Sex roles are very complicated in most societies. This third point is less a sociological or anthropological question than it is a clinical question about expectations of maleness in your own relationship. Warren Farrell, in his book Why Men Are How They Are, and Carol
GilHgan’s book In a Different Voice provide interesting insights about this issue. How do you see men?
Dr. Farrell reports that male fantasies emphasize variety of sexual partner and the challenge of the hunt, of finding new and better sexual objects. He writes that women value sameness of partner, commitment to and from one man. Dr. Gilligan suggests that all interactions with the primary caretaker, in almost all cases the mother, determine the gender-role behaviors of men and women. Both researchers know that the brain-experience connection is a mutually influential one.
“I know this will date me, but I see men as providers, caretakers, and sexually active. They are aggressive and less emotional than women. I know that sounds stupid, but it is how I see them.” This report from one of the wives was not atypical. Stereotypes die hard and continue to influence the sexual interaction within the marriage, regardless of intellectual protests of “nonsexist” views.
“Men just have to do it all, and I think they want to do it all. It is in the nature of things and in their nature to be the doers, the responsible ones,” reported one husband. You can see the love maps of both these spouses. Can you imagine how each of these people came to feel and behave as they do?
A word of warning. It is not always the case that the spouse’s actual behavior matches his or her report. How we feel is the real love map. How we behave is only a rough approximation of that map and is filtered and changed by social constraints that may mask the real map itself.
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