If I had a Feminine Side, I would play with it a whole lot more!

My fascination with mainstream women’s magazines has grown over the last five years. The initial attraction was most often the brightly advertised covers with something about sex which grabbed my short-term male imagination. “How to achieve an hour long orgasm” was one, and the other was “Teach him to love like Sting”. Look, I have to admit that he is one of my favourite artists I can add to my claim to fame that an ex-girlfriend who was an artist painted a picture of me walking into the fields and turning everything behind me to gold. But, and this is a very big but, I don’t want to have to endure five hours of foreplay to get to do what comes naturally!

The notion of what the modern woman wants still confuses me. I mean she wants a real man, a rugged adventurer, a gentle considerate lover (who needs to know when she wants more urgent loving), and she wants a man who is “in touch with his feminine side”!

I have to place this on record, I do not have a feminine side, and men (in general) find it mildly insulting to suggest we do! Before you tear your hair or this page out, let me elaborate. I am a man, I believe a solid man. Women say that they find it easy to have a relationship with a gay man because she feels safe with him in that he doesn’t want anything sexual from her. I have an earring, so I must be gay. I am at ease talking to women, so I must be gay. I wear pink at times and take care of my appearance, so I must definitely be gay. I am a psychologist and I am equally at ease and thoroughly comfortable in the complicated world of emotions as I am talking rugby with my mates, so I must be a little gay. Again for the record I am not gay, not even mildly gay, not even a tad gay, I am straight.

Men and women have at their disposal the full spectrum of human emotions, and women seem to have discovered far more of them than men. Let’s be honest, men have six basic emotions, happy, angry, horny, sleepy, watching sport and playing sport (horny deserves another mention as we link it to happy, and playing sport and after having sex we become sleepy). The lack of sex seems to make us angry, so I guess our primary emotions are angry and horny.

Women, on the other hand seem to far more easily understand the root causes of their anger, their happiness and they seem to have a completely different set of emotions that are considered mutual bed fellows with the emotion horny. Feeling loved, feeling safe, feeling recognised and feeling at peace seem to lead together as one towards the perhaps notion of the possibility of nookie. Just licking your lips gets us blokes going, and your cleavage does strange things to our blood flows.

When women are cooking, the best thing for us is snuggling behind them and cupping their breasts – something that seems to make women mad. You see, we are fulfilling the women magazine article headers, we are touching our feminine side, you are our woman and we are touching what we often consider to be your best side. Before you try to find my address in the phone book so that you can skin me alive, I say this tongue in cheek. I think.

You see, we are genetically wired differently, and if you want to get it from the horse’s mouth, just read “Why men don’t Iron” by Anne and Bill Moir. From before birth our neurological wiring is different, and after we as men and women struggle from a warm womb into this hostile cold world we are treated differently according to the visible presence of a penis or the lack thereof. At the birth of my son, the Argentinean Pediatrician raised my son up in the air and pronounced loudly “Ees champion, ee as weely!”

Getting back to the emotional “thing” as men prefer to call it, we are often totally lost in the sea of wave after wave of seemingly disparate emotion that women experience (and we are equally confused at how they string them together in their own logical way). This connectedness and illogical flow of emotions usually has us looking shell shocked and we naturally, as men are wired to do, try to find a logical solution to the problem presented to us. We have the answer, it is clear as day to us but we get frustrated when women say, “Why don’t you just listen!” We are not wired for listening, we are programmed to find a solution, to prove we are worthy. All this listening solves nothing in our minds, the answer is right there.

So we follow modern wisdom, we say little, nod and absorb a lot. After about half an hour of empathetic “uh-huhs” and well meaning looks we are allowed to speak and give the solution that we conjured up at the beginning of this roller coaster ride. Our disbelief turns to dismay and inevitably to sarcasm after our partners say, “Why didn’t you say that thirty minutes ago!”. So much for empathy. Let’s go back to the cave, me man, you woman, me hunt buck for dinner.

This feminine side that women say they desperately want to experience in men is something that women already have in enough abundance for both of us. Have you ever heard a man say to a woman, “I want you to think like a man, no I demand that you do, it will make you complete!”. The last thing we want is competition from you, we get enough of it from other men, all day, every day. What we need to do is celebrate your femininity and learn from your intuition. We rely on you to teach us the nuances of your expression, and we can only but learn and try to apply it in our own male way. Be honest, if you had a male partner who constantly asked you emotional stuff and behaved like a girlfriend, you would dump him for a more balanced man, albeit a confused man.

It’s late, it’s time to touch my feminine side, “Honey are you coming to bed?”