Wednesday, November 14, 2012

PROLOGUE

[Updated August 2018]

Even before I talk about me, let me address the title of my book: Why Women Are So Problematic: A Memoir and Irreverent Whimsical Polemic. When men hear the title, they all say either: “Where and when can I get this book” or say “You didn’t?” followed by the “where can I get it” comment. When women hear the title, almost all of them younger than 45 laugh and say: “Where and when…”. A few younger women, and many 45 years or older, start to scream and call me a misogynist, caveman, or rapist. Here is the deal with the title. I need for men to read this book. The title ensures that. It is not just my personal opinion: that women are in fact problematic, or a full disclosure: that the book is personal, a memoir, and one specific point of view, a polemic. I am not worried about what women will think based on the title. The women I need to read the book—intelligent, self-aware, and sentient ones—will read it just to make sure it will not make things worse. (In which case, I am confident, they would organize a raiding party of women warriors and take me out.) I am not worried about comic book young “feminists” who know nothing about feminism, or angry older women who cannot accept the reality of men, as we actually are.

Now about me. I am a first-born 68-year-old second-generation Italian-American guy. I look like a White Guy but am neither White (a WASP or White Anglo-Saxton Protestant wannabe) nor very American. Why and how this is so is explicated in Chapter 6: How I Know What I Know. I have had an interesting life. A puzzle I have spent a very significant amount of time exploring since I was a young child is women. What are they about? Why are they so different than me? Why do I need them so much? Why do I love them so much?

[As an aside, WASPs are the people who control almost all the wealth and real power in America and whose champion Donald Trump won the Presidential Election in a split decision in 2016. Trump lost to Clinton by a 2.9 million vote plurality, in the national popular vote, but won the Electoral College handily. The shift of about 42,000 votes, across the three closest States Trump narrowly carried, would have given the Election to Clinton. They won Bigly, to hear Trump tell it. Or did they. Mainstream Republican leaders opposed Trump throughout the Republican Primary season, and when he could not be denied the nomination, opposed him throughout the General Election campaign. Only when he unexpectedly won, did main line Republicans and establishment WASPs embrace him. Their lust for power and desire to move their agenda forward, at all and any cost, overrode any sense they had of the National interest. At this writing, 18 months of his term, Trump holds a 41% approval rating and Republican support is holding. The Republican establishment has made a deal with the Devil. Time will tell how cynically wise, or disastrously foolish, that deal will turn out to be. As you may imagine, WASPs in general and Republicans and Trump in particular, get a pretty severe critique throughout Part 2: Some Unpleasant Truths.]

Briefly, I helped raise three younger sisters and a baby brother. I was married for 12 years in my youth (1973-1985); have had a couple dozen sexually intimate relationships with women, all wonderful, with about a dozen long-term lover relationships; lived with and was engaged to one woman for nine years (1993-2002); and have lived for a time with and am engaged to my soul mate now (2005-present). [This is all laid out in Chapter 7: How I Learned Even More.] I humbly believe that I know and get women.

My premise is that women are more miserable now than they have ever been in our 200,000 evolutionary history as Homo sapiens. I believe that relations between men and women are more strained now than ever. I assert that it is going to get worse still if we don’t do something about it. I think I know how and why this has happened, and I have at least a solution. It is not a short discussion or easy thing; my book is 400 pages with no pictures. But given the magnitude of the problem and the stakes, I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to read a longish book.

The simple fact is that we are mammals with highly evolved brains. Our consciousness is a very useful thing. But it is also a curse: Hubris is a constant problem. Our intelligence lets us delude ourselves and live in denial and illusion.  It makes it easy for a greed-driven consumer culture to use advertising to create insane wants far removed from real needs. It makes is easy for Republican politicians to exploit people—convincing struggling middle-class workers they will somehow be allowed to become rich someday, if they just let the already obscenely well off Filthy Rich get even richer first. This mass culture appeals to the mammal inside of us; to the most irrational and primitive parts of our brains.

Instead of letting the Republicans continue their war on public education—cutting education funding and trying to teach “Creation Science” (their Bible) instead of real science (Evolution), and corporations to use advertising to convince us to buy shit we don't need, in pursuit of a meaningless materialistic “happiness”, we need to say enough. But that effort will take a while. The Republicans lost the election in November 2012, but they will not go away. Appealing to fear, hate and willfull ignorance, a lunatic demagogue was 'elected' in 2016 and continues to cling to power. The myth of Capitalism will not be abandoned any time soon. In the meantime, we can fix the man-woman problem. The template is easy: (1) get clear about the reality of our inner-mammal and profoundly different natures as men and women; (2) accept and forgive each other for this; and (3) negotiate a reality-based new social contract.

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