What made the ensuing court case significant is a female judge had sided with the mom and tried to stifle the father’s voice and his ability to defend the boy.

Outrageous isn’t the right word to describe most people’s reactions. If I lived in Texas, I would have been happy to picket the courthouse.

In Ottawa, a few years ago a case surfaced when a grade one teacher told her class: girls and boys did not exist. It’s that gender fluidity issue again.

This happened about four miles from my home at the Prince of Wales primary school. The principal, another woman, backed her teacher’s abuse, or idiocy, or whatever you want to call it.

One little girl in the class was so distraught to find out she was not a girl (like mommy), it affected her with daily worry.

Oh great, just what we need: take the gender that is already biologically prone to fear and give them more reason to be freaked out about themselves. The parents moved their child schools and lodged a human rights complaint.

They should have sued as well. They lost at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Should we be surprised.

I remember my first trans client, a heroin addict named Mercedes (obviously her street name).

Coming from a large Quebec farm family, she was born with both sets of genitalia and raised a boy. Boys are needed on farms more than girls. Thus, began her odyssey which included her eventually reclaiming what she felt was her rightful female identify.

After disappointing her father and leaving home, she often worked as a hooker and had done time for robbing Johns. She’d long been on hormones and had huge tits and clearly female facial characteristics. When I knew her in the 1980s working as an addiction’s counselor, she was an attractive but slightly overweight middle-aged woman.

I found her charming but manipulative — though not dangerously so — as she asked me to write a book about her journey. I was there to help her with her drug habit and wasn’t distracted. I quite liked her.

She described her physical and mental ordeal at length, hoping one day to visit a Scandinavian country which was the only place offering sex-reassignment surgery at the time according to her.

Her justification for being a hooker was to afford her medical interventions. Now, it can be done here.

The universe doesn’t make mistakes. We don’t get to second guess how things turn out. People like Mercedes could be said to be put here to teach us something, even if that lesson is just tolerance.

To me, her condition was not unheard of as I had spent part of my previous summer at L’Universite de Sherbrooke studying sexology and addictions. I was fully aware of the link between substance abuse and trans, minor though it is comparatively.

At the recovery home, she fit right in as a woman though raised as an unhappy boy.

The acquired Childhood Experiences Study (ACE scores) by Kaiser Permanente was still a few years off but a quick survey of the 20 mixed gender people in any of the groups I ran (when I was the only counselor on duty all weekend) would tell you what you already knew. An ACE score of 4 and above is associated with higher risk of all kinds of things from heart disease to diabetes to mental illness.

Trauma causes stress and stress lies behind addiction. That can be early or late, sudden or gradual, biological or environmental, and nothing since has changed my mind. It is about the nervous system and how it is trained by experience.

So, despite my background as a straight male, I have some experience with trans people. I’m also sympathetic.

The current trend towards gender fluidity is my concern. I’m further convinced that like many social trends where there may have existed a tolerance deficit, in a classic corrective overreaction, it means the pendulum of change is swinging wide in error.

Rather than quietly making small adjustments, the trans cause hitched its case on the vocal gay rights movement and here we are.

I get the impression this was facilitated by social sciences academics, a majority of whom are now female. Women are far more egalitarian than are men and I suspect a shrill cry for egalitarianism from a corps of overthinking and influential females has resulted in a well-intentioned, not inclusion oriented but instead, dominant trend, which is misplaced and unnecessary, and in fact, harmful.

There I said it.

Not long after hearing about the Texas case I happened to be driving and listening to CBC radio, our Canadian public broadcaster, and heard a female academic who was advising the Ontario Education Ministry.

She stated gender fluidity must be taught in all schools from primary to secondary and that each teacher had a “moral obligation” to get the word out.

Are you kidding me? This is egalitarianism run amok.

This is the feminization of the culture occurring in a vacuum of male weakness.

“Unlike Boys, girls almost never boast, command one another, tell jokes at one another’s expense, try to top one another’s stories, call each other names, or in any way show off, and they sure don’t let any other girl do this. No girl is superior to any other girl. Should a girl appear superior, even accidentally, she faces social exclusion.”

That quote is from Joyce Benenson, a prof at The Emanuelle School (p. 178, Warriors and Worriers, 2014, Kindle version), though she is affiliated with and did most of the studies she quotes through Harvard.

Women are less social, more egalitarian and fearful than are men.

The feminine energy we currently experience embraces a kind of equality that shouldn’t be trusted for its proximity to socialist or even Marxist philosophy.

Great for women competing among each other as primary caregivers, lousy at making public policy which will determine how our children are educated on things like gender.

In her 2019 book, Primal Screams, Mary Eberhardt advances the idea politically that correctness is at least partially due to a breakdown in family.

Factors like economics, more people living in cities and so having fewer children, feminism, state support for single mothers, easy divorce laws, abortion on demand, the pill, etc. have all contributed to a much-changed family dynamic.

Political correctness might be a search for identity, she says, as people look outside of family for causes to believe in.

To taboo or not taboo: I could care less who you are having sex with as long as it’s not with children or animals and the adults involved have consented.

I have seen enough in my time to realize there is a fair bit of flexibility among folks. I’m all for less shame in society.

Look, probably over our history the taboo against homosexuality existed for a reason, especially given women’s competing for resources from men and others because of their primary caregiver status.

But also, men need to know that the guy next to him is tough enough to stand beside him and fight enemies. That’s why young boys taunt others who act like girls.

This is a hardwired set of traits.

Women being more fearful is also an inborn trait. She risks anxiety and depression at a far greater rate than do men.

Her priority after all, it to bring life forward into the future. Kind of important. She is ultra-sensitive to competition and allies.

This need to keep babies alive is the basis of her greater level of fear when compared to men. Looking after children is a job that is NEVER done.

Children can’t be left alone for a SECOND let alone a minute. Do the math: 60 seconds in a minute, that’s 525,948 minutes in a year, or over HALF A BILLION seconds to keep a kid alive to age sixteen.

It drives women a little nuts and we should appreciate their inborn tendency to worry, without condescension, but rather, with much due appreciation, even with awe.

Some men have always had sex with each other. The Greeks are famous for it and from what I can tell, until there is a woman who can interpose herself between a man and his sexual energy, it’s natural.

Some guys can become aroused with other men and some can’t. It is not my thing, but I know when I was in the penitentiary, the barbershop was full of trans and effeminate men we called sisters.

One of them, Sabrina, had undergone the hormone treatments and had what must have been about a 34 C rack on her. She was a mulatto with high cheekbones, quite attractive, usually wearing a white wife beater style t shirt with no bra.

She’d come into the visiting center on weekends and all the wives and girlfriends visiting their men would get jealous. It freaked my ex out a bit.

But, there were men in there who were big and fierce bisexual men. Jimmy had 22-inch arms and had a young kid as his boyfriend. He was doing life and was president of the inmate committee…. The kid was well protected.

There was “three tape Helen” who was another trans gal. The rumour was there was always three pieces of tape at the ready on her bunk which she used to affix her long penis to her shaved belly so guys sodomizing her wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of her appendage.

Try getting that image out of your mind now.

OK, OK, you get the picture… or message.

It’s just that the kind of upheaval we are witnessing is unnecessary given the size of the population involved.

By the numbers, here’s the data:

“The LGBT community is small. Early research on the prevalence of homosexuality suggested that roughly 10 percent of the adult population were gay or lesbian (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948).
We now know that these were inflated estimates (Carpenter 2013; Vizard 2014). Using six national and state representative data sets, Carpenter (2013) found that roughly 1 to 2.3 percent of the U.S. adult population identified as either gay or lesbian. Between 0.7 and 2.9 percent identified as bisexual (Carpenter 2013:217).

Transgender individuals account for roughly 0.6 percent of the U.S. population (Flores et al. 2016). Similar estimates have been found in Canada, with 1 percent of adults identifying as either gay or lesbian and 0.7 percent identifying as bisexual (Statistics Canada 2004).

For comparison purposes, 22.3 percent of the Canadian population identify as a visible minority, 21.9 percent of the Canadian population are foreign born, 4.9 percent are Indigenous, and 14 percent report having an impairment or disability that limit their daily activities (Statistics Canada 2015, 2017a, 2017b).”

Sean Waite & Nicole Denier from A Research Note on Canada’s LGBT Data Landscape: Where We Are and What the Future Holds. 2019

So two percent of the population are gays and lesbians with a few outlier dabblers and experimenters. Genetic mutations if you will.

But, just a half a point of any population are people like Mercedes.

Surely, not fun for her, and anyone who must face pain alone without people around them acting as angels of better mercy, attachment figures to which they may turn to when needed is by definition: traumatized.

Just as any kid reaches for mommy when he or she is afraid, all people need social engagement.

If we think we are going to alleviate trauma by telling little girls and boys’ gender doesn’t exist, I’d suggest you give your head a shake.

It’s in our nature to be traumatized and from it, to create resilience.

I want to encourage men to voice their concerns where they have them. It’s the silencing of male leadership power under the fearfulness of a feminine energy dominated public narrative that is the root cause of what we see happening today with the “trans question.”

I don’t even know if such a thing exists, but I do know this: wherever a small group of people can band together and act to further their interests over others, they always do it.

I don’t care what group it is; self-interest is paramount (as Conrad Black says).

Men lead, women command.

That means we either step up and lead or prepare to be bossed around by the feminine trying to mitigate insecurity. There are plenty of good contributing women out there, the ones in charge and speaking to this issue in these fashions are mistaken.

Their “white knight” enablers can’t be trusted.

Men and women have banded together since the dawn of time to take advantage of each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses.

A woman can pretty much do anything a man can do but will have clear preferences. Those preferences are usually influenced by her caregiving status and her propensity to be attracted to the vulnerable. That’s generally the undeniable facts of her existence.

Don’t buy into the idea of a patriarchy somehow dominating women. We’d never have language unless there was reasonable equality between us.

Where there is inequality we ought to step in and speak for those who cannot speak for themselves because of development or numbers. But we don’t upset the apple cart for a few bad apples.

Most of what we do is done well. The current trans trend is largely social contagion. We have seen this before.
 

It’s the Lindy Effect I learned from Nicholas Taleb: A book in circulation for one hundred years is almost assured to be in circulation in one hundred more. A book published last month has almost no chance of still being around in a hundred years.

The idea of gender fluidity is but a few years old.

Nature? It has been around millions of years.

I bet on nature.

Questions? Comments?

Invictus, true and free!
cw

MEN AT WORK

One of you asked me how we got to where we are, so here’s an answer:

The current generation of men are part of a grand externality extending from the Industrial Age to the Digital Era which resulted in drawing men (and now women) away from home and hearth. This is unnatural under the heavens I say.

Whereas two hundred years ago more than 80% of us would have lived and worked together on the equivalent of the family farm, in the last 150 years especially, it seems men are married to their work more than to their families (generally speaking).

This is no one’s fault, survival amongst the tribe demanded and facilitated these events. It was a different world not too long ago.

For example, one hundred years ago the greatest killer of children was infectious disease.

At the turn of the previous century, as a little boy my grandfather heard two big sisters he adored cry plaintively in the night, each calling the other sister’s name, checking in on her sibling’s suffering. It was Scarlet Fever, brought to the home by an infected milkman. Grampa Gimpy found them both dead in the morning. It broke his heart.

A few years later he heard more suffering as his mother died giving birth to stillborn twins at age 40. She bled out over three days in the house while women of the neighbourhood desperately tried to save her.

Look to the records from TB sanitoriums of that era, or some of the institutions where our sick and mentally ill were warehoused. Children separated from their most critical bond to mother are affected forevermore.

The practice of institutionalizing extra-ordinary kids continued until as recently as a generation or so ago. I worked as a pool porter at the Rideau Regional Center in Eastern Ontario the late 1970s (while doing time), where families were encouraged to leave (sometimes discard) their developmentally delayed and damaged. A thousand or more kids and afflicted adults housed in a tenuous mix of order and chaos, in wards that were sometimes horror stories.

Daily I walked into a room of thirty children in hockey helmets all just banging their heads on the floor while the staff smoked cigarettes and watched soap operas. The violence, sexual degradation, and oh, the things I’ve seen…

A hearse appeared every morning to take away the dead.

For an idea of what the 1800s were like, look up the circumstances that led William Ernest Henley to write his poem Invictus in 1875. He was waiting to have his leg cut off when he wrote it. Read the poem while you are at it.

The #2 killer of children back then was infanticide. Nowadays, people complain about abortion and the pill. Perhaps it’s justified, I’m not sure. Seems to me it has always been a mother’s (and father’s) prerogative as to whether a child lives or dies.

Compared to today, life in times past was more Hobbesian, as when the famous pessimist wrote, “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Leviathan)

Surely that’s too much. Or was it, or is it?

200 years ago, most lived on the equivalent of a dollar per day. That meant getting your water out of a hole in the ground, growing your own food and eating pretty much the same meal each day. A crop failure meant starvation; sickness meant death.

In the 20th century alone, we lost 20 million soldiers and civilians in WW1.

Then we lost 22 million souls to the Spanish Flu pandemic which immediately followed.

The stock market contraction of 1929 saw world GDP drop 25%. Then we had a protracted recession (before expansion of the money supply and while most countries were still tied to the gold standard).

Going off the gold standard’s real money and adopting fiat currency seems to have caused that crisis. Governments around the world have printed money since and created boom and bust cycles of expansion and contraction.

People suffered for years. My father was born in ’29, a child of The Great Depression as it was called. He hammered used bent nails straight and kept them in tobacco tins on his workbench thereafter.

A world concerned with feeding itself flirted with eugenics… while Stalin embraced totalitarianism and then the Nazi regime allied with Italy and Japan to give us WW2, the horrors of the death camps and eventually, 75 or 100 million dead.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were obliterated with nuclear bombs.

Stalin locked down the Eastern Block countries even more post WW2 and killed tens of millions.

It was the US and her allies who later rebuilt Japan’s economy and led the charge to rebuild much of the world, notably under the likes of W. Edwards Deming’s brilliance and many others.

The Korean conflict followed. China joined in support of its vassal state, North Korea, with a million-man army rushing over the border to fight the allies and effect a stalemate that continues today. Millions more North Koreans have died as a result.

The French colonizers of Vietnam ran from a commie north propped up by billions worth of Communist Russian and Chinese military aid, and the US and allies took up the fight only to lose eventually.

I am old enough to have had friends (or older mentors) who saw action in each of those wars, including my grandfather in WW1.

Next door, Cambodia killed millions of their own under Pol Pot. Mao Zedong’s policies killed tens of millions in China, yet in 1972 Nixon went over and shook Mao’s fucking hand on behalf of capitalism.

Stalin’s rule produced 50 million dead, maybe more, including starving millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in the 1930s.

The nuclear détente between east and west lasted until Gorbachev in the 1990s. And we are not out of the shit yet by any means with the likes of Putin, Jinping, Jong-un (N. Korea), Raisi (Iran), and others.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 70s, we expected to die from a nuclear attack at any moment. In summer, the fire station up on Alta Vista Drive would run the air raid sirens for practice. We’d look skyward just in case, searching for incomings…

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassinations of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King taught us calamity was on our doorstep.

I was in Cubs, Scouts, and even Pioneers. I attended Air Cadets (51st Squadron, Beaver Barracks). Preparing for war.

Posters at the ice rink on the Uplands air base (CFB Ottawa South) where I later worked as a cleaner, told us what to do in case of a nuclear attack. You were supposed to crouch down and put your head between your legs for protection… and kiss your ass goodbye.

All this world fuckery was faithfully reported to a population slavishly devoted to a thriving print newspaper industry and the new medium of TV news with trusted newsmen Walter Cronkite in the US and Harvey Kirck in Canada.

And what did western men do in the face of all this?

They went to work.

They felt called as defenders to work for democracy under capitalism.

As they have always done, noble men produced more than they consumed in support of their tribes.

The honourable expendable male came through. It was Men at Work…

Only, the trend that started during the Industrial Revolution saw men increasingly work apart from their families. Suburbs sprang up, and during the Victorian era the concept of “privacy” came into being.

Before that, a man’s family was with him as he worked. This new demand for labour changed… everything.

For some men, as long as they could put one foot in front of the other they worked. And the more talented of men rode this great wave of innovation and growth, while all men worked and worked and worked. We have the world we have because of them.

That cost something. I say it cost us plenty in unpredictable externality (side-effect).

These changes had unforeseen consequences that are only now coming to a head (In a sense, the chickens have indeed, come home to roost).

Perhaps that’s a “chicken-shit” simile but I’ll explain what I mean.

When I was a kid it was “eat your vegetables, there are starving kids in Africa.” Now? Not so much.

We have gone from 1.4 million starvation deaths annually up to the year 2000, to a few tens of thousands ‘death by hunger’ in the modern era (and only because of wars or other political infighting).

That’s no small feat, a 95+% reduction in dying from not having food to eat, occurred in my lifetime. It’s mind-blowing.

Capitalism’s powerful hold on supply and demand has resulted in the lessening of trade barriers and an increasing standard of living worldwide. By 2017, 6 out of 7 billion people on the planet were far beyond the dollar per day subsistence level of 200 years ago.

Life expectancy doubled. DOUBLED!

Industrialism and capitalism together is like a more complex game of monopoly… the longer it is played, the more wealth and property is accrued by fewer players. Just like monopoly goes until one person wins the game, capitalism’s nature concentrates wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer players.

Because it feeds us and provides for our quality of life, the capitalized world also beats tradition, culture, geography, relationships, and families, hands down over time.

Capitalism invests wherever it can make a profit and proceeds around the world relatively untrammeled. It hangs in there as the most attentively played and widely protected game and so, eventually takes all the marbles.

We have gained a lot since the Industrial Revolution, but we are giving up a lot too and no one is talking about it.

Once we made enough goods to house, clothes and feed a market, profits needed to be reinvested to make even more profit. And so, capitalism created consumerism.

Men worked more, including my Grandpa Gimpy and his brother Patrick, original Canadian Maritime “mad men” at Wallace Advertising, which was started at the end of the First World War. My dad said Gimpy wrote upwards of ten thousand slogans and headlines.

These wholesale changes of the last few centuries eroded the male/female ‘Team Human” ethos which had most prevailed beforehand.

Writing in Scientific American recently, journalist Francine Russo interviewed Brown University anthropologist Michele Hayeur Smith, who says, “In the Viking and medieval eras, women were the basis of the North Atlantic economy, and their clothes allowed people to survive the climate of the North Atlantic… Textiles and what women made were as critical as hunting, building houses, and power struggles.”

This all changed with the Industrial Revolution’s textile mills in England using imported cotton from around the empire, killing off this part of the North Atlantic way of life. Evidence has emerged over the last few years proving Viking women were also warrior women.

It falls to men… Let’s keep our eyes wide open to see the truth of what has happened. There is good and bad.

Left to their own devices, collaborative men and women have always banded together to take advantage of each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses.

In medieval times there were many European “kingdoms” that were actually run by queens (I read in one report how these Queens were more likely to go to war). The two longest serving British monarchs were both women. The Mediterranean during the Bronze Age saw great queens, notably in Egypt. In short, the record shows there have been plenty of powerful women contributors throughout history.

Back to the present: there is about a two percent difference in DNA between men and women. Not much, you think. It’s only when we consider that there exists a similar 2% DNA difference between humans and chimpanzees that we see just how much differences count.

Boys and girls grow up differently under mom’s watch. Women are great at keeping boys alive to adulthood but don’t make men.

Little boys must bask in the glory of their mother’s love the first few years. But then, to develop properly, boys must slowly make their way over and under dad’s influence and become primarily influenced and accepted into the masculine order of things.

Failing to do so is a disaster for him, a disaster for those around him, and a disaster for society at large.

Only men make men.

I argue we can tolerate some of this in a culture, but not much. The events of the last hundred or two hundred years leaves children (the effect is noticeably hard on boys), under the influence of maternal love indefinitely. In contrast, most little girls are maternal by nature.

Some men (it may now be most) never leave their mothers emotionally, regardless of her disposition.

It just becomes what is normal, alternatively unawares because they have not experienced a life otherwise and, for the most part, neither have their fathers. They were working, as were their father’s fathers.

These boys as men long for mother’s love forevermore (subconsciously projected onto the people around him). Their nervous system is left with a dependence on maternal care and a secret search for unconditional love or being demonstrably ruled by abandonment fear.

Of course, this was never nature’s intention, which was set up so that children, especially boys, would be raised by both mother and father from the outset (and a series of “alloparents” such as aunts, grandparents, friends, neighbours, etc.). Losing or dissipating the father influence at home under a mutually cooperative relationship with his wife has cost men and the whole culture. In American society, almost half of homes now have no father in the house.

This is how the chickens have come home to roost. This is how we are reaping what we have inadvertently sown…

The mother is a child’s most important relationship. All love starts with the maternal bond. She takes precedence the first few years to keep the child alive, and especially for boys (who are expendable), with the man later teaching him how to stay alive and thrive thereafter.

I teach something called The Parental Pact. That’s the idea that as a couple, our first job is to protect the children from each other. Mother and father both need be there early on, firstly to protect the children from each other.

We are imperfect beings, after all, and men and women working together are able to keep each other in check. Nature set it up this way lest one or the other is able to capriciously rain down generational pain upon the child unopposed.

Without this balance a family suffers under life’s demand even more.

We men and society at large have lost male rites of passage, with no ascendancy to the rank of warrior class.

We have men who are partly there in some aspects, but who in other facets of personality are lost and confused, wondering why they are not loved for simply being who they are (Others are simply lost and confused). No one is to blame for this, it’s the times. It’s the side-effect.

Men now reach adulthood and, from sheer habituation, end up looking for maternal love in their girlfriends and spouses and other females. Because they don’t know otherwise, subconsciously seek maternal care.

And for survival’s sake, these friends, girlfriends and wives sense his deficit. Her survival instinct spots his weakness a mile away. This strikes her hard.

In general, women don’t get male weakness. They are puzzled by it and hold the very idea in contempt.

In many cases, it drives women nuts. Like certifiably nuts.

Rather than accepting a partner with whom he can build a life by allowing her to hitch a wagon to his horse, many men settle for a relationship where they are not alone.

Or they are happy to swap out mom for some bossy wench whose bidding he must do under maxims like “Happy Wife, Happy Life,” all to avoid being cast aside. Men like this don’t get the fundamentals of healthy male-female adult attachment.

Ostracism is the real scourge of mankind.

In the twentieth century we pushed back hard on fascism and communism and learned to feed six+ billion people while adding versions of universal health care and education. Purchasing power went up and we made some headway on pollution. Gains were made around sexual, racial, and ethnic injustice.

Arguably, there is less tyranny and more democracy. Overt tyranny has lessened, but a stronger but nuanced tyranny exists derived by government control of the money supply. The illogical Friedman and Keynesian economics which sees governments printing infinite fiat currencies is a sure sign that totalitarianism still exists… only under a far more pernicious form. Crony Capitalism undermines freedom.

The cultural rise of female power, of the last two generations especially but stretching back a century or more, occurs in a vacuum of male weakness firstly by way of his absence from day-to-day family life… and which is harmful to all of us over the longer term.

Men created second wave feminism by virtue of their own ignorance.

The weird thing is that chances are at the start of most relationships she gives him every opportunity to be the powerful man she needs; she expects that he knows his role. Her biological clock ticking, she bets on him. It’s the biggest gamble of her life.

Paradoxically, when a man is unable to bring his fully assimilated masculine order to bear on his relationship to offset the chaos of life sure to befall him and his woman, it makes women suffer. When women suffer, so do her children. She stress-tests cultures accordingly. Men are none too pleased in that case either.

And so, here we are gentleman.

Learning how to be powerful men.

Make that your priority. And, if necessary, I will show you how.

So that YOU can change this…

So YOU can be one of this generation’s men who stand up and declare, “The pain stops here!”

The world desperately needs you to become your most powerful self.

It is weakness that is the enemy.

Questions? Comments?

Commitments?

Invictus! (go read it)

True and Free!
cw

©2023 Christopher K Wallace
Advisor to men ™
https://advisortomen.com/bona-fides/

BREAKING HEARTS

You will often see me write that it is, if not inevitable at least likely, that a young man will break a few hearts along his way, especially at the start of his partnering years. The reasons here apply in later years too, though to a significantly lesser extent.

Let me also point out that I’m generally a pretty consistent supporter of relationships. I’ve counselled couples and been involved with both men and women individually trying to make their marriages or cohabitations work better. I don’t recommend breaking up lightly: I’m pro-love if anything.

In a meta-analysis of 60 years of attachment theory done in the 1990s, researchers were surprised at just how important the “need to belong” factored in life satisfaction. They discovered belonging governed the whole of the emotional system. When we connect with each other, our emotions rise; when we disconnect, those emotions fall.

As anyone with even a modicum of understanding realizes we operate much better when we feel positive and empowered. That largely results from how well we manage the relationships around us.

That said, the most important relationship a man ever has in his life is his first, the one he has with his mother. All love is essentially maternal in nature. The nervous system governing flight, flight, and freeze are present in the developing fetus in the first few weeks of life.

A child’s ability to connect with others begins in the third trimester—presumably when the baby starts to hear its mother’s voice—and continues when the babe is born and responds to “motherese” as she coos and cuddles and talks to the newborn. “How’s my little man today, are you hungry, do you need your diaper changed little bear?” she might say…

It is mother who teaches love from her bosom and this love then takes form in various contexts as a person grows in belonging amongst others throughout life.

Mom’s love is also critical to any child’s survival, and if a child makes it to age three or four, it is usually because of its mother. Dads are important too, but mom’s care trumps dad. She is the creator of life, while dad’s best role is as a defender of life.

Back in the late 1930s and into the mid-1940s, a few hundred men from Harvard were enlisted into the Grant study, to investigate what makes a “Harvard Man.” Later a few hundred more inner-city Boston men under the Gluek study were added and the two combined into the Grant-Gluek study.

The men underwent extensive questionnaires and testing including interviews with family and doctors and continued every two years for life. There is a small handful of these men alive presently.

An interesting finding is that warm maternal relationship meant greater earnings as an adult, as much as 90K more annually. Good paternal relationships meant less adult anxiety and greater fun on holidays.

Poor relations with mom as a child was associated with a four-fold increase in dementia end of life. (8% versus 32% if I remember correctly). Some of you will have witnessed dementia. It ain’t pretty.

I had occasion to ask my dad about his life once I rekindled our friendship in my late thirties and beyond and he told me both his parents broke his heart. I sat on his bed beside him for four hours as he death rattled before watching him die… of dementia.

I often tell how we evolved to band together to take advantage of each other’s strengths and to shore up each other’s weaknesses. I point out nature intended for men and women to raise children together.

In days of yore, we used to live where we worked. Not so since the Victorian era. What has weakened men over the last 150 years is that fathers leave the home to go to work. The usual apprenticeship under a complement of men on the family farm or family trade has now largely been lost.

Add to this is that we have just survived a century filled with calamity. WW1 saw about 20 million deaths. Another 21 million from the Spanish Flu which followed the war. The stock market crash of 1929 set the world GDP back by a quarter or more.

Total death count for WW2 is another 70 million. Add to that Stalin killed millions, as did Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia. Vietnam killed millions more. The nuclear war détente stretched for half a century into the 1990s providing even more uncertainty.

The good news is technological advances, especially in medicine, double life expectancy over the last two hundred years. Starvation has decreased by 96% over my lifetime.

The great rebuilding of the world during the 20th century put men to work, and capitalism prevailed. Unfortunately, this leaves boys almost exclusively raised by the feminine caregiving around him. Not always, but predominantly, a boy’s adult influences are female.

In 1990, the poet John Bly wrote an important book for men called Iron John, in which he identified this issue and encouraged men to break free from maternal forces. Iron John is a fable where the young man is encouraged to steal the keys to the castle out from under his mother’s pillow if necessary, and fuck off on great adventures out on his own. Every man should read it.

Which brings me back to break ups.

Often when a man summons the courage to leave a woman, it is an exercise in leaving the maternal. We are trained as youngsters to be beholden to the feminine. We put women on pedestals starting with the all-powerful mother, and rarely have an adequate check to her power in masculine form.

Having the balls to leave a woman, despite the particulars, is often a calling for the man to steal the keys and leave the castle. It is an opportunity for self-reliant renewal.

If no children figure in his circumstances, he does well to realize he is not responsible for her feelings, only responsible to her as a fellow human being.

He must first honour his destiny, protecting his mission and journey, before he can defend others.

Life is suffering, unavoidably heartbreaking even.

Wherever possible, choose your pain.

Questions? Comments?

Powerful, true and free…
CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE

advisortomen.com

That women are more about people and men more about things is one of the most durable sex differences. Oh sure, there are outliers. It is just exceptions do not disprove a general rule.

One of my gal friends sent me video just last week of a baboon troupe exposed to kid’s toys, trucks, or dolls. Sure enough, the male baboons were interested in the trucks while the female baboons picked up the dolls and dragged them around like babies.

My friend said she ignored the dolls as a child and preferred trucks. She is truly one of a kind and does not fit typical predilections. She grows an extraordinary garden engineered for production & efficiency out of four-gallon pots lined up and down her driveway that has my envy.

The same way we find men who can do things we normally associate with women. Cooking is an area some men have a real knack for. My old friend Loris was the second oldest of four sons born to Italian immigrants. I met him when I was about twenty and spoke at his funeral a few years ago.

The first time I went to his house at lunch time he made me breaded zucchini like I have never had again. He prepared most family meals, and his three sons can all cook. One is a chef by profession.

Running sales teams in various cities across Canada for many years, I taught managers of all genders how to read maps. Men picked it up quickly, women, not so much. Among my collection of books is Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, by Barbara and Allan Pease.

Yet my sister-in-law Michelle has the best sense of direction of anyone I have ever known. At times I suspected she has particles in her brain that coordinate with earth’s magnetic field like birds because if I made one wrong turn, she would know immediately… and point it out.

As we confront our challenges, many are surprised to learn that we carry so much shame from our early years. Men are superb suppressors of emotion, an adaptation which allows cool under fire in emergencies. It can turn to repression where we do not have a clue how we feel.

Yet, it is in the work done to uncover, expose and rectify shame that we find significant growth. To that end, as I got to know shame better, both in myself and the men I have the privilege of working with, I developed an understandable shame awareness.

It is not quite like buying a red truck and suddenly noticing every red truck in town, but there is no doubt heightened sensibility comes along with the work. An example is rejecting both compliments and criticism from the people around you. When I see that in others, I suspect shame.

To that end, despite seeing mostly men in my daily existence, online or in person, I conclude that women carry even more shame than men. I see it in their defensiveness and hypervigilance, and the oft-irrationality of their personal suffering.

For example, social scientist Roy Baumeister points out most women tend to keep one or two, usually no more than five, best pals whom they guard jealously from each other and use for emotional regulation.

I grew up with four sisters and have found women suffer without trusted friends nearby.

Susan Pinker, writing in The Sexual Paradox, says the feminine competes by maneuvering covertly using mean remarks, social exclusion and by winning over each other’s friends and allies.

Some men do this too. 007 we imagine does it professionally. Machiavellianism could be said to be feminine energy I say.

In one Israeli study Pinker cites, girls ran against boys in track and scored best times. Boys ran against boys and scored their best times. But when the girls ran against girls their times dropped. No one wanted to be the first across the finish line and risk alienation say the study authors.

The sisterhood bands together for emotional regulation as a survival strategy. Without it, she is emotionally cast adrift from the group, her belonging uncertain, out on a limb from which she may not retreat should her male supports let her down.

That is no small thing. It would be like a child being left at the edge of the village alone, exposed to the elements and the animals. She loses her safety and succorance, her belonging.

Women are about people generally and they use their empathy to grow those around them. This is a wonderful gift. I often tell men that women do not get male weakness, it seems they do not have the bandwidth to understand how this can happen.

That she will grow up one day and be a creator of life is understood early. Her corresponding view of the males around her is that they will grow up and be powerful defenders of life.

She believes everyone and his dog knows this, that it is that self-evident. When she encounters weakness in an adult male, she can be intolerant. She has tolerance for babies and children, the sick, the infirm, the old and the frail, not so much for grown men. Women need powerful men.

When she is criticized, her shame rises as if her very existence is questioned. Her hypervigilance and defensiveness soon kick in to protect her soul. The spirit speaks for the soul, so her responses in the face of an attack on her being are… ‘spirited’ to say the least.

One of the things I suggested to my son as he made his way through life was to find himself a gal with a university education. She is still a woman, but that kind of gal will have been exposed to logic, discourse, and communication enough to at least give you a shot at reasonable argument.

It is no guarantee, but I took this gambit on his behalf. He told me later my advice counted.

The fairer sex carries more negative emotion. Men are neurotic too but women in general hit this one out of the park. It is an adaptation which allows her to spot danger and sickness in the people around her, especially children. “Ont as tous les défauts de nos qualités” say the French.

Women in general think more with both hemispheres than men and run information through the limbic (emotion) system of the brain. The corpus callosum connecting both sides of the brain is thicker in women.

If I go somewhere socially, she picks up all the undercurrents happening between people far better than I do. She remembers birthdays and such. Me, not so much.

She will tend to overthink, something a man can stand in and help her with on occasion. She also has better verbal ability earlier on. But you put a man and a woman in a room and let them argue, she is usually talking circles around him. One of the reasons for this is what I call abuse of empathy.

Men have rules of the game in an argument, probably so they don’t kill each other. The ad hominem attack is understood to be weak. It might surprise you that no one seems to have let women know about this little caveat.

Get into an argument with a woman, and with her hackles raised, nothing seems out of bounds. Your looks, your weight, your dress, your personality, and any number of personal things that have nothing to do with the subject at hand might be used against you as she defends herself.

And the degree to which she is defending herself is usually a construct of her own mind and history and bears little connection to the situation at hand.

If you feel something today, you have felt it before. You are not dealing with her in the present moment, but a history of feeling slighted.

In Warriors and Worriers, Joyce Benenson compares little girls and boys playing in the school yard sandbox. If two little boys are playing and a third one arrives, he is usually welcomed regardless of if they have played together before.

If two little girls are playing in the sandbox and a little girl arrives to join in who is not an approved “friend,” chances are the two will move off elsewhere.

Women have contended with rejection from very early in age and are wired to be egalitarian.

It is our hunter-gatherer brain. If you and I hunt and you kill a deer, we share the meat. You might keep the heart and liver and the very best cuts. But once we arrive at our respective caves, the women make sure everyone eats.

When I talk of abuse of empathy is a woman’s birth right, I am referring to her innate abilities being turned against you.

Just as a man’s strengths can be used for violence or for defense, so can her assets of verbal ability, negativity bias, egalitarianism, and wider scope be used to abuse.

By understanding this about women, you can appreciate her gifts and protect yourself accordingly.

It’s why I wrote The House Rules, so that you and she could negotiate fairness in advance of your discussions.

A good trick is to agree on a code word or phrase either can use to take a break. Missus and I use, “Let me get back to you about this.”

This enables you to create rules of engagement when things are going well, so that when things get heated, you are prepared.

And without turning to the “you are essentially fucked up and broken like all women” line of shaming talk and thinking espoused by certain online cowards.

Be aware and beware, but be men.

Questions? Comments?

Powerful, true and free…
cw

©CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE, 2022, all rights reserved, advisortomen.com

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