and understanding their existence is equally important. I want to focus on these in future posts.

So the question remains, why is there no formal training for even the most basic functions for which we use our brains every day: what we eat, whether we smile or frown, how we choose friends, with whom we have sex.

For example, did anyone give you a good template for making decisions? Have you ever been taught to notice when your brain is ignoring things to which you should be paying attention? Do you know when your brain is using emotions to fool you into a course of action counter to your well-being? Can you recognize when your thinking is taking you in the wrong direction?

Perhaps I am the only one not completely in control of my brain. But I doubt it.

Man versus Machine

Where to start, where to start....okay, let's try this.

When a man starts going steady with a woman, he often dumps his buddies. It's a given that he'll go away for a while to concentrate on her, leaving the guys to note something like :

"Haven't seen Brad for a while."

"Yeah, he's found a new squeeze."

These revelations are met with general assent in the form of knowing nods and grunted agreement. It's an understood flow in the tides of male life.

As a sidebar, this is more evidence that men are single processors. 'Early relationship' requires concentration and singular purpose, and being with guys chews up valuable time and energy. Plus it's distracting. End sidebar.

Why is this the case? Even if the guy is seeing the chick only once or twice a week, he checks out of his male relationships, despite oodles of time to maintain them. And doesn't he want to boast about the new piece of tail in his life?

My amateur/observer response is that we should look at Brad as a reproductive machine, not as the good-guy friend. Because we don't divide to reproduce (a very good thing, given that one Paris, and one Perez Hilton is quite enough, thank-you) we have to find a partner with whom to have sex. If our hero has latched onto the potential bearer of mini-Brads, it makes pure biological sense that he'll want to spend time cultivating (and harvesting) those randy oats.

A more subtle reason might be that Brad is keeping the other males away from a reproductively-minded female. Why give other ball-sporters the chance of gaining vital intelligence about someone who might be interested in someone's progeny other than Brad's? I think that question answers itself.

Priorities, that's what that's all about. First reproduce, then drink beer.






If you haven't read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I recommend you do so to understand just how innate this drive to fuck and spawn is. It exists at the protein level.

Male Universe - or Universes

The question Doc Annie asked is:

When men DO put women at the center of their universe, why does it not appear that way to women?

I think - and am soliciting ideas from other guys here - that the answer lies in the way I, and other men, compartmentalize our lives in our heads.

We have the work compartment, the recreation compartment, the obligation to family compartment, our buddy compartment and so on. Wives, girlfriends and lovers fall into the sex and romance compartment, which has a possible common door with the family compartment.

Difficulties arise because as men, we can only be in one compartment at once.

If we are in the 'watching sports on television' compartment, that's where we are. Moving from there to the 'being attentive to my girlfriend' compartment requires us to get up off the couch, turn off the teev, put the dishes in the dishwasher, grab our jacket, walk out of the compartment, lock the door, walk along the hallway, locate the 'being attentive to girlfriend' door, find the key, let ourselves in, go to the kitchen, smell the air, look in the fridge, wonder how the game is progressing....and then see about being attentive to our girlfriend.

It's all about the unchangeable fact that I, we, can only think about one thing at a time. It's a limitation, right there in the handbook "Men: Your Operating Guidebook".

Here's a way for women to think about it. Men's minds are like a multi-story apartment building, with many levels, and many apartments. Each apartment is an abstract 'compartment' in our mind. Crucial to understanding this (sorry to belabour the point) is that we are only occupying one apartment at a time.

Now for the critical idea: because we are landlords overseeing a whole bunch of apartments, there is no unification of them. We cannot amalgamate all of these separate parts of our mental multi-story into one. All the walls are load bearing, so knocking one down creates problems for us processing stuff. It's like a clash of disparate universes; Lord knows how matter from one will react with another. Nuclear meltdown is entirely possible. For an example, see the previous post.

So when we say "You're the centre of my universe" what we mean is that you are at the centre of the "girlfriend/sex/romance" universe, not the one universe that is a woman's mind.

Women (again, I think) have minds like one of those atrium-style hotels with a big, big internal space into which all the rooms or apartments face. Y'all can have one centre of it all, with all the constituent parts (apartments) working together to create and view the shiny disco ball out there in the atrium. Onc centre, one focus.

Men have a building with corridors, hallways and back passages, linking many apartments, with no way of (easily) combining them into a whole.

That's the difference. And that's why when men say a woman is the centre of their universe, it doesn't mean the same thing. We're talking about two different and separate universes.

Even Einstein would be confused.

The Last to Know

Earlier this week a friend told me about two male acquaintances of his. They both had the same experience of finding out their marriages were over.

The men were in their thirties, with young children. They arrived home from work to find their wives sitting at the dining table with a strange man.

"I have something to tell you," the wives said. "This is (the other man's name) and we have been together for eighteen months. Our marriage is over. I'm with (him) now."

One of the guys related that the next time he remembers anything, it was three hours later, and he came to standing in the same place. That sounds like a classic symptom of shock.

I'm not interested in the fact of the infidelities. That is an equal opportunity sex failure. What does interest me is the reactions of both of the cuckolded guys. They (predictably enough) sought solace in booze or drugs or both. One of them didn't turn up for work for three weeks, and when he did, told the boss to Get Fucked. When asked what was up, he burst into tears and spent four hours telling his story.

The other guy went to hard drugs, and took a lot of dead-end jobs. After a few months he left his town, and went to California. My friend hasn't heard of him in ten years.

These are unremarkable tales, sad and dispiriting. Unfortunately they are played out every day, everywhere. So I wonder why men so regularly make the women in their lives the centre of those lives. Because relationships go wrong, having a sense of perspective about onesself and the people in one's life is an important skill. Shit happens. Finding a way to understand and deal with the bad days is an art foreign to many men, including me.

We're supposed to be the strong sex, but I think not. What we are is the delusional sex, often living in a bubble of make-happy of our own creation. The world can be cruel, and having a way to deal with that without drowning ourselves in whisky or dope or sex would be a big step forward.

Men, facades and talking

The fact is that men can be divided into two groups: the men who talk, and the men who mask.

The men who mask form the majority. They are facadists, suppressing the real person behind by creating a false front which the public sees. I know these men exist because they are pretty much impossible for me to talk to, and they contrast so completely with non-facadist men. They could almost be another species.

If you don't like the word 'facade', we can use the word 'cloaked'. Cloaked men hide beneath bulky filler-type stereotype male junk that passes for manliness. That means sports, talking down their intellect, and almost always expressing themselves in cliches.

Not making waves appears to be their only goal.

Men not shackled by the need to stay below the radar - the non-facadists - stand out like the proverbial dogs' balls. I have known a few such gentlemen, and with the perspective of time, wonder why we aren't all like them.

Their defining characteristic is an ability to be themselves, and men, and communicators. They talk, and they listen, and they can synthesize abstracts. These skills almost guarantee success in life.

Just why is it that the majority of guys so easily fall into the role of 'guy' and not 'communicator'?

Female Orgasm

A rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar.

The bartender says "Do you guys know the one about the female orgasm?" to which the rabbi replies "Do you mean the oral orgasm, the vaginal intercourse orgasm, the digital orgasm or the anal penetrative orgasm?"


Apparently even religious men are aware that The Big O is something that women achieve in different ways. It's kinda disappointing when squares are hip to the squishy stuff: what can we shock them with next? Perhaps there is nothing, so it might be time to examine what we have in more detail.

For instance, more than 40% of women do not climax from vaginal intercourse. One imagines this is a source of trepidation for some men, specifically those for whom the clitoris is an unknown entity. Fear not, chums, talk to your friendly clitoris owner and ask what she likes. Then practice. You'll be suprised what happiness you can bring.

One problem with the female orgasm I have experienced is having women describe it to me. Observing is one thing, but communicating what's happening inside your head clearly isn't easy.

I thought of flippantly suggesting that women could tell her man the type of automobile that most closely represented her orgasm. This might work because cars are something we guys understand, with great nuance even.

But then I realized that telling a man he'd just given you an '87 Nissan Sentra might not be the best idea - even if you think a high-revving, clutch-slipping, noisy, jack-rabbitting, multi-geared, spring-popping, wave-riding, skidding to a stop orgasm/Nissan is the best thing EVER.





Technorati: Kiss & Blog, Female Orgasm, The Big O, Clitoris.

Higher Purpose

In this week of July 233 years ago the British Army arrived on Staten Island. It was the beginning of a build-up of force that would see George Washington and the Continental Army turfed out of New York by the end of November.



The painting depicts the Battle of Long Island.

If the history of the United States' independence has a common thread, it is that so many of the fighting men believed they were there for something greater than themselves.

Membership of Washington's corps "...lead to...low pay, often rotten food, hard work, cold, heat, poor clothing and shelter, harsh discipline, and a high chance of becoming a casualty."

On Long Island and in Brooklyn in the summer of 1776 those men had no idea how bad matters would become before they improved. Years of fighting would pass before the promise of the Declaration was made real, yet they persevered despite the privations, the hardship and the death.

They saw something bigger.

Technorati: Kiss & Blog, Independence, 1776, Higher Purpose.

Let's Debate About It

There is a difference between argument and debate that splits them neatly down the middle. Argument is a debate using emotions, and a debate is an argument using facts.

Important to note is that both argument and debate can be passionate, but only in an argument does a passionfruit get thrown. That's emotion getting to someone.

Sometimes a debate begins as a debate, and degenerates into an argument. Someone forgot they were supposed to leave their emotions outside, and then allowed them in, like a dog being let in from the rain.

Likewise, arguments can begin with emotion and end with fact, but it's a rare trick. I think that would be called dispassionate, and probably means there are neither dogs nor fruit present.

Beginners at this game often have difficulty distinguishing between a debate and an argument. A rough rule of thumb is that whomever is arguing will shout - or at least raise their voice - and whomever is debating will remain steady of voice, or even lower the volume.

The reason I raise this is because everyone needs to know in which activity they are engaged. If you're in an argument, you can't debate and expect a satisfactory outcome, and if you're in a debate and start arguing, you'll look silly.

Just ask me.

Technorati: Kiss & Blog, Argument, Debate, Passion.

Less Obvious

As a kid, one of my favourite pastimes was lying on a blanket on a clear night, staring at the stars. In the unpolluted skies of the southern hemisphere, it seemed like the whole universe was right there for you, like an untouchable gift.

Once your eyes have accommodated to the low light, more and more becomes visible. The best game was to play 'spot the satellite'. Complicated, this is not. The idea is to find and point out as many satellites - dots of moving light - as possible. This provided hours of amusement, especially if it delayed bed-time.

Like many simple games, this one has a trick. The way to identify a moving object in field of stationary objects is to not look directly at it, but a few degrees to one side. It's counterintuitive to start, but once you get the hang of it, spotting the satellite gets way more fun.

I don't know why, but I think this works in life, too. Shift your gaze a few degrees either side of whatever's on your mind, and you might see it more clearly.


Technorati: Kiss & Blog, Universe, Less Obvious, Tangents.

Mystery

For once in my life, I made the smart move.

I walked past the honeys, left the hotties behind, and pulled up a chair next to the teacher. She was a first- and second-grade teacher, probably in her sixties, and slightly hard of hearing.

"Hello," she said. "What brings you to these parts?" gesturing at the Antarctic part of the bar we inhabited.

"You." I said. "I want to know about you."

And you know what? After thirty minutes, the hotties came around, and wanted part of teach-and-mine's joke.

And now I have an invitation to a chi-chi July 4 par-tay.

Something worked.

Technorati: Mystery, Kiss & Blog, Hotties, Teachers.

Pill.

Link.

Indonesia

Denpasar, Bali, June, 1977.

Everything rots quickly in the tropics, and it smells like it. Barbara was as baffled by this as she had been nervous about everything in her life. Staring unsteadily down the steps from the DC-8 door felt like running headlong into hell, with approximately the same loss of control.

The heat was killer, the humidity worse. Friends had happified Bali, as if it was some paradisical end-place, but the reality was stupifying, all the worse for being that way from the first breath.

"Oh, God", she thought, taking a moment to steel herself for whatever was to come.

She grabbed Jonathon's hand more closely than in years, and smiled tightly at him.

"Ready for the adventure?" she asked him.

He looked back at her, aware of her uncertainty. Twelve year-olds have that kind of karmic calm.

"What's that smell?" he replied.

"I don't know, but I guess we should get going" she said. Avoidance was a way of life.

They walked down the steps carefully, aware of them rocking in the breeze, and of the crowd behind.

"What happens now?", Jon asked.

"I don't know. Just look for your father", she said. "He'll be here somewhere".

Wire Fraud

Whenever the FBI catches a big time criminal, my impression is that the charge they often use is "wire fraud". As a catch-all way to get an arrest, I'm sure it works a treat, allowing the G-Men time to pressure their suspect and troll through the product of their searches.

Of course why Mafia types are replacing real wire with string or rolled-up tin-foil is a mystery. Surely the big money is in running hookers or collecting garbage or providing garbage for people to shoot up.

Pssst. Wanna buy six reels of wire? It's almost as good as the genuine stuff.

Wire fraud got me to thinking about women with underwire bras, and the alleged internet/Oprah "fact" that 85% of women are wearing an incorrectly sized bra. Seems like a rather large oversight to me, by rather a large number of women.

Then I found this and forgot all about it.



How To Put On A Bra 101 - Celebrity bloopers here

Love scrapes

With the spring come the motorcycles, and I guess high gas prices have something to do with it too. Everywhere I look there are young guys on powerful rice rockets, weaving through traffic taunting the cops.

Actually, I totally get their state of mind; bikes are really cool, especially if you're young and male. Where did I read recently that guys' brains only develop fear around age twenty-five? True, in my experience.

The blokes take their sweethearts riding as well. It's like having a two-scoop ice-cream. Not only do they tool around on their pride and joy, but their squeeze is sitting right there behind them, holding on around their waist, grinding herself into them. Lord. Talk about heaven on two wheels.

Trouble is that so often neither of them is wearing a helmet, and only the flimsiest of clothing. Every time I see a girl's bare arms wrapped around the guy, I remember the words of an EMS guy I know, who calls all motorcyclists "organ donors".

*shudder*

Let me see your vagina

The major reason sex works is because men have an insatiable desire to see vaginas.

No matter how many one might have seen in the past, the next one that comes along is the one we want to check out.

Mick Jagger has probably seen 657,335 vaginas, and yet he still wants to see yours.

Pornography and the internet allow me to see exponential vaginas while writing this post. And yet I, too, want to see yours.

This, in summary, is what it's like being a man. A head full of vaginas, and none of them yours.

Yet.

Iceland, Hot Women

An Icelandic man of my recent acquaintance drew my attention to the following fact:

His homeland supplied the Miss World competition with three winners:

Holmfridur Karlsdóttir (1985) Linda Pétursdóttir (1988) and Unnur Birna Vilhjálmsdóttir (2005).

I checked. It's true.

With that record, Iceland has the highest population of Miss Worlds per head of any nation on earth.

I think that needs a personal verification.

Miss Milk...

...made me do it.

Herewith the meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.


"Kill him" said Tynah, committed to demonstrating his unwavering good faith. Bligh was not inclined to do so, but instead administered the most severe punishment of the voyage: one hundred lashes to the the thief, who was then confined in irons until the departure of the ship.

"His back became very much swelled," Bligh recorded with a kind of wonderment, "but only the last stroke broke the Skin."

Living in the moment

For someone new to living in the moment, this is a remarkable coincidence.




When the second-hand breaks, the hour is fixed.

Fashion

Prancing around like jail-house sissies, today's young men baffle me. Do they not realize that - in prison culture, at least - wearing one's belt sub-buttocks exposing the underpants is an invitation to sodomy?

I was reminded of the vagaries of men's fashion by this passage from a book I'm reading about the Battle of Trafalgar.

In response to this need for courtesy and delicacy, wide swathes of English 18th century life became fragile and dainty, in a way that no age in England, before or since, has managed. It became possible, for the first and only time, for a perfectly serious man to attend ceremonies at court in 'a lavender suit, the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver or of white silk work worked in the tambour, partridge silk stockings , gold buckles, ruffles and lace frill.'

Partridge silk stockings and lace frills? I bet they'd go down a treat in the iron-bar motel. Watch for them in the Hollister and Abercrombie summer collections.



Quotation from "Seize the Fire. Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar" by Adam Nicolson.