Your blog, I guess you can say that if you want. I feel compelled to point out that a similar false analogiy between racism and a woman’s nature from anybody else would probably get a ban or deletion, though.

The Chief asks:

Hugo, particularly, loves to preach on how men CAN change. He’s weak on providing the reasons why we SHOULD. To put it crassly, what’s in it for us?

Well, that’s a bit like white bigots in the South asking what was in it for them if they gave up segregation, but I’ll bite. Time permitting, answering that question is my next lengthy post.

But one scene stuck in my mind. Hopkins as Kellog is delivering a speech to new guests at his spa and showing off two wolves. One is your standard, meat eating, not particularly people-friendly wolf that I guess Kellog supposedly kept around for demonstration purposes. The other was, I believe, called “The Kellog Wolf,” essentially the spa’s mascot. It’s weak, enemic looking but docile enough. Kellog pets and brags on the beast, talking about how the “much loved animal” has been fed nothing but grains and a vegetarian diet, and is now harmless and domesticated–his point being that the diet he prescribes can help other overcome whatever ails them. It looks sickly and it seems to react to human contact with that combination of cringing fear and pathetic gratitude a whipped dog will give you but yeah, it’s technically still a wolf, and it’s tamed and eating veggies.

Assuming that the wolf really existed and wasn’t just a fabrication of the novelist or the screenwriters, I believe the poor creature’s trainers and keepers did indeed eventually get it to start eating and behaving in a domesticated manner–by keeping it in a cage and starving it of meat, allowing it only grains, fruits and vegetables. Later, they probably put a plate of meat in one corner of the room, a plate of veggies in the other and praised it when it went for the veggies but punished it if it tried to eat the meat. Eventually, hunger and the desire to get these damn humans to leave it the hell alone motivated the wolf to go against every bit of it’s natural programming, everything the world meant it to be. It started eating vegetables and reacting to people around it the way a domesticated housecat might.

There are parallels between this and the “reparative therapy” a lot of Christian fundamentalists and a very few psychologists advocate. Supposedly they can turn gay folks hetero with behavioral modification, aversion therapy and lots of ol’ time religion. I guess it works in a sort of half-assed way, in that sometimes they can get a gay person into a relationship with a straight person where they’re living together, having sex and the gay person is no longer having gay sex. From what I’ve read and heard the gay person also usually feels frustrated, unfulfilled, ends up bitter towards his or her hetero partner and frequently ends up returning to the gay lifestyle but, hey, the change has still been made, at least for a while.

And yep, there are real parallels between the Kellog Wolf and what some women in general and many feminists in particular seem to want hetero men to be these days. Much is made of the need for men to do more “emotional work” in a relationship, a term that still hasn’t been defined to my satisfaction. Does this mean thinking about things, feeling about things, reacting to things exactly as a woman would? I can tell you from both experience and observation that women would find this satisfying, briefly. Then they’ll want their man to “act like a man” again. When he’s done this for awhile they’ll want him back to Mr. Sensitive. Repeat, repeat.

Among all this talk of men changing, by the way, there’s a real lack of motivation. To make a woman happy? As above, it ain’t going to happen. Hugo, particularly, loves to preach on how men CAN change. He’s weak on providing the reasons why we SHOULD. To put it crassly, what’s in it for us?

Ladies, if you want a partner who acts just like a woman maybe you’d better do a little reverse-reparative therapy of your own and try actually being with a woman. Whatever the case, you really don’t have any right to ask a person to change the basic elements of who he is. I believe the Kellog Wolf should not have had to change just to make John Kellog happy. I believe gay people shouldn’t have to change just to make some Christian fundamentalists happy. And I believe men shouldn’t have to change just to make some feminists happy.

That is all. Back to lurking.

Correct. Which is why if Michael T wishes to argue that men and women are “hard-wired,” he needs to prove that assertion. Saying that Hugo has a weak counter-argument doesn’t mean anything if the original argument is itself weak.

And negatives can be proved

Well, yes. “Can be proved” != “I can say whatever I want and it’s your job to prove me wrong, or I’m right.”

The burden of proof is on anyone who makes an assertion, whether or not that assertion is a positive or negative.

And negatives can be proved:

P1: When my car is out of gas, it will not run.
P2: My car is running.
C: Therefore, my car is NOT out of gas.

No, but I’ve heard of non sequiturs!

I’ll tell you a secret: when men are alone, they — are you ready for this? they have emotions, just as women masturbate. It’s true!

It is also, however, stunningly irrelevant to Hugo’s points, which apply to heterosexually coupled behavior, not solitary splendor.

Or, if you were talking about men masturbating, not women (it’s impossible to tell what you meant), that’s also irrelevant, because men who happily go off and do that instead of sleep with partners who have to work at enjoying it are…not what Hugo was writing about.

Hugo: I’m not sure I buy the notion that while sex is fun, emotion work isn’t also a deep source of fulfillment.

I said orgasms vs. emotions, not sex vs. emotions, for a reason. You were talking about heterosexual, coupled sex - both partners in such an enterprise are, by definition, having equal amounts of sex. But they are not having equal amounts of sexual pleasure, in the archetypally/stereotypically gendered situation you laid out.

And with ‘emotional work,’ if you are working through your husband’s anger, stress, frustration, impatience, depression, and anxiety as well as your own, that is truly not a deep source of fulfilment. Putting his unspoken affection for you into words and into a context may be fulfilling as all get out, but it that not the main thing people mean by “emotional work.” Repressed emotions are likely to be unpleasant, a great deal of the time, as is coping with them. Sex, if you’re having it only when you actively want to, is almost always pleasant. So: your picture of a stereotypically socialized woman is the person who does the unpleasant emotional labor and the person who has the unpleasant sex. That’s why the two supposed deficits in the genders aren’t symmetrical.