Finally... It's 4 weeks but I'm at it again
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This post was composed while listening to Alive [Solomun Remix] by Rufus de Soul. Why did I put this detail here you ask.. Well no reason at all. I just needed a way to start the article and who really cares anyway. You all know by now that I’m nothing close to a conventional writer, all I do is think it up in my head and I write it that way and somehow it comes out as something reasonable and I have no idea how but hey, I’m grateful for it, I’m grateful for hive and I’m grateful for you who gives these posts your little time to read through them. Alright enough chit chat let’s get into our order of business. Last week at the hive book club chat, we talked about the first book we were reading for the year, shout-out to stevenson7 the moderator of our book club as well as the coordinator of our group voice chats. it really was an interesting one and we had the opportunity to talk about so many books, books which I intend to read this year even though in reality I will probably forget all about them immediately after writing this post and will probably only come across them later in life if I am lucky. Anyways the book I talked about in our weekly meeting is the book I want to talk about today and that is Allan and Barbara Pease’s Why men want sex and woman need love.
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What the book is about basically.
As you can tell, the message and essence of book is spelt out in its title. It’s a book that spells out why men want sex and chase after it and women need love. I’m currently five chapters into it and by far it is the most insightful book on sex and relationships I have ever read and I mean ever. It takes a very practical, scientific, realistic approach to sex and relationships and it expounds on the reasons why sex and relationships are mutually inseparable. I don’t know I think the best way to break this book down is to talk about the chapters individually as they all each have very significant things to talk about. Like I said I’m only five chapters deep however everything looking for the one, to the statistics, to the power and biology of love, what men really want and what women really want and what women really want. So let’s get right into it beginning with the first chapter.
1.Sex on the Brain
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The beginning of this chapter starts by examining the phenomenon we call love or desire. It tries to break down this universal experience into with it biologically is as it says it in its concluding phrase; love is simply chemical responses triggered in the brain. It then further goes into details breaking down the difference between love, lust and desire, highlighting how men and women have the same goals but just different agendas when it comes to love and sex. Men are turned on by the visual images and cues that women show which display their health and fertility while women are turned on by markers of a man’s power, status, influence, commitment and material resources. This message is one of the common themes of this book and the authors go into great details explaining and justifying this stance. As a side note I actually support this stance and it might be that to some extent my bias towards it is what draws me more to this particular message in the book however like I said, the authors go a great length at validating this particular stance, justifying why it is most relevant when it comes to the conversation of sex and relationships. The next part this chapter delves into is its discussion about the biology and the geography of love in the human brain. It goes into details explaining the chemicals i.e dopamine and norepinephrine which when released in the brain are responsible for the phenomenon we know as love at first sight and this feeling in essence is nature’s way of ensuring our continuation as a species. Finally the chapter describes love as a potent drug that we all get high on at least once in our lives and the reason it compares love to drugs is because the evidence shows that in many ways our brains respond to love the same way it responds to drugs like cocaine and heroin. The authors even go the extra mile to show us brain images showing how almost identical areas in the brain light up when said person is in love, the same areas lighting up when people are on cocaine. The authors conclude the chapter by once again examining how the brains of men and women process love and sexual desire. The part of the brain responsible for vision and sex drive lit up in men while in women the parts of the brain responsible for memory and attention lit up when both were showed pictures of people they were madly in love with. The chapter does the solid job of establishing biology and the sciences in the first chapter and it gives the readers a fairly solid idea of what the complicated feelings of love and lust are and why we act the in the ways that we do as men and women and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now on to the next chapter
2.Straight talk in sex and love
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This chapter focuses on how society has changed beyond all recognition in the last century however our needs and motivations pertaining to sex and relationships have remained unchanged. With the coming of the twenty first century, the traditions guiding the way aging and its relationship with dating and marriage is viewed in the society has changed. The average age for people to get married has increased in both men and women, from their early to mid-twenties, to their early to mid-thirties. This change however still doesn’t affect human sexual desire and our sexual strategies for finding a mate as that occurs at an unconscious level. The next thing it points out is how the media has given both men and women unrealistic expectations when it comes to relationships. Women in these times expect their men to be well built hunky masculine men with a feminine side who look masculine but behave feminine. Men on the other hand hold women to a ridiculously high standard in terms of their beauty and looks and in both cases the media doesn’t help the matter due to the way these images are hyper inflated. Finally the need to understand and embrace our primitive motivations is the key to a happy relationship.
- What women really want from men
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With the advancements in the times, the contrasting nature of the traditional, evolutionary needs of women against their modern day options still plague their minds and drive them into a conundrum. Women of this day and age still want what their female ancestors wanted even though they have the opportunity to acquire such things for themselves. There is still the innate desire in them to chase after mates who show the availability of resources or the potential to acquire said resources in the future. Speaking on this I remember telling a friend that if certain traits occur across cultures all over the world, even in cultures that are direct opposite of each other, such traits are not considered as cultural traits but evolutionary or biological traits. Women preference is men is almost universal and cross cultural making this particular traits an evolutionary one even with massive changes in today’s culture.
The next aspect of this chapter breaks down the characteristic traits women look out for in men. They include love, kindness, faithfulness, commitment, education and intelligence. Love in the sense that women need to feel loved and appreciated especially in the form of words. Faithfulness in the sense that a man should remain faithful to her and not commit sexually to any other person as that might mean that he would be willing to commit his resources to the other person. Kindness in the sense that he has to be willing to share his resources with her and her offspring especially while she carries and nurtures them, commitment in the sense that…. Well you already know what this one is about and finally education and intelligence because those are traits that show how that a person is most likely to have the potential to acquire resources in the nearest future.
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Alright I’m going to end this post here and when I do come back to talk about this I will try to summarize three other chapters in the book. I really like this book though; I love the stand it takes on what relationships are really like and how we can navigate through it to get the best out of it. I’m excited to see what else it entails and it might just be the first book I finish this year. Until I see you next time…..
Ciao.
