I recently participated in a forum flame war about what men and women really want.
It brought up some interesting questions. I will attempt to answer those questions in this post. The original poster asked the question: What are the differences between what men want and what women want? I responded that I didn’t think men and women want anything really that different. I stated that both men and women want the same things. They want trust, loyalty, security, understanding, validation, affection, attention, and intimacy. It would be impossible to come up with a list of things men want that women DON’T want and vice versa. Every single thing you could say men want, women also want. Every single thing you could say women want, men also want. We're all human and we all have the same human needs and feelings. We wouldn't get into relationships with each other if we didn't want the same things. We may not all be the same or think the same way, but we can empathize with each other and realize that we're all on the same page here. We may not have the same perspectives, tendencies, and capabilities, but underneath it all, we are human. The original poster felt that I was devaluing the conversation, his question, and him by not addressing his premise that men and women really are different. He launched into a lengthy explanation about the problems of men who feel they are being exploited as nothing but wallets by women who only value them for their money. This is mirrored on the other side by women who feel they are being exploited as nothing but pieces of meat by men who only value them for their bodies. The original poster stated that the entire dating scene is arranged to use men as pay pigs. Men are expected to have nice cars, pay for dinners, and to have their own houses and apartments to host their female counterparts. Men pay to get into bars and clubs. They buy drinks for women they are interested in. Dating sites charge men and not women. This is a complicated subject, so let’s focus just on this argument because it’s so prevalent in today’s dating environment. There’s a wider flame war raging between men and women where neither side feels that the other is providing what each one truly needs. First of all, let’s get one thing clear right from the outset. There are literally millions or even billions of men in the world who actually want women to value them for their financial resources and material success. These men themselves are the ones who see their financial resources and material success as the benchmark of their value in the dating market and the wider world. These are the same men who are complaining the loudest about women valuing them for their financial resources and material success. The men who complain the loudest about women treating them as wallets are the same men who are treating themselves as wallets. As with men, so with women. Women cater the most strongly to today’s standards of beauty and attractiveness. Women are the ones who hold themselves and each other to this standard. These women pay thousands of dollars on their hair, makeup, clothing, plastic surgery, and dozens of other cosmetic enhancements. These are the same women who feel the most wronged when men objectify them, use them, and throw them away. Countless men have publicly stated that they don’t even like these standards. Men prefer natural women with natural health and beauty. The women persist in these practices for themselves and each other, not because it makes them more appealing to men. When a woman treats a man as a wallet or a walking ATM machine, she doesn’t respect him any more than a man respects a woman he can use and dump the next morning. Women want strength, maturity, boundaries, mental stability, and fortitude of spirit in men. Women will happily give their hearts to men who are penniless and hideously ugly if the men are strong in character, authoritative, and determined. Women who do seek wealth from men or form relationships based on financial resources do not give their hearts. They don't love these men and they don't respect them. The women come to hate these men, look down on them, and cheat on them. Women might say they want money and go after rich men, but if they get lucky enough to get these men, the women don't respect them or treat them well—so that isn't what they want at all. The same goes for men who say they want beauty and go after women based solely on their looks. Many prostitutes and adult dancers state that their customers are more interested in talking to someone about their problems than in the actual sex or seductive dancing. Men who choose based on looks aren’t choosing a woman for stability, compassion, or her nurturing personality. They’re looking for a sex object and they treat the woman as one. So we need to make a distinction between the superficial noises both sides are making with their mouths versus what they are actually looking for in the opposite sex. These are usually vastly different. The truest desires of both men and women are to feel connected, to feel loved, and to have long-lasting relationships that feed our souls. Men are just as interested in security and long-term family connection-building as women. Seeking something superficial and temporary is as likely to leave a man feeling hollow and used as it is to make the woman feel that way. The truth is that both men and women get treated the way they will tolerate. No one is making men put up with women who treat them as wallets the same way no one is making women put up with men who treat them as bodies. If someone is getting treated that way, it's because they lack the perspective, boundaries, and self-respect to demand that they be treated any better. These people are desperate for something they will never get, so they put up with bad behavior from the opposite sex. Men are participating in this status game and then complaining that the game exists. Women go to great lengths to make themselves sexually appealing and then complain when they get treated as sex objects. This only proves that neither men nor women want this arrangement at all. It would be so easy for men to ignore gold-digging women and for women to ignore men who are obviously only interested in sex. Those who don't ignore the warning signs are the ones who suffer. Hopefully, they will learn something and correct their dating standards to reflect what they really want. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn't have this problem. They value marriage, family, raising the next generation, and building a society that works instead of fixating on instant gratification. Putting up with this behavior is exactly the reason why this behavior exists. If people exercised some standards, the problem wouldn't exist at all. It would quickly die away when the people exercising this behavior no longer had any options. The people they are pursuing wouldn't be interested anymore. Let's say a billionaire man surrounds himself with women who are only after his money and only care about what kind of car he drives. He could just as easily completely ignore these women and no longer surround himself with them. He could instead look more carefully for a woman who is less interested in that and more interested in building a lasting, meaningful relationship with him. The gold-diggers in his life would disappear. They would seek another billionaire elsewhere. If all the billionaires did the same thing, these women would quickly realize that the billionaires weren't looking for them. The gold diggers would have no choice but to change their ways. These behaviors only exist because so many people are entertaining them and rewarding the behavior with results. The problem only exists for people who are living in the bubble where this behavior is the reality. There is a whole world of other people outside the bubble who don't buy into this and aren't interested in it at all. We all need to take a certain degree of personal accountability in our lives. Wanting different things doesn’t make someone a bad person. Blaming someone else for your problems is the height of cowardice and immaturity. Set standards for what you will tolerate from other people’s behavior. If someone violates these standards, you have no one to blame but yourself for letting the person get away with it. ------------- All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.
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Allow me to set the stage by telling you a story. A man and a woman were in a relationship. Both ran their own businesses. The woman was also a single mother. As time went on, she began to lose confidence in her ability to handle her own affairs. It started out when she asked her partner to help her respond to certain business emails she didn’t feel completely confident about handling correctly. She asked for her male partner’s input about whether she was wording these emails in the best way. Over time, this evolved to the point where the man was answering all her emails for her and conducting her business correspondence on her behalf. The cycle progressed until she lost confidence in dealing with her clients in person, too. She would go to work, and in the middle of the day, she would have to call up her male partner for help, either because she wasn’t sure how to handle certain situations or she just didn’t feel competent to manage her business on her own. She eventually progressed to the point where she couldn’t function in social situations. She would go to business meetings, lunches, and conferences. In the middle of trying to network and socialize with people, she would panic and freeze. Her male partner would have to go with her so that he could step in at the right time, make their excuses, and take her away. He would then spend hours calming her down, rebuilding her confidence in herself, and going through a lengthy and agonizing process of coaching her back to a state where she could face all her obligations and challenges. The situation continued to deteriorate until the woman became so depressed and even suicidal that she ended the relationship. She no longer felt like an asset to her male partner’s life and she no longer wanted to drag him down with her. Here we see the first example of the vicious circle of one bad habit leading to another. The following diagram illustrates this cycle in action. In this example, the woman became stressed at work, which happens to all of us. She failed to handle this stress on her own, which caused her to lose confidence in her ability to handle this stress. She began to doubt her own competence because, in fact, she wasn’t competent to deal with these situations on her own. The idea that she was no longer competent to handle her own affairs caused her to lose respect for herself, which further eroded her confidence in herself. Losing confidence in herself and questioning her own competence made her even more stressed about dealing with situations she once had no problem dealing with. This loss of confidence further undermined her ability to cope, which caused her to fail to meet further challenges, which further degraded her sense of competence, self-respect, and self-worth. This became a vicious cycle of ever-increasing descent into helplessness, self-loathing, and over-reliance on others to accomplish tasks she should have been able to accomplish herself. The only way to get out of this is to break the cycle. In this case, the male partner could have flatly refused to answer her emails for her. Instead of helping her avoid these tasks, he could have bolstered her confidence and encouraged her to push through her self-doubt to meet the challenges on her own. Meeting these challenges and overcoming her own fears is the only way to counteract the corrosive effect of always running away from them. Once we start doing this, the cycle leads us to ever-increasing levels of confidence, self-respect, and a certainty in our own competence. We see ourselves handling these situations. We feel more competent to handle these situations, which leads us to take bolder steps to meet future challenges and overcome them. This cycle plays out in dozens of areas of our lives. For our second example, let’s look at the cycle of overeating and weight gain. Here we see the same process at work. We gain weight from over-eating and inactivity. We see ourselves in the mirror as we would rather not see ourselves, which causes us to think badly about ourselves. We might over-eat to ease our feelings or we might just think, “I already look terrible. It doesn’t matter if I eat this.” This causes us to over-eat again. We know in our hearts that we’re letting ourselves down, which saps our self-confidence and self-respect. We see ourselves in the mirror as still being overweight and unable to improve, which causes us to feel hopeless and unable to change, so we continue to think it doesn’t matter if I just eat this one thing right now just for today. This is why people continue to gain weight year after year. This is why people fail to lose the weight and get healthy. They get trapped in this cycle of losing respect for themselves. They see themselves as already overweight and don’t feel competent to change it, so they fall back on the one thing that comforts them—eating more than they should. Here again, the only way to get out of this is to break the cycle and reverse it. Once we start eating healthy and exercising consistently, we start to see results. This boosts our confidence and gives us the motivation to keep going.
We stick to our nutrition plan and our exercise routine, so we see further results, which makes us feel better about ourselves. This gives us the willpower to resist the urge to cheat and slack off. We want to continue to see better results and we don’t want to lose the results we already have, so we don’t fall off the wagon in ways we might otherwise. This pattern repeats in every aspect of our lives. Every aspect of our lives is either cycling upward or it’s cycling downward. The only way to reverse the trend is to start cycling in the opposite direction. As long as we stay in the same cycle, we’ll continue to go in the same direction, either up or down. The choice is always ours and we can change it at any time. I’m not saying it’s easy. It isn’t. The only option is to bite the bullet and shatter the cycle. The alternative is staying trapped in the same pattern of self-destructive negativity for the rest of our lives—and none of us wants that. I hope this helped someone today. God bless you all. ______________________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. I’m a mother. I have three kids.
They aren’t as young as they used to be, but I remember how it was when they were babies and small toddlers. Raising babies and young children is hard work. It’s one of the most challenging, stressful things a person can do. These challenges can lead to mental health struggles for parents who aren’t prepared for the work, stress, and pressure involved. The biggest problem is that babies and young children are totally unpredictable. They wake up in the middle of the night, either because they’re hungry, need to go to the bathroom, because they’re scared or confused, or for no reason at all. They don’t know how to communicate, so they can’t tell their caregivers what the problem is. Most of the time, babies and young children don’t know what the problem is. Imagine you really, really needed to go to the bathroom, but you didn’t recognize that sensation. You would be uncomfortable. Then you would be in pain. Then you would become terrified because you didn’t know what was wrong with you. You might think you were dying and couldn’t do anything to stop it. Babies and young children go through this every time they have to go to the bathroom, every time they get hungry, when they are tired, and every time they have a slight cramp in their stomachs or they’re uncomfortable because their diaper is wet. Being an adult is so much easier. We recognize all these sensations. We can take steps to relieve them before they become uncomfortable. This is why raising children is so nerve-wracking. We have to constantly guess at what the problem is. Sometimes we can’t solve the problem at all and we just have to live with it and listen to the child cry. I went through this in the first year with my oldest daughter. She had colic. She would get excruciating stomach cramps at the same time every afternoon. She would cry nonstop for hours. It was absolute hell for me as I’m sure it was for her, too. I couldn’t do anything to ease her pain. We just had to get through it so we could do it all again the next day. This went on for over a year. Eventually, I got to the point where I went into it thinking I just wanted to be there for her. I held her, bounced her up and down, and walked her around so she would know she wasn’t going through it alone. That was all I could do. Even if we know what the problem is, it can be a nightmare trying to get the kid to take the steps to solve it. Babies can start crying because they’re tired. They keep crying and crying, which keeps them awake, so they get more tired and more distressed. The same goes for going to the bathroom. You can watch a little kid squirming and dancing around, crossing their legs, jumping up and down, and maybe even crying. You can tell the kid, “Go to the bathroom. You’ll feel better.” The kid will sooner have a temper tantrum than listen to you. The most important lesson I learned from raising kids is that, in order for both the children and the parents to stay sane, you must have routines. Kids thrive on routines. The more routine their lives are, the more secure they feel. They can relax in the security of knowing what’s happening and when it’s going to happen. For babies and young children, everything other than neutral is a disaster. The best we can hope for is to keep them at a neutral point as much of the time as possible. To do this, we need to keep them fed, comfortable, and as rested as possible. Routine is also critical for parents. Kids are already unpredictable enough as it is. As parents, we need to remove as much stress and uncertainty from our lives as possible. We need to know when we are going to make dinner. We need to know when we are going to put the child to bed so we can have some much-needed downtime every evening. I learned from raising kids that we don’t stop needing routines as we get older. Older children also thrive on routine. It gives them security and relieves them from making too many decisions. All of us can get decision fatigue. Making decisions is one of the hardest parts of being an adult. The more we can relieve ourselves of this responsibility, the easier it gets to navigate all the other unpredictabilities of life. Routines give us the security to risk and push ourselves the way we need to. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed out by life, try introducing more routines for yourself. Schedule every minute of your day so you know when, where, and how everything is going to happen. Plan out when you will wake up in the morning, when you will eat, when you’ll work, when you’ll exercise, and when you’ll do everything else. This is how you’ll be able to meet all your obligations in the time allotted to you. You will remove as much uncertainty, doubt, and insecurity from your life as possible. It will also allow you to accomplish the maximum amount in any given day and achieve the goals you set for yourself. I hope this helps. God bless everyone reading this. _____________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. Just the Facts, Ma’am
Writing is a form of communication between one human being and another. This should be obvious to anyone and it usually is when we are talking about non-fiction. I have a point I want to communicate to my reader. I make my point through my writing. You read my opinion. My opinion has been transferred from my brain into yours through the medium of writing. It isn’t so obvious when we talk about fiction, but it’s equally true. Fiction is a form of communication between the author and the reader. Anything that interferes with this is subverting the purpose of writing. The medium of fiction is story. The medium of fiction isn’t how wonderfully elaborate a writer came make their descriptions. The medium of fiction isn’t how big the writer’s vocabular is. The medium of fiction isn’t even whether you get all the grammar and punctuation right. The whole point of writing fiction is to immerse your reader in the story. Readers read fiction to get immersed in the story. Anything that interferes with that is counter to the whole purpose of writing fiction. If your goal in writing a piece of fiction is to influence the reader with your philosophical or political message, then this message needs to be embedded in the story in such a way that the reader doesn’t even see it. Take Charles Dickens, for example. He told intense, engaging, often funny, heart-wrenching, poignant stories with a powerful political message. Charles Dickens’ work was instrumental in getting the child labor laws of England changed. He brought public awareness to the problem, but he never clubbed his reader over the head with the need to change anything. He simply portrayed what was already happening in the country. Everyone in England at the time already knew the situation. Everyone knew children were working in factories, in street jobs, as chimney sweeps, and in practically every other walk of life. His stories didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know. His work showed the human side of the situation and made people realize just how awful these children’s lives were. If the author wants to convey a message and make the reader think, the message has to be woven into the story itself. If the writer comes right out and tells the reader what to think, the writer has failed. Bad art asks no questions. Mediocre art asks the questions and tells the audience the answers. Great art asks the questions and leaves them unanswered. All great art does this. It makes the audience think without ever blatantly giving us the answer the author thinks we should come up with. The author lets us come to that conclusion on our own. This is also hands down the most effective way to get people to change their opinion on something. Most people already have an opinion on everything. Telling them or demanding them to change it will only make them hostile. Showing them a different side of the same argument—the human side of the argument—is the best way to make them see the same problem from a different perspective. We’re all human. Certain truths apply to all of us. Leveraging these truths is the best way to get inside someone’s head and leave your message there for them to think about it in their own way. Anything that interferes with this communication process is the enemy of the fiction writer. Our job as writers is to eliminate everything that doesn’t directly relate to our story. This includes all our carefully constructed descriptions. Descriptions should be short, simple, and only convey the information the reader absolutely needs so they can understand the unfolding plot. We can look at this process from the macro level, the micro level, and the mid level. The micro level is the sentence and individual word level. A word, phase, or sentence that isn’t necessary to the plot has no place in any work of writing. Here’s an example from my latest book. This is the original sentence. It was the same sequence that always played out at the end of every bout. In the edited version, I changed it to: The same sequence always played out at the end of every bout. I removed the words, It was, and that. The second sentence communicates exactly the same information with fewer words, so these words aren’t necessary. Removing one, two, or three words isn’t a pedantic or inconsequential detail that is beneath our notice as writers. These words are actually throwing roadblocks in front of us and our readers. The unnecessary words create barriers between the writer and the reader that stops the reader from receiving the writer’s message. The reader doesn’t care about anything except receiving the information as quickly, as simply, and as effortlessly as possible. They might not register consciously that the author is using unnecessary words, but the reader will pick it up subconsciously. The reader will intuitively understand that the author is wasting the reader’s time. The writer is belaboring the point instead of just getting it out there as efficiently as possible. This can be as simple as changing, was working, to just worked. I have gone through this process dozens of times even just in the few minutes I spent writing this blog post. This a crucial and indispensable part of the writing process. I also take the flow, rhythm, and readability of the text into account when I make the decision to remove a word or multiple words. The mid level covers paragraphs, descriptions, and sections of chapters that don’t relate to the story or are just extra filler with no connection to the plot. Here’s an example. See if you can tell which book the following description came from: A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thick-set with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen. On both sides of the house was a big orchard, one of apple-trees and one of cherry-trees, also showered over with blossoms; and their grass was all sprinkled with dandelions. In the garden below were lilac-trees purple with flowers, and their dizzily sweet fragrance drifted up to the window on the morning wind. Below the garden a green field lush with clover sloped down to the hollow where the brook ran and where scores of white birches grew, upspringing airily out of an undergrowth suggestive of delightful possibilities in ferns and mosses and woodsy things generally. Beyond it was a hill, green and feathery with spruce and fir; there was a gap in it where the gray gable end of the little house she had seen from the other side of the lake was visible. Off to the left were the big barns and beyond them, away down over green, low-sloping fields, was a sparkling blue glimpse of sea. This description is totally irrelevant to the plot. The reader would never know from this excerpt which book the description came from because this excerpt contains zero plot information. This is three whole paragraphs—long paragraphs—that don’t belong in the book at all. They could have been cut entirely. The rest of the book—the essential part of the story—would have been exactly the same. Now let’s look at the macro level which is the most important level because it relates to elements of the story itself. Think of the macro level as the outline level where we hammer out the skeleton bones that are going to hold up our story and carry our reader to a satisfying conclusion. Unnecessary parts of the story at the macro level could include entire chapters. The most glaring example of this is the Harry Potter books. The author included unnecessary and irrelevant chapters at the beginning of almost every single book. These chapters could easily have been cut without changing the story. Take a look at the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. All of the information we received in this chapter could easily have been included in Hagrid’s conversation with Harry on the storm-tossed island when they first met. The book should have started on the morning of Dudley’s birthday. The hair-cutting incident where Harry’s hair magically grew back after a disastrous haircut could have happened that same morning. If I had written this book, I would have made this whole birthday scene, along with the trip to the zoo, happen the same day that Harry received his first Hogwart’s letter. The author made the same mistake in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, only this time, she included two chapters that didn’t belong in the book. The first chapter is a long, unnecessary scene of Cornelius Fudge’s meeting with the muggle Prime Minister. The second chapter details Severus Snape’s meeting with Bellatrix LeStrange and Narcissa Malfoy. All of the information we need from the first chapter about what’s going on in the magical world and the war against the Deatheaters could have been included in the third chapter when Dumbledore takes Harry from the Dursley’s. Dumbledore could have told Harry all of this information in a few sentences. We didn’t need an entire chapter with two completely unknown characters to tell us this information. The second chapter shouldn’t have been included at all. It completely spoils the book that we find out ahead of time that Draco Malfoy joined the Deatheaters and that he was on a mission for them to infiltrate Hogwart’s and carry out their agenda there. All the other information from the second chapter should have been revealed over the course of the whole book. That’s the mystery—putting these puzzle pieces together. It ruins the story to dump them on the reader at the beginning. These are plot points that should have been corrected in the outline phase. Other high-level details related to the story structure happen here. These are what makes the story successful or unsuccessful. This is one of the biggest problems we see in the fiction world. Writers are so full of themselves that they add any extra nonsense they feel like without regard to whether it relates to the story or not. Don’t be that person. Give the readers what they want—which is a good story and nothing else. _______________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. |