This seems to be a topic that a lot… A LOT of people have firmly rooted opinions about and are negatively impacted by. I hear my brother and friends make comments about “women are just [fill in the blank]“, and I was just sitting next to two women who were writing their “Men are all [fill in the blank]” manifesto at Intelligentsia. I’m writing this because I’ve been working through my own issues with this topic recently, and because I have a different perspective on this than most… and also because I completely disagree with this mentality.
I’ve been really confused by my interactions with women recently, and by “women” I mean what seems to be the overwhelmingly pervasive variety of females that California produces. As I said, I’ve never been the type to subscribe to the “well, men/women are just [insert label here]” school-of-thought regarding negative aspects of people’s personalities, but on the other hand, you’d be foolish to not recognize that there are definite differences in the two sexes and how they interpret some events, and what their instinctual and natural needs and preoccupations are.
Ok, that said, I’ve been perplexed because:
1) I’ve never been single this long and had my life be so devoid of women that I find attractive beyond their skin being arranged in neat ways.
2) I’ve never had so many women show so little interest in me.
3) It truly seems that in this area what most women are responding to is money, image, and men being disinterested or treating them shitty. (I make that last statement based on observations of people’s interactions, cultural maxims and recent experiences which I’ll elaborate on.)
One such experience was my recent trip to Portland (See? I’m elaborating). In LA / OC women don’t look twice at me, but when I was in Portland in June for my friend’s wedding they were like flies on… on something that flies like (sexy, soft, pretty, good-smelling flies with breasts mind you).
Wtf?!
So what this is leaning me towards is the relatively solid conclusion that I’m just living in an area that is soooooooooo completely preoccupied with everything that I am not and have no interest in being (a scenester, materialistic, attention-starved / a show off, going through life with my head in the sand), and because of this I’m not even a blip on most women’s radars here.
Another question that I’ve been mulling over recently is “why is it that women respond to men not paying any attention to them?” (and if any women out there reading this has some insight they’d like to share, please do). It seems like 90% of women (give or take) respond to being treated like crap by total douche-bag cavemen.
I hear my older brother talk about the women he meets in bars (and I am not at all insinuating that my brother is a douche-bag caveman, quite the opposite), and stories about him meeting younger guys in those bars who ask him for girl advice (about, not from), and his advice is what a lot of other people say, and that is to be “confident”, but when you pick their use of that word apart what they mean is “act like you don’t give a shit that they’re in the room and they’ll be all over you,” and based on results that’s totally accurate. But here’s the M. Night Shyamalan twist to that: these same guys are the ones who go around saying “Man, women are [insert lame label here]“. Since I know that all women aren’t like those labels, it leads me to believe that that method works really fucking well at attracting unconscious cavewomen, but not very well at all for attracting women who are more evolved, or evolving, or worth spending time with outside of the bedroom.
Are MOST women like that? In this area? Quite possibly… but not ALL. So there’s two parts to this as I see it:
1) This puts the power and responsibility right back smack in your lap (which is precisely how EVERYTHING in life works: as long as you blame external forces, or “god,” or your parents, or whatever, you rob yourself of your power in life, which is substantial) and implies firmly that if you want to attract different women, you need to change things in yourself that are attracting these people to you.
2) There’s also a matter of context / location to take into consideration (as with anything in life). I mean, in a way it’s like going to Paris to meet an Italian chick… yeah, there’s bound to be a couple sprinkled around, but you’d have a MUCH better chance finding one in fuckin’ Italy. That’s totally one of those “duh” situations where in that context the logic is self-evident, but in other contexts in life “obvious” observations like that aren’t so obvious.
I absolutely agree that being confident is a positive thing to aspire towards because what that word is really pointing at is people who are authentically themselves, and obviously the True Truth™ is much more appealing and sexy than a bullshit truth (with a tiny lowercase “t”). Life’s purpose is evolution and expansion (which is constant and infinite), and the purpose of being human is a movement towards self-actualization (which I’ll elaborate on in a bit).
So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the task of honestly looking at where we’re coming from and how it’s effecting what we’re attracting into our lives, and looking at the places we’re trying to find the things we want. Are we wearing ourselves out trying to squeeze blood from a rock, or are we looking for chickens where chickens are pretty likely to be found (like the meat department in Ralph’s). Maybe that’s a bad analogy because of the connotations of the word “chicken,” and because I’m likening a mate to meat… but I like it so I’m keepin’ it! :D
Here’s another important distinction to make: the labels people slap on the genders are only true regarding the default responses of low-level-of-consciousness members of those sexes. As people become more evolved and developed individuals, they not only shed catabolic behaviors naturally, they stop attracting the same ol’ type of people that were complicating their lives; quite the motivation for self-education and exploration.
I’ve picked up several magazines recently that are geared towards women (Oprah’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, etc.) which have articles about “What Every Man Loves / Hates” or “How to Make Your Man Happy” bullshit… and the other team’s take on the subject is an equally large pile of poop. I am not a “normal” guy thank god (and all the word “normal” means in a context like that is “being like everyone else.” Dying of cancer when you’re 50 or 60 is normal too, doesn’t mean it’s natural or healthy), and honestly, most of the traits that fall under the word “Man” when people use it are references to gross, lingering, Neanderthal-esque things (read as: “low-level-of-consciousness”). I’m going to give my next girlfriend those magazines and say “Here, do the exact opposite of everything they’re suggesting here and I’ll be totally stoked.”
I also feel that the women here (Southern California - particularly in Orange County and Hollywood) are doing the female equivalent of what males do in sizing up a woman’s worth based on her physical appearance (object-ifying), except with women it’s how much money the guy appears to have. I understand this in relation to what we’ve evolved from, just like I understand men reducing women to a pair of tits and an ass. Shelter and being provided for was very important back in the less-evolved days of our species, as was basing a mate’s worth on physical appearance (which was a good indication of a healthy mate with good genes for procreating), but we’re not living in caves anymore. It’s time to begin evolving consciously and deliberately.
And this leads to the same problem that is responsible for all the other problems in the world, and that is that there are too few people who have any interest in growing/evolving deliberately, and just go through life like a primeval pinball in a big scary pinball machine. Most people are running around trying to cram all of the holes in themselves full of whatever they can get their hands on only to realize it doesn’t fit or fix the problem, and contort themselves into all of these crazy positions to appease some apocryphal god (notice the lowercase “g”. And just as a side note, this contorting is regardless of whether they’re religious or not, because the collective beliefs of society stem from religion) despite the fact that we now have THOUSANDS OF YEARS of recorded history that points NOT AT ALL SUBTLY (which reminds me of my new favorite band “Subtle” that you should totally check out) to the FACT that what we’ve been doing IS NOT WORKING!!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
This reminds me of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
I’m not slamming anyone for any of this because there really isn’t any fault to be assigned. If anything there’s a lot of compassion to be felt for these people who are going through their life acting from responses to pain and trying desperately to reduce the degree and intensity of that pain.
Fear also plays a huge role in this, and fear is a curious and highly-insidious thing because it’s a self-devouring and self-perpetuating cycle. Fear causes us to feel the pain that we try to run from, but it’s also fear that prevents us from trying new mechanisms (in other words: fear-of-the-unknown), and it’s also fear that stands as the last barrier between ourselves and expanding the borders of who we are currently being. Evolution of self happens when we push past our fears into new territories. If anything, fear is quite often a damn good indicator of exactly the right direction for us to be heading in for self-actualization (obviously things like driving the wrong way on the freeway don’t fall into that category). Imagine how the evolution of our species would explode if we created a world where it was safe to experiment without the fear of death, destruction or eternal damnation.
A dear friend of mine told me about Maslow’s model of a human’s hierarchy of needs several years ago when I was living in Seattle, and it’s been very useful in understanding bits (donkeybits?!) of myself and others. The basic premise is that the elements that human potential is comprised of exist on interdependent levels that are dependent upon the level below it for the higher functions to be within the realm of possibility for a person. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, or whether you’re going to have a roof over your head next week, a great deal of your resources (energetically and mentally) are going to be focused in that direction, and higher, more luxurious pursuits (like spirituality or self-actualization, which are HUGELY important) are going to be basically unattainable to any significant degree. This also explains why so many people in our country can be described as “complete fucking retards” for allowing this administration to pull such heinous bullshit during the past 7+ years. They’re kept in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity, so they don’t have the luxury of thinking about what’s really going on, and are therefore willing to allow crimes to be committed against themselves and others in the name of relieving the fear and pain. Sadly it’s the very system that they’re supporting as a solution that is the creator and perpetuator of that fear and pain.
Here’s Maslow’s Pyramid:
And here’s the Wikipedia entry on Maslow’s Pyramid.
If you’ve at any point thought “he was talking about ‘A’ in the beginning and now he’s all the way over on some weird squiggly letter in some other alphabet” stick with me please. I get that very frequently when I talk about this stuff to people (which isn’t very often), and it’s because a lot of people don’t see that it’s all interrelated, and what that means is that when you address the root cause of one issue, all the other related issues topple with it. You can try like mad to affect the details or symptoms of a problem, or you can work at the source and the symptoms will be eliminated by default. This is precisely why Conventional Medicine is relatively worthless beyond fixing broken bones or cutting pieces of your body off/out… they’re focused on the symptoms and not the source. This is also true of the ways that we address problems as a society. Instead of looking at the root cause of the abject insanity in the world, we’re obsessed with the details and trying desperately to fix a myriad of problems instead of seeing that it’s really just one or two incredibly far-spreading problems. Existence is fractal, and everything is made up of the same basic parts arranged in an infinite number of compositions.
What was my point in all of this? My point is/was/will be that catabolic, destructive, painful behavior and experiences are the result of misconceptions, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, miseducation and deliberate misleadings. There are solutions to all of these problems, and the solutions are deceivingly simple (and “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy”).
