CHAPTER-10 (THOUGHTS, ATTITUDES, EMOTIONS AND OTHER DISASTER AREAS)

              THOUGHTS, ATTITUDES, EMOTIONS AND OTHER DISASTER AREAS 

Our Different Perceptions 

Men and women perceive the same world through different eyes. A man sees things and objects and their relationship to each other in a spatial way, as though he was putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. Women literally take in a bigger, wider picture and see the fine detail, but the individual pieces of the puzzles and their relationship to the next piece is more relevant than their spatial positioning. Male awareness is concerned with getting results, achieving goals, status and power, beating the competition and getting efficiently to the bottom line. Female awareness is focused on communication, co-operation, harmony, love, sharing and our relationship to one another. This contrast is so great that it's amazing men and women can even consider living together in the first place. 

Boys Like Things, Girls Like People 

Girls' brains are wired to respond to people and faces but boys' brains respond to objects and their shapes. Studies of babies from a few hours old to a few months all show this one clear point: boys like things, girls like people. Scientific, measurable differences between the sexes show how each perceives the same world through the bias of their differently wired brains. Baby girls are attracted to faces and maintain eye contact two to three times longer than boys, and baby boys are more inter- ested in watching the movement of a mobile with irregular shapes and patterns. At 12 weeks old, girls can distinguish pictures of family from strangers, while boys cannot, but boys are better at relocating a lost toy. These differences are obvious, long before social conditioning has had a chance to take effect. Pre-school children were tested with a pair of binocular eye-viewers that showed objects to one eye and people's faces to the other eye. The tests of the children's recall showed that girls remembered people and their emotions and boys recalled more about things and their shapes. At school, girls sit in circles, talking and each mirroring the group's body language. You cannot identify a leader. 

"Girls want relationships and co- operation, boys want power and status."

If a girl builds something, it is usually a long, low- profile building with the emphasis on the imaginary people who are in the building, whereas boys compete to build a bigger and higher structure than the next boy. Boys run, jump, wrestle and pretend they are aero- planes or tanks, while girls talk about which boys they like or how stupid some of the boys look. At pre- school, a new girl is welcomed by other girls and they all know each other's names. A new boy is usually treated indifferently by other boys and is only included in the group if the hierarchy feels he can serve a useful purpose. At the end of the day, most boys would not know the new boy's name or details, but they'd know how good or bad a player he was. Girls welcome and accept others and are even more sympathetic to someone who may have a handicap or disability, but boys are likely to ostracise or victimise the disadvan- taged person. Despite the best intentions of parents to raise boys and girls in the same way, brain differences finally decide preferences and behaviour. Give a four-year-old girl a teddy bear or toy and she'll make it her best friend; give it to a boy and he'll dismember it to see how it works, leave it in pieces and then move on to the next. Boys are interested in things and how they work, girls are interested in people and relationships. When adults reminisce about weddings, women talk about the ceremony and the people who attended, men talk about the 'stag night'. 

Boys Compete, Girls Co-operate 

Girls' groups are co-operative and you cannot visually identify a leader. Girls use talk to show their level of bonding and each girl usually has a best friend with whom to share secrets. Girls will ostracise a girl who exerts authority by saying, 'She thinks she's somebody' or they call her 'bossy'. Boys' groups have a hierarchy with leaders who can be identified by their superior or assertive talk and body language, and each boy hustles for status in the group. Power and status are all- important in a boy's group. This is usually achieved through a boy's skills or knowledge or by his ability to talk tough to others or fight off challengers. Girls are happy to build relationships with teachers and friends while boys question teachers and prefer to explore the spatial relationships of the world, and to do so alone. 

What We Talk About 

Listen to any group of men, women, boys or girls in any country and you'll hear how the brain circuitry of each sex causes them to talk about the same things differently. Girls talk about who likes who or who is angry with who. They play in small groups and share 'secrets' about others as a form of bonding. As teenagers, girls talk about boys, weight, clothes and their friends. As adults, women talk about diet, personal relationships, marriage, children, lovers, personalities, clothes, the actions of others, work relationships and anything to do with people and personal issues. Boys talk about things and activities - who did what, who is good at something and how things work. As teenagers, they talk about sports, mechanics and the function of things. As men they discuss sports, their work, news, what they did or where they went, technology, cars and mechanical gadgets. 

Talking Dirty 

Women have always assumed that men huddle in groups for sleazy sex chats, but that isn't true. If a man, in the company of other men, actually began to talk about what he had done in bed the night before, including operational details, his companions would become speechless or leave. This is not because he is ruining a woman's reputation, but because the speaker might produce statistics, including times and centime- tres, that the other men would have difficulty in meeting. This is why men prefer to joke about sex. While men have side-by-side friendships based on things and achievement, women have face-to-face friendships based on emotional sharing. That's why women's arguments can be so hurtful - they know more personal details about each other and have more ammunition to hurl. Women are never withholding when it comes to sex talk either. They freely discuss techniques, strategies, times and sizes. And they are graphic in their descriptions.