A lot of women went nuts over this mugshot - 

and he's an effing criminal for crying out loud.

I find these "studies" interesting - what a woman finds attractive looking at pictures has little (if anything) to do with what kind of man they would actually go out with (or more). Consistently, studies show that women who are ovulating prefer more traditionally masculine looking men (from Discover News, Aug. 18, 2010):

Starting in the 1990s, studies began to show that in the days before ovulation women start to become more attracted to men who have deeper voices and more chiseled, masculine and symmetrical faces. According to some studies, that may be because men who look like George Clooney are more likely to have dominant social roles, better genes and stronger immune systems.

Woman in relationships experience an even greater increase in their desire for highly masculine men during ovulation - and ovulating women in relationships are also more likely to cheat on their partners than non-ovulating women.

Unless this variable was controlled for in the study below (from Mother Nature Network), it is meaningless (even if it makes us less masculine looking guys feel better).

The masculinity myth: Here's what women really want

(Hint: It's not what Hollywood has been telling you.)

Mon, Nov 03, 2014
Jenn Savedge, Author of parenting books blogs about raising children and health issues.

In theory, masculinity signifies health and strength — but that's not the whole story. (Photo: Pressmaster/Shutterstock)

If old stereotypes are to believed, women like their men oozing with masculinity. But a new study flips that thinking on its head, revealing that what women really want in a man might be far from this tired depiction of masculinity.

Even though it had never been proven, the stereotype of women liking masculine men has been around for so long that it was considered true by default. Experts theorized that masculinity signified health and strength, thus it was more appealing to potential mates. But a recent study conducted by British researchers at Brunel University in London has revealed that the appeal of more masculine men only holds for women from Westernized, urban communities. Throughout the rest of the world, women prefer feminine-looking men to their more masculine counterparts.

For starters, the team attempted to define "masculinity" in terms of appearance. They compiled data using computer simulations to merge photos of men’s and women’s faces into composite, “average” faces of five different ethnic backgrounds. They edited the photos of the men to make some more "masculine," and others more "feminine." To do this, they calculated the differences between the male and female faces. To make a photo more masculine, they increased these differences. Conversely, to make an image more feminine, they minimized the differences.

Then they showed the images to both urban and rural residents of 12 countries and from different ethnic groups. Participants were shown three sets of photos from models of five different ethnic groups. They asked each of the 962 subjects which of the faces they found most attractive. In urban areas, they got the response they expected. Women consistently found the men with the most masculine traits to be most attractive. But the responses of the remaining women shocked the researchers, as they seemed to prefer men with more neutral or even feminine-looking faces.

Researchers theorized that maybe city-dwellers have developed the masculinity preference as a means to make a snap judgment about a man's health without any other background information.

Either way, the study flies in the face of the age-old notion that women prefer manly men, or that the roots of this so-called preference could be found throughout history.

More likely, the masculinity myth is just another urban legend.


The opinions expressed by MNN Bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of MNN.com. While we have reviewed their content to make sure it complies with our Terms and Conditions, MNN is not responsible for the accuracy of any of their information.

Why One Male College Student Abandoned Affirmative Consent (via The Atlantic)

Interesting . . . raises some interesting issues that men must deal with regularly, but that seldom get brought up in the discussions around consent.

Perhaps this is a discussion that people should have before things move to the bedroom, or wherever.

And, more importantly, we need to remove the double standard around female sexuality. Women like sex, too (duh!), and should not be shamed for liking it or initiating it.

Why One Male College Student Abandoned Affirmative Consent

A letter from a recent graduate who takes issue with California's new sexual-assault law

Conor Friedersdorf | Oct 20 2014

 

Beck Diefenbach/Reuters 

After I asked college students and recent grads to comment on California's affirmative-consent law, several different respondents shared a controversial perspective best captured in the email below. The male writer reports that he began college determined to ask women for explicit verbal consent during sexual encounters, but abandoned that approach over time.

Here is his explanation of why:

Dear Conor,

I am a recent graduate, and want to share with you a few of my experiences that I think are illustrative of why the new affirmative-consent laws are out of touch with the reality of the human experience. I hope they can be of some value to the debate.

I was raised by a left-leaning, feminist family who (at least I thought at the time) were relatively open about sex. But while I arrived at college with a healthy respect for women, I was totally unprepared for the complex realities of female sexuality.

“Oh,” sighed one platonic female friend after we had just watched Harrison Ford grab Alison Doody and kiss her is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Why don’t guys do that kind of thing anymore? Now days they are all too scared.”

On our second night together, one of my first partners threw up her hands in disgust. “How am I supposed to get turned on when you keep asking for permission for everything like a little boy?” She said. “Just take me and fuck me already.”

She didn’t stay with me for long

This would be a recurring theme. More than once I saw disappointment in the eyes of women when I didn’t fulfill the leadership role they wanted me to perform in the bedroom. I realized that women don’t just desire men, they desire men’s desire―and often they don’t want to have to ask for it. I also realized that I was in many ways ashamed of my own sexual desire as a man, and that this was not healthy.

At this point I was experiencing some cognitive dissonance with my upbringing, but in time learned to take an assertive lead unless I got a “no” or otherwise thought I was about to cross a boundary as indicated by body language.

One night I ended up back in a girl’s room after a first date (those do happen in college). She had invited me in and was clearly attracted to me. We were kissing on her bed, outer layers of clothing removed, but when my hands wandered downward she said, “No, wait.” I waited. She began kissing me again, passionately, so again I moved to remove her underwear. “Stop,” she said, “this is too fast.” I stopped.

“That’s fine,” I said. I kissed her again and left soon after, looking forward to seeing her again.

But my text messages received only cold, vaguely angry replies, and then silence. I was rather confused. Only many weeks later did I find out the truth from one of her close friends: “She really wanted you, but you didn’t make it happen. She was pretty upset that you didn’t really want her.”

“Why didn’t she just say so then, why did she say we were moving too fast?”

“Of course she said that, you dumbass. She didn’t want you to think she was a slut.”

Talk about confusing. Apparently in this case even no didn’t mean no. It wasn’t the last time I've come across “token resistance” that is intended to be overcome either. But that’s a line that I am still uncomfortable with testing, for obvious reasons.

But I have learned not to ask when it clearly isn’t necessary, or desired.

One of my fondest sexual experiences started with making eye contact across a room, moved to a dance floor, and then to an empty bathroom. Not a single word was ever spoken, because none had to be. We both knew and understood. I was a man and she was a woman, and we found ourselves drawn together in that beautiful way that men and women have been since a time immemorial, a time long before language was ever spoken.

Today in California this would be considered rape. I find that very sad. Women are not infantile. They can make their own decisions about sex, and that includes being able to say no―even if they don’t want to have to say yes.

Regards,
Anonymous

The experiences that this young man had will resonate with some readers. Others will find his descriptions unreliable or his conclusions wrongheaded. Agree or disagree with him, this much is clear: If his attitude persists among a significant number of college students, it will be a huge obstacle to spreading affirmative-consent culture.

How might different supporters of affirmative consent respond to this young man? They might say:

• Under an affirmative-consent standard, consent need not be verbal. Depending on the details, it's possible that your "saw her across the room" hookup was fine.
• Perhaps women supposedly put off by your attempts to seek consent were actually reacting to a lack of confidence or wimpy manner, not consent-seeking itself, which can be sought in a confident, assertive, charismatic manner.
• Some women may put off by explicit consent-seeking, but others are turned on by it. And even if some subset of women dislike explicit consent-seeking, that doesn't mean the standard should be abandoned, even if it does "cost" men some hookups, as if society should care about that when it adopts norms. This will reduce rape and sexual assault, a benefit that is much more significant than the trivial cost of a 22-year-old guy not having sex quite as often, or 22-year-old women who can no longer offer "token resistance" and get laid.
• The idea that women offer "token resistance" enables rapists and other sex criminals and should not affect consent-seeking. (The writer seems to agree in part when he notes that he is "still uncomfortable" testing "token resistance.")

I'd be curious to see a frank debate between this young man and critics of his position. (Would anyone be persuaded to refine their position or learn how to better persuade their critics?) But the sensitivity of the subject, the understandable aversion most people have to speaking on-the-record about their past sexual encounters, and the way both politically correct stigma and misogynistic threats are used to police discourse on this subject make it less likely that college men who feels this way will have open, rigorous on-campus exchanges with those whose perspective is different.

My hope is that emails from students and recent grads about any aspect of the affirmative-consent debate will air a broad spectrum of views and facilitate frank exchanges. If you have thoughts or insights informed by what you've seen or experienced, please share, anonymously or not, by emailing conor@theatlantic.com.

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

I tend to flinch when I see headline that proclaims anything about ALL people, or men, or women. There are very few absolutes, if there are any at all. But this seven things on this list are pretty accurate, and I would guess that most men want/need these qualities in a relationship - I know I do.

7 Things All Women Need In A Relationship

Jordan Gray - Relationship Coach
12/7/2013


Men and women are at an emotional stalemate.

We feel something’s lacking in our relationships. The majority of men aren’t able to penetrate their women fully, nor are women fully opening to their men.

Women aren’t opening because men aren’t giving them what they need. Women feel disappointed and resentful; they are suffering. When women suffer, and they feel like they aren’t being seen, they close off to their men.

Fortunately, you can learn the right tools to be able to more fully penetrate your woman. You can give your partner what she needs, allowing her to feel seen so that she will open again.

Take the time to read through these needs. Let them sink in. Understanding what you can do to help your partner fully open will not only improve your relationship, but it will improve your entire life.

Here are the seven things that all women want in a relationship.

1. To Feel Loved

When women feel loved, they relax and open to us. The arguments dissipate, the sex is abundant, and their nurturing feminine energy flows throughout our lives.

Not feeling loved is the subtext of every argument that you and your partner have.

If she is unhappy that you are going out with your friends, or she’s upset about her day at work, or she is only responding to you with brief snippets of sentences, then the cause is most likely her not feeling loved enough.

Learn to see through her words, actions, and moods and see what the real root of it is.

2. To Feel Safe

There is a war being waged on women’s self-esteem, sexuality, and safety from a very young age.

Because of the barrage of disempowering messages being sent to women regarding their sexuality, women need to have a safe space where they feel that they can trust their partners.

She wants to trust your strength. She wants to feel like you can handle whatever she shows you.

She wants to feel like you will not judge her if she asks for something risqué. She wants to know you won’t collapse in defeat if she tells you to do it “This way” instead.

By creating a safe space for your woman to open up to you emotionally and sexually, you will be giving her a very powerful gift- you allow her to grow within your relationship and undo old emotional damage.

3. To Feel Seen

Women want to feel seen.

She wants to feel you hearing her, and being aware of her emotional state.

She doesn’t necessarily want you to be affected by her emotional state, but she does want you to be witness to it.

If she is sitting across the room from you and you aren’t picking up on the fact that she is suffering emotionally and on the verge of tears, she will begin to trust you less. She will think, “If he can’t see that I am hurting now, how long will it take him to figure it out? Will I be suffering for days or weeks before he is aware of it or cares enough to help me through this? I guess I have to rely on myself for my own emotional support.”

Life can seem extremely lonely, even within a relationship. You have to constantly show your partner that at least one person will be witness to her and her journey through life. (Hint: that person is you.)

4. To Be Allowed To Be Nurturing

Just as masculine energy has the need to protect, feminine energy has the desire to nurture.

Women want to see the cracks in our armour. They want to see that we trust them enough to open up to them. They want to be able to help us through our sadness.

An integrated, evolved man who has a balanced masculine energy as well as his own sliver of feminine would welcome his woman’s nurturing.

If you are a guy reading this, have you ever held open a door for a woman because it’s the polite thing to do (but more just because she’s a person and it wasn’t even a gender-based act) and she chews your ear off for it? “Oh what? I can’t open the door for myself because I’m a woman?! You sexist pig!”

That is an example of a wounded, unbalanced woman who doesn’t want to accept help from a masculine source. This is exactly how it feels to your partner when you push her away when you feel the most vulnerable. “I don’t need to lay my head down on your chest and tell you about my feelings because I don’t have any!” That is a lie. It’s a lie that serves your purpose of not letting your partner in. This lack of vulnerability and authenticity is what is making you and your partner suffer.

So let her in. She wants to love you.

5. To Feel Sexually Desired

What’s a major difference between your relationship to your partner and your relationship to everyone else in your life? You have sex with your partner.

Women need to feel sexually desired. They want to make sure that you see and appreciate them as a feminine, sexual being.

Praise her body. Feel her and grab her appreciatively. Remind her that you see her as a sexual being and you will both benefit.

6. To Be Appreciated

The feminine in all people responds primarily to praise and appreciation.

Remind your partner that you love her. Tell her that you appreciate what she brings to your life. Show her how much she means to you.

The fastest way to run your relationship into the ground is by ignoring your partner and taking her for granted. Appreciation is the opposite of those things. Appreciation is the embodying this mindset: “I am aware of what you bring to my life, and I want you to be sure that I am aware of it as well.”

So tell her what you appreciate, and tell her often.

7. To Feel Like She Can Count On You

Life gets pretty messy sometimes.

When life’s unavoidable difficulties arise, do you fall apart under pressure or are you able to bend and not break?

Women want to know that we can handle ourselves when life happens. They want to know that we won’t run and hide when they get a bit ‘too emotional’ for our liking. They want to know that they can count on us.

When you tell your partner you’ll do something, and then you don’t do it, it hurts her. She loses a piece of trust in you that has to be earned back. Even seemingly small things break that trust like you saying that you will wash the dishes shortly after dinner, but washing them the next morning instead.

When enough small transgressions like this are sprinkled throughout your relationship, she will distrust you.

Do what you say you will do, be who you say you are, and be consistent in your actions.

What Do Women Want In A Relationship?

Women want partners that care.

Women don’t want perfect partners; they want men who are striving to be their best selves.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who has every step of his life pre-planned, but she wants someone with drive and with goals.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who cries every day, but she does want someone who has the courage to cry in front of her when he needs to.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who stays in therapy for his entire life, but she does want someone who has the courage to face his own emotional demons.

So put in the work. End the stalemate. Decide that you want to be in the kind of relationship that most people don’t have and you want to put in the effort necessary to become that kind of man.

The women of the world are waiting for us. And they want us to step up just as badly as we want them to open up.

Dedicated to your success,
Jordan

Ps. Want do women want in a relationship? Check out my best-selling book Keep Her Captivated: Lead Your Relationship To Its Maximum Potential to become the ultimate relationship partner (and the kind of man that women crave). Not much of a reader? You can check out my video course Fight Less, Love More instead.

This interesting article from Salon looks at women are now objectifying men in the ways they have often complained that men objectify them. This is especially true with a man's penis (aka, his junk).

The author notes the polar extremes of how women talk about a man’s dick — in praise of his virility and masculinity, and as a form of total and complete emasculation. Nice. Just sharing the love, now, aren't we?!

 

This [above] is the Jared Leto crotch-grab referenced in the subtitle.

The real story of how women evaluate men’s junk

From "Bachelor in Paradise" to Jared Leto's crotch-grab, reminders this week that women objectify men's bodies too

Tracy Clark-Flory
Wednesday, September 10, 2014

(Credit: Camrocker via iStock)

“He has an uh-mazing dick.” Those were the words of Michelle Money — yes, that is her real name — on this week’s season finale of “Bachelor in Paradise.” She was referring to the appendage of Cody, her now-boyfriend, with whom she had just had an overnight date. Even before she saw the aforementioned member, she told the camera in a pre-date interview that she was excited to see what she would find that evening. “Like, sometimes I get the impression that guys with that big a body have a small dick,” she said, her mouth blurred on the final word, on top of an obscuring bleep. “But I could be totally wrong. Maybe his dick is very muscular, like the rest of his body. Like the hulk.”

I must admit, when she said this, I pumped my fists in the air. That’s not because I enjoy seeing men, or women, reduced to their genitals — quite the contrary! I don’t like it when sexual aptitude is conflated with penis size, either. I’m very pro-“motion of the ocean” thinking, for the record, and to any straight man concerned that his penis is not large enough, allow me to direct you to a diagram of the vagina and, importantly, the G-spot. But it was refreshing to see sex talked about so blatantly on a TV franchise that historically has only allowed allusions and metaphors — and a whole lot of slut-shaming. But beyond all that, here was a woman talking about a penis in public like I’ve only heard women talk in private.

That wasn’t the only time that happened in the show’s finale. Following an overnight date during which her beau Robert wore his jeans to bed, contestant Sarah told the camera, “I don’t even know if he has a penis.” In that two-hour-long season finale, we saw the polar extremes of how women talk about a man’s dick — in praise of his virility and masculinity, and as a form of total and complete emasculation. It also happens that this week Jared Leto inspired a bunch of penis-fawning by grabbing his junk during a performance, which Lauren Yapalater broke down on BuzzFeed via several stills and commentary such as, “WHOSITSWHATITSBALLOOGAAAHELGSKHGLSNDGMSD?????!!!” Just to fully convey her enthusiasm, know that I had to cut off the latter part of the exclamation points, along with special characters, to fit the quote on this page.

We’re used to hearing the kind of despicable “guy talk” that evaluates women according to their bra size or even … interior dimensions — but not so much women. So all these ladies talking about peen made me proud, it made me ashamed — and then I decided to talk to some of my lady friends about how we talk about penises.

My friend “Susan” says she started her sex life fooling around with guys who all had what she described as “very standard-issue schlongs.” Then in college, she started sleeping with men of all different sizes and shapes. ”It was neat, actually — a lesson in the depth of human variety,” she said. “I started to realize that the way people talked about penises — bigger is better, basically — was a symptom of shallow and unimaginative sex.” She did sleep with one man with an especially large penis and says, ”He practically broke my cervix. Oh god, it hurt. There is nothing good about a cervix-banger.”

Small penises are not an issue for her, she says. “I think that becomes more of a problem in a very standard, missionary-style sexual relationship. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I do think that good sex is less about genitalia and more about the way you feel when you’re together — your ability to let go, to surrender, to connect. The soul stuff.”

As for the recent reality-TV dick talk, Susan says, ”I find it funny how women have adopted the objectifying language that is so crude in men. The idea that a woman is ‘a good piece of ass’ or ‘a nice rack’ is pretty diminishing, but somehow, when I turn on reality TV, it seems to be crammed with women who want to ogle a guy’s six pack and talk about his junk.” And now I feel ashamed for cheering them on.

Another friend, the phenomenal sex writer Anna Pulley, is bisexual and in a committed relationship with a woman. “My straight friends always tell me about the penises of the guys they date,” she said, noting that I am the exception (leave it to someone who writes publicly about her sex life to be demure in real life). “‘He had a nice dick,’ has been used more than once as the sole reason to keep sleeping with someone, regardless of personality. Other friends have held up pinkies to illustrate their displeasure with a dude’s size.” Ah, the ol’ pinkie move!

What about men who are not well endowed but have the right moves, though? “I’ve literally never heard ‘he was small but knew how to use it,’” she said. “I think women are a lot more size-ist than they want to be.” Real talk from this one! Although now is a good time to mention that another friend of mine did enthuse to me about her boyfriend, ”It’s small but he knows how to work it!” Pulley added: “I personally enjoy smaller wangs because I am hella tight.” All around, good news for all sizes.

My friend “Georgia” tells me, “When I’m describing a man’s penis to my friends, I often find girth more impressive than length. Curve is often the thing that makes the penis unique. Does it curve up? To the right a little? All of these thing contribute to the experience and are important notes to be shared.” Usually she employs the measuring stick of “thick, thin or average.” A couple of women weighed in on my inquiry via Twitter: One said she once described a penis as “serviceable,” while another told friends of a particularly “huge” member, “I almost died when I first saw it.”

On the harsher side of things, my friend “Mary” tells me that she had a friend who broke up with her boyfriend and then began referring to him as “needle dick.” “We laugh every time,” she says. “She was, like, at one time describing it to me and she said she remembered thinking, ‘Is it in?’” On Facebook, responding to my call for women’s firsthand accounts of how they have talked about penises, a woman wrote, “Stubby. Sorry, Rob, but I was waiting for you to penetrate me and, um, you already had. Then you said your oral capabilities made up for it. They didn’t.”

I suppose it’s fair to conclude that the reality of how women talk about penises is both men’s best fantasy and worst nightmare.

~ Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook.

Denise Cummins - Are Males and Females Equally Emotional?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that men express emotions (like empathy) differently than do women. Here is the even longer answer:

[I]n another study, male and female teens gave self-reports and had several physiological measures taken while they viewed animated clips depicting people being hurt. Female participants scored higher than males on self-reported empathy, and this sex difference increased with age. But no sex differences  were detected in blood pressure, heart rate, or pupil dilation—all measures of emotional responsiveness. These results suggest that males and females feel the same thing, but report what they feel differently.

These results, and many others like them, lend credibility to the social construction model that suggests many of the differences between males and females are socialized into each gender but are not inherent in either sex.

Are Males and Females Equally Emotional?

The sexes experience emotions the same but process them differently

Published on June 23, 2014 by Denise Cummins, Ph.D. in Good Thinking

In a previous blog, I discussed why some people seem to lack empathy. The short answer is that empathy (feeling distress when viewing another's pain) can be exhausting and lead to burnout, so some people cope by distancing themselves from those who are suffering. I also reported the intriguing results of a study that showed compassion can be trained as a highly effective coping strategy to overcome empathic distress and strengthen resilience. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the suffering of others (as happens in empathy), compassion allows one to feel concern for another's suffering. This frees us to effectively offer help and to derive peace and satisfaction from acting to reduce the suffering of others.

In that study, however, all participants were female. That might lead the inquiring reader to wonder why the researchers chose to exclude men and whether the results apply to men as well.

Do Men and Women Feel Empathy Equally?

While this seems like a straightforward question, the answer is not. Countless studies have been conducted to address this question, with conflicting results. For example, one study followed the social development of over 500 teenaged boys and girls for six years. The measures they looked at included empathic concern and the ability to see emotional situations from another person's perspective. Girls outpaced boys on both measures.

We might conclude from this that females are indeed more empathetic than boys. But the difficulty is that this study (like most studies on empathy) relied on self-report: Participants simply reported how distressed they felt or how easy or hard it was see things from the other person's perspective. When physiological measures are taken, however, these sex differences tend to disappear. For example, in another study, male and female teens gave self-reports and had several physiological measures taken while they viewed animated clips depicting people being hurt. Female participants scored higher than males on self-reported empathy, and this sex difference increased with age. But no sex differences were detected in blood pressure, heart rate, or pupil dilation—all measures of emotional responsiveness. These results suggest that males and females feel the same thing, but report what they feel differently.

There is more scientific agreement, however, with respect to sex differences in how emotions are processed. A number of studies have reported that males and females recruit different neurocircuitry when processing and "down-regulating" (blunting) emotions.

A recent study led by Dr. Yoshiya Moriguchi of the National Institute of Mental Health shows this quite clearly.

Adult men (n = 17) and women (n = 17) viewed images that typically arouse strong positive or negative emotional reactions. While viewing the images, they rated their moment-to-moment feelings of subjective arousal and underwent fMRI brain scans.

The results showed quite clearly that men and women did not differ overall in their intensity of moment-to-moment emotional reactions to the images. But the neural circuitry recruited during emotion processing differed between the sexes. Women showed neural activity in the anterior insula cortex, which processes bodily sensations. This means that they deeply experienced emotions within their bodies. Men, on the other hand, showed neural responses in the visual cortex. While processing these images, male brains immediately activated circuitry involved in regulating shifts of attention to the world (i.e., the dorsal anterior insula cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex). This allowed them to shift the emotional impact of the images away from themselves.

Is this automatic shifting of emotional impact away from oneself adaptive? Well, it depends. On the one hand, women risk emotional overwhelm and burnout if they repeatedly experience distress within themselves at the sight of others in distress. So distancing oneself from others' pain may be adaptive to mental and emotional well-being. On the other hand, such distancing also allows one to ignore the pain of others or to freely inflict such pain with little distress to oneself. Such distancing may be adaptive for combat, torture, or cruelty, but can prove problematic for developing prosocial competences.

In either case, this research suggests that compassion training is warranted for both sexes. Such training allows both sexes to learn to disengage in a manner that fosters benevolent action rather than succumbing to overwhelm or resorting to uncaring dissociation.

Copyright Dr. Denise Cummins June 24, 2014

Dr. Cummins is a research psychologist, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and the author of Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think.

• More information about me can be found on my homepage.
• Follow me on Twitter.
• And on Google+.

If Men Were Honest When Hitting On Women

Via BuzzFeed Yellow.

If Men Were Honest When Hitting On Women

Written and Directed by Keith Habersberger and Chris Reinacher

Starring:
Chris Reinacher
Keith Habersberger
Justin Tan
Jamar Neighbors - Twitter: @JamarNeighbors
Brian Wohl - @brianwohl
Nick Cardiff
Jon Eidson: www.youtube.com/ExtremelyDecent

--------------------------

MUSIC
Love to the Beat Instrumental
Warner Chappell Production Music

 

Funny....

If Guy Best Friends Acted Like Girl Best Friends

​Mind-Blowing Facts Men Don't Know About Women Is Blowing My Mind (from Jezebel)

It's interesting to me what men and women do not know about each other's private bits - and how many things get passed on as truth that have little or no basis in reality. Perhaps high school sex ed should have a little more show-and-tell.

This amusing article is by Tracy Moore at Jezebel.

​Mind-Blowing Facts Men Don't Know About Women Is Blowing My Mind

Tracy Moore

Friday, 8.22.14

While it's safe to say we should all have a working knowledge of how the human body works, it's also quite obvious that definitions of what constitutes common knowledge vary widely, and nowhere is this often truer than when it comes to what we know about the opposite sex, and vice versa.

In a list over a Frisky, author Rebecca Vipond Brink recounts a list of "mind-blowing" facts that men allegedly don't understand or misunderstand about women. Some of them are highly dubious to me, unless we are talking about teenage boys who have about as much knowledge of women as they do mixing a proper cocktail. Here are a few examples from her list: 

We have hair all over our bodies.

Brink writes:

Yeah, even on our faces! Crazy, right? I like to think that there's a difference between the hair that grows on a woman's face/all over her body and a mustache and beard, but several guys have made it clear to me that they don't believe that to be true.

For anyone still unclear: Yes, women can grow hair all over their bodies, including their faces. Perhaps because we've been removing it for hundreds of years, it has erroneously created the impression that we are naturally hairless, but we are not. Moving on.

Crotches that smell like perfume only exist in fiction.

Brink wants you to know that vaginas smell like a lot of different stuff: fish, "rank biscuits" if you have a yeast infection. And:

On a good day they smell like … I don't know, salty, ripe fruit? It's never exactly a great smell that you'd want wafting off of your body so that people 20 feet away can smell it (or maybe you do because that's your thing! Respect). Balls stink too, know that.

Dude, don't I know it, re: balls. And while it's also hard to accept that any grown hetero man doesn't know vaginas can smell a lot of ways, or that they smell at all, and that the smell is not naturally one of bouquet-of-flowers-on-rain-swept-misty-morn, let's accept it and go so far as to expound a bit: Vaginas do smell, and they are supposed to, and that's not bad! From a great post on BlogHer by gynecologist Lissa Rankin talkin' 'bout a woman's own special "V-pourri," we learn:

So how is the vagina supposed to smell? It depends. When you're straight out of the shower, your coochie may have no smell at all. When you've just finished running a marathon, it may have a strong musky odor from all the sweat glands. When you're menstruating or giving birth, the flinty-iron smell of blood prevails. When yeast overgrows in the vagina, you may smell like freshly baked-bread or a good malt beer. Right after you've had intercourse, you may smell faintly bleach-like, as semen has a classic odor of its own. And when certain normal bacteria overgrow, they release amines that smell — yup, you guessed it — like fish.

Every vagina has its own special smell — a combination of the normal bacteria that live in your vagina, what you eat, how you dress, your level of hygiene, your bowel habits, how much you sweat, and what your glands secrete. Remember that the glands near the vagina also secrete pheromones, meant to attract a sexual partner. So you don't want to deodorize your va-jay-jay so much that it smells like rain. Doing so thwarts the primal function of what your smell is supposed to accomplish. Plus, it interferes with the vagina's natural pH balance and can lead to a whole host of gynecological conditions.

So own your odor, girlfriends.

What's really fishy, though, is this next item from The Frisky post:

Tampons are not sexually satisfying (to most of us, anyway).

Ok, really? Someone had to be told this? I guess there's always someone who doesn't know about something we consider to be common knowledge — see any episode of Jay Leno's Tonight Show segment Jaywalk for endless examples, or any of those reddit posts on stuff doctors had to explain to patients about how anatomy works. But tampons? Sexual? And to be fair, I mean, sure, if don't have a vagina and therefore haven't put a tamp in it, and you also only think of a woman's vagina as a dick-holder, than I guess you would think anything vaguely dick-shaped going in said vagina would be a turn-on. Only it's not. Duh, there's perfunctory aspects of the vagina for the release of menstrual blood and offspring, so assuming all activity near the vagina is only sex-like would be like women assuming every time a man takes a piss, he gets turned on (I realize a man can have a boner while needing to pee). 

You are capable of having cellulite, too.

A'ight, I have to admit I'd literally never thought about men having cellulite, and reading this made me realize that I'd never seen it on a man, either. Brink's post says It's just easier to cover up because it tends to be on your stomach, not your legs.

I Googled a bit further and found a post from Len Kravitz, PhD, explaining that men can get cellulite, but that "90 – 98% of cases occur in women."

The reason cellulite is rarely seen in men (obese and non-obese) is because the epidermis, dermis and uppermost part of the subcutaneous tissue is different in males. Men have thicker epidermis and dermis tissue layers in the thighs and buttocks. More distinctively dissimilar, the first layer of fat, which is slightly thinner in men, is assembled into polygonal units separated by crisscrossing connective tissue (See below).

The differences in subcutaneous fat cell structure in men and women occur during the third trimester of fetus development and are manifested at birth. Variations in hormones between genders largely explain this skin structure deviation. It has been shown that men who are born deficient in male hormones will often have a subcutaneous fat appearance similar to females.

Vaginas don't get "stretched out" from sex.

We've discussed this hotdog-in-a-hallway myth before. In a nutshell: You can't fuck yourself loose, but over time, elasticity changes from aging, not fuckin', got it?

Also I would like to add this one:

Men and women both have smegma.

Jezebel scribe Mark Shrayber didn't know until recently that smegma was not just a dude's dick thing, but a male and female genitals thing. (YOU'RE WELCOME, MARK).

To turn the tables for equality, I'm sure there's dumb stuff I have thought about how dude's parts work, like I don't know really anything about balls, so I'm always wondering if guys dip their balls into various substances, and which one is best? Like, room-temp queso, maybe? And if you don't do that, why in the fuck not?

P.S. My friend wants to know if dudes getting kicked in the balls feels just like really really bad period cramps or what. 

Also boners? Like, WTF does a boner actually feel like? Discuss.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

Omnivore - Of the Two Sexes

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, here is a collection of links on men and women and the issues that drive gender theory.

Of the Two Sexes

Aug 8 2014
3:00PM

• Janet Radcliffe-Richards (Oxford): Only X%: The Problem of Sex Equality. 
• Robert Deaner (GVSU), Rickey Carter and Michael Joyner (Mayo), and Sandra Hunter (Marquette): Men Are More Likely than Women to Slow in the Marathon. 
• Millions of years of fist fights have altered the human face to leave men's jaws more robust than women's, a study has found. 
• Joni M. Lakin (Auburn) and James L. Gambrell (ACT): Sex Differences in Fluid Reasoning: Manifest and Latent Estimates from the Cognitive Abilities Test. 
• The Mars and Venus question: A variation in the cognitive abilities of the two sexes may be more about social development than gender stereotypes.
• In the brain of the father: Why men can be just as good primary parents as women. 
• No, men aren’t “having it all” either: A CEO steps back, and shows that the work-life challenge is for guys too. 
• Why are there no female Sheldon Adelsons? Rebecca Traister on the real reasons for the absence of free-spending women political donors. 
• Kat Stoeffel on why it shouldn’t take having a daughter for men to care about feminism. 
• A new study helps explain why some people get enraged when women have sex. 
• A new study helps explain why Hobby Lobby supporters are so fiercely opposed to birth control: The idea that ensuring access to affordable birth control is harmful to society because it leads to promiscuity and infidelity. 
• Tara Culp-Ressler on the GOP’s plot to convince you they support birth control. 
• Phyllis Schlafly explains why feminism has made women unhappy. 
• The women of the men's rights movement: Alex Brook Lynn goes inside the online world of honey badgers, trolls, and feminist threats. 
• Punching Gloria Steinem: Jessica Valenti goes inside the bizarre world of anti-feminist women. 
• Hey, “women against feminism”: Feminism still has your back so you’re welcome. 
• Christina Sterbenz on the 24 words that are most known to only men or women.

A Couple's Therapist on the Reality of What Men Think About Sex

From Samantha Rodman PhD, Dr. Psych Mom, writing at Huffington Post, this is an informative and entertaining article on what a couple's therapist has learned about male ideas about sex through talking to people in relationships.

In discussing the impact of porn on relationships, she mentions the film Don Jon, a movie recommended to me by a friend. At first it was just annoying its faux masculinity and objectification of women. But that is the point - the main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who wrote and directed the film) prefers porn to women, even when he hooks up with a "ten" (Scarlett Johansson). It's not a great film, but I think it presents a reality that many men are unwilling to speak about openly, so I recommend it.

What Men Think About Sex vs. Reality

By Samantha Rodman PhD, Dr. Psych Mom
Posted: 08/09/2014

As a couples therapist, I see quite a great deal of miscommunication about sex between partners. And this is in the rare scenario where there is any communication at all. Generally, each partner thinks that the way they think about sex is obvious to the other, and nothing could be further from the truth. Here I come, like a psychology-wielding superhero, to vanquish common misunderstandings about sex for once and for all. Really. Also, I create world peace. But seriously, this post may at least function as something to email to your husband to show him how normal you are, and/or to start an honest and open discussion about your sex life.

Here are the most common incorrect assumptions that men make about sex, with my rebuttals after each.

1. Frequent and strong sexual desire and thoughts should be natural and normal for all people in long-term relationships.

Frequent and strong sexual desire and sexual thoughts are natural for normal for SOME PEOPLE in long-term relationships. These people are usually either men, or they are women who feel close, relaxed and attractive, or who are in a new and exciting relationship. Note the lack of qualifiers after the subset "men." Note all the qualifiers after the subset "women." I am not saying women don't want to have sex. However, all the recent research shows that sex drive in women tanks in monogamous relationships (see What Do Women Want?), unlike what was previously thought, which was that men grow tired of women after a while but women never get sexually bored by their partners. So basically, it is entirely normal and natural for your wife NOT to want to have sex with you, unfortunately.

The facts of the matter are that if your wife is experiencing decreased sexual desire, it is entirely normal. She is likely hitting the trifecta of libido-killers for women: long-term monogamy, exhaustion and body image issues (the latter two particularly apply after having kids).

Furthermore, any resentful feelings she has about you or the relationship in general, or anything that makes her feel insecure, will also kill her sex drive. If any or many of these issues apply, she will have to apply some real effort to get into a sexual mood, and this is completely normal. See Mating in Captivity for a more in-depth discussion of why your wife is normal in not wanting to have sex more. (Sorry, buddy.)

2. Most married couples are having sex at least three times a week, if not more.

Check out this chart. Almost half of married couples with husbands aged 25-49 fall into the "a few times a month to once a week" category. And only 5.8% of married men in their 30's are having sex four or more times per week. And who knows about these guys, anyway, because this chart doesn't distinguish between how long couples have been married for, whether they have kids, whether their wives are pregnant or nursing or whether one or both suffers from depression, anxiety or any other condition that would dampen sexual desire. From my clinical experience and Moms Night Out confidences, married fathers of small children are having sex a bit less than once a week on average. Pretty much, they aim for one to two times a week and then life and small kids get in the way of that aspiration. (Co-sleep much?)

3. Women go into sex expecting and wanting the focus to be on their pleasure.

Au contraire, women generally do not want the primary focus of the sexual encounter to be on their pleasure. Instead, I hear female clients share frequent fantasies of being with men who are overpowered by lust and desire. If a woman feels like her partner has the sole goal of giving her an orgasm, it is quite a lot of pressure and can make her feel self-conscious and awkward. This does not mean that women do not want to enjoy sex; but, they have to feel that their partner is enjoying it at least primarily because he finds her so attractive sexually that he feels urgent desire for her. Women do not respond well to a man who is trying to use various "techniques" in order to be a better lover. This makes us feel like a sudoku puzzle you are trying to solve.

4. Men who focus on a woman's pleasure (read: enjoy giving oral sex) are few and far between, but I myself happen to be one of these rare ones (note how every male client I have met thinks this).

Dispelling this myth can be my great contribution to humanity. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a man say that "unlike most guys," he "really likes" to go down on women, I would have enough nickels to build a life size statue of a man going down on a woman. And then I would auction it off on eBay, because I have children, for God's sake. Anyway, men, listen up, I would wager from clinical experience that about 80% of you say that you really like to do this. You are not the minority.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, very, very few women in long-term monogamous relationships want frequent oral sex. Really. Even the hot girls you dated in college that were all about it. Do you know why they were all about it? A few reasons: a) they were young and hormonal. Women and men are fairly similar in terms of their sexual peak; it's a myth that men peak at 18 and women at 40. Doesn't this make evolutionary sense? (This myth got propagated probably because women are too shy when young to speak up about what they want in bed, but older women are more confident so may seem more sexual.) Then, b) you were new and exciting. As I said before, women's libido decreases greatly with monogamy. Even a few years of college dating is nothing like the monogamy that comes with living with you and your underwear on the floor.

Many women find oral sex to be overwhelming (too much physical sensation in one place), it may make them feel distant from you (physically and emotionally) and not to mention, you try it at the wrong time. Many women are likelier to want oral sex when they are already aroused; trying it too early in the encounter may physically hurt and make women feel self-conscious. When their inhibitions are lowered is a better time to try, but even then, many women do not enjoy it.

5. I must last as long as I can and be in full control of myself at all times.

In my clinical experience, women do not want a man to last forever. This is consistent with what I said before, that women like when men urgently desire them. If you last forever, how urgent is your desire? Not very. Of course, if premature ejaculation (within a minute or less) is an issue, this can be helped with sex therapy or techniques you can practice yourself.

6. Also, I should engage in a lot of foreplay, all the time, because women want this.

Some do, and others prefer to just start having sex pretty soon into the encounter. For many women, having sex is what gets them into the mood to have more sex. Additionally, if your wife thinks you'll be disrupted in the middle of sex (e.g. by young kids waking up, etc), often a long elaborate sexual episode can make her anxious. Moral of the story: Don't assume your wife wants a long, drawn out sexual experience every time. Ask her, or see how she responds to something more, say, to the point.

7. Women orgasm from intercourse alone pretty frequently.

About 75% of women don't orgasm from intercourse alone. If you didn't know this already, this statistic will change your worldview. So your wife is not weird or not in touch with her sexual side. She's just your run-of-the-mill non-intercourse-orgasming woman. Phew.

8. The women I dated in high school/college/my 20's who I had lots of crazy sex with are still doing that with the men they married.

I call BS on that one, friend. I just told you about the whole monogamy and age and babies leads to decreased libido in the majority of females. If you had married that hot young thing, she would be a less hot, less young thing who wants to sit around and watch TV at night too. You know it's true if you think about it rationally.

9. My wife makes up excuses not to have sex, and other women just go with the flow and are happy to feel desired.

See above.

10. After the baby, most women get their sex drive back reasonably quickly.

If by reasonably quickly, you mean, after the last baby is 5 years old and sleeps through the night. And also if by that point they've gotten back to working out, eating right, sleeping well and feeling good about who they are as a person and not just as a mommy. In that case, yes, pretty quickly.

11. Watching porn does nothing to hurt our sex life or relationship.

I beg to differ. Yes, it's normal to masturbate and so on and so forth, BUT people have only a limited amount of energy -- mental, physical and sexual. If you're giving the best of yourself to an Internet person, it's not going to your wife. I am further willing to bet that it makes your wife feel pretty crappy to know that you're looking at other naked women, many of whom are going to look more conventionally "hot" than she looks (or feels that she looks). And the more porn men watch, the less likely they are to be satisfied with the physical appearance and sexual appetites and behaviors of their real life partner. See #7 above -- did you ever see a porn movie where the woman didn't get off from intercourse? Of course not, yet this is how the majority of women function. Anyway, watching porn is the male equivalent of when your wife sees a movie like The Notebook and then she hates you for a couple of days.

On top of this, porn can be addictive. So try and limit it. For more on this topic, see the movie "Don Jon."

Now, I am in no way saying that women cannot work on being more open to sex and get more in touch with their sexuality within their marriage (and alone, for themselves). However, the purpose of this post was to discuss the vast differences between what many (not all!) men assume about sex, and the reality of what the majority of women think and feel about it. Discussing this post with your spouse is a great way to see whether you two are on the same or different pages about sex. If you'd like some more reading on this topic, try the excellent book Wanting Sex Again: How to Rediscover Your Desire and Heal a Sexless Marriage by Laurie Watson.

And don't worry, next I'll tackle all the ways many women are wrong about sex.

• For more, visit me at Dr. Psych Mom, on Facebook, or on Twitter @DrPsychMom.
• Follow Samantha Rodman PhD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrPsychMom

"All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking." Well, not so much.

For the majority of men and women, the major factor in choosing a partner is twinship (to use a Self Psychology term), meaning "this person is like me," and companionship - we want someone who's company we enjoy.

I suspect there are people of both sexes who choose partners for wealth or beauty, but those relationships are probably not going to last very long.

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women

Similarity and companionship are the currency of attraction, for better or worse.

James Hamblin | July 15 2014

Francis Cugat/Wikimedia

In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to rank 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate?

The winner wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t wealth. Number one was "kind and understanding," followed by "exciting personality" and then "intelligent." Men did say they valued appearances more highly than women did, and women said they valued "good earning capacity" more highly than men did—but neither ranked measures of physical attractiveness or socioeconomic status among their top considerations.

People, though, are liars. Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind. In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.

While people tend to prefer people similar to themselves in terms of traits like religiousness or thriftiness, when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.

The stereotypical example of that is known in sociology as a “beauty-status exchange”—an attractive person marries a wealthy or otherwise powerful person, and both win. It’s the classic story of an elderly polymath-billionaire who has sustained damning burns to the face who marries a swimsuit model who can’t find Paris on a map but really wants to go there, because it’s romantic.

All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking.

When Homer Simpson once came into a 500-pound surfeit of sugar, his id instinct was to turn it into fortune and sexual prosperity. “In America," he said, half dreaming after a night spent guarding the mound in his backyard, "first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.” That’s an homage to Scarface (in the movie the quote was “money” instead of “sugar”), and it’s where both Simpson and Tony Montana went emphatically astray.

University of Notre Dame sociologist Elizabeth McClintock has done exhaustive research on the idea of people exchanging traits. Her work was published last month in American Sociological Review, looking at data from 1,507 couples in various stages of relationships, including dating, cohabiting, and married. “Beauty-status exchange accords with the popular conception of romantic partner selection as a competitive market process,” McClintock wrote, “a conception widely accepted in both popular culture and academia.” She referred specifically to the gendered version, “in which an economically successful man partners with a beautiful 'trophy wife,'" as commonplace.

But McClintock found that outside of ailing tycoons and Donald Trump, in the practical world it basically doesn’t exist. Where it does, it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is matching.

What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often actually not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a series of matched virtues. Economically successful women partner with economically successful men, and physically attractive women partner with physically attractive men.

“Sometimes you hear that really nice guys get hot girls,” McClintock told me, “[but] I found that really nice guys get really nice girls. [Being nice] is not really buying you any currency in the attractiveness realm. If the guys are hot, too, then sure, they can get a hot girl.”

Because people of high socioeconomic status are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between one partner's appearance and the other partner's status are spurious and misconstrued.

“Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in attractiveness. And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”

The study concludes that women aren’t really out for men with more wealth than themselves, nor are men looking for women who outshine them in beauty. Rather, hearteningly, people really are looking for ... compatibility and companionship. Finding those things is driven by matching one's strengths with a partner who’s similarly endowed, rather than trying to barter kindness for hotness, humor for conscientiousness, cultural savvy for handyman-ship, or graduate degrees for marketable skills.

At least partly because physically attractive individuals are treated preferentially by the world at large, they enjoy improved school performance, greater occupational success, and higher earnings. So these variables can be hard to isolate.

“It would be very hard to separate out class and attractiveness,” McClintock said, “because they’re just so fundamentally linked. I can’t control for that—but I don’t see how anybody could.”

Past research has found that both physical attractiveness and education “help a woman achieve upward mobility through marriage (defined as marrying a man of higher occupational status than her father),” McClintock noted in the journal article, “and help her marry a man of high occupational status, in absolute terms.” But these studies regularly excluded any evaluation of the men’s physical attractiveness, and so didn’t address the simple fact that it might just be two attractive people being attracted to one another, probably in attractive clothes in an attractive place, both perpetually well slept. Any “exchange” was an illusion.

McClintock has also found that the pervasive tendency toward rating higher-status people as more attractive seems to perpetuate itself . "Because of that," she said, "there’s a bias toward seeing women who are married to high-status men—who are themselves high-status—as being more attractive. It creates this self-affirming circle where we never even stop to ask if we perceive the man as good-looking. We just say she’s good-looking, he’s high status—and she’s good-looking in part because the couple is high-status."

“Assuming that the importance of beauty and status is gendered may cause researchers to overlook men’s attractiveness and women’s socioeconomic resources,” Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University, told New York magazine, praising McClintock’s work. In so doing, scientists misidentify matching as exchange.

“Scientists are humans, too,” Finkel claimed, “and we can be inadvertently blinded by beliefs about how the world works. The studies that only looked at men’s (but not women’s) income and only looked at women’s (but not men’s) attractiveness were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that allowed flawed papers like that to be published.”

“Controlling for both partners’ physical attractiveness may not eliminate the relationship between female beauty and male status,” McClintock wrote, “but it should at least reduce this relationship substantially.”

Even as its pervasiveness in popular culture is waning, the gendered beauty-status exchange model is harmful in several insidious ways, McClintock said. “It trivializes the importance of women’s careers in a social sense: It’s telling women that what matters is your looks, and your other accomplishments and qualities don’t matter on the partner market. The truth is, people are evaluating women for their looks, and they’re evaluating men for their looks. Women are as shallow as men when it comes to appearance, and they should focus on their own accomplishments. If women want an accomplished guy, that’s going to come with being accomplished.”

So this is just one more place where upward mobility is, it seems, a myth. But in this case, no love is lost. Within the gendered beauty-status exchange model, physical attractiveness “might enable class mobility for women,” yes, McClintock wrote, but not without ensuring the women’s economic dependency on her husband and anachronistically ignoring her valuation of his physical attractiveness.

“It also sets up this idea of marriage being mercenary,” McClintock said, “which doesn’t fit with our usual conception that we kind of like our spouse and we want someone that we get along with. It’s not just this trade of his money for her beauty, and he’s going to dump her as soon as she starts to get some wrinkles around her eyes.”