Brian Explains Men and Women – Thoughts from December 17, 2010

Brian Explains: Men and Women

Men and women are the similar in more ways than they are different. We are both humans, have feet and hands in the same general area, and have heads that are tied to our bodies with skin string. We are so similar that you cannot tell which category some people fit in. There are a couple physical differences between most women and men. Rather than make this a sex education class with charts of ovaries, I’ll move on to the next paragraph where I explain the meaning of Christmas . . . I mean, the difference between men and women. I will focus on the inside. No, I am not talking about the ovaries again. I am talking about the female and male brain.

(Future note: The next few paragraphs feature generalizations about men and women. They are not universally true for any sex. I should have added a “most” or “many” throughout the paragraphs, but I didn’t. This is what I wrote at the time so I’m letting it stay as is. I think I was going for a men and women as different creatures thing. I have found it helpful to point out basic differences so we don’t think everyone thinks like we do. The main subject is men and women in a relationship, but it could be enlarged to anyone who doesn’t think the same as you. If you only see this article as proof of what a stereotypical man I was, that’s at least something.)

If you have ever hung out with women for over two minutes, you know they are auditory creatures. They love to talk and it is their primary form of communication to others of their kind. They also choose to communicate with the opposites of their kind in this manner. Men are visual creatures. We remember things as visual images and communicate more with visuals than do our opposites. Men can watch a movie and tell you what happened scene by scene. Women can hear a conversation and tell you exactly what was said sentence by sentence. Picture a man and a woman watching a crime take place in the same room. The man will notice the visual information and the woman will remember any conversations that took place. Both sides are needed to get a complete movie (with visuals and audio) of the incident.

As a child, I was bullied often enough to worry every day about being bullied. Not that it has to be said, but my bully was usually a boy who was slightly older and bigger than I was. Girls didn’t have to deal with the boy bullies most of the time. If they saw a bully picking on someone, they thought it was just stupid boys messing with each other. When they dealt with bullying, it came in the form of being socially shunned. The social shunning was worse than the bullying as far as time. Bullying would usually last a few minutes, while a social shunning could go on for weeks. A very cruel trick to play on a social creature is to not speak with her. I don’t remember all the bullying in my life, but most women remember when they were shunned and who shunned them.

Men are thought to be aggressive monsters who only think of sex and meat (sometimes in the same visual moment). Women are thought to be timid creatures who only think of marriage and clothing sales (always in the same auditory moment). This is as bad a stereotype as all Irish people being drunks who like to fight. As soon as I finish my Baileys, I will stop yelling at my neighbor and start on my article disputing this stereotype. Not all women are the same and not all men are the same (unless it comes to thinking about sex). Some women act like men and some men act like women. I don’t follow any sports, but my wife loves baseball. She watches hours of TV, but I listen to hours of music and podcasts. As with any generalizations, they only work in general. For specifics, consult a specific woman or man near you. You’ll get a more detailed explanation from the woman and fewer details from the man. Of course, I don’t know these things for sure because I only heard most of this stuff from others. It just sounded like “blah, blah, blah” to me most of the time. Probably, a woman was talking about it, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching a dog sniff another dog’s butt.