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Karen Jones has been
studying relationships between men and women for nearly two decades.
She founded The Heart Matters, a relationship coaching and training
company, in 1997. Karen has helped hundreds of women--married,
single, or at some stage in between--enjoy more fulfilling
relationships with men. She is a member of the Relationship
Coaching Institute and the International Coaching Federation. In
addition to being passionate about the work she does with
women, Karen adores spending time with her husband, Craig, and their
dog, Willie. You can often spot the three of them walking along the
river near their home outside Boston, MA. |
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Book Excerpt... Chapter Three - Part 1 |
From
MEN ARE
GREAT:
How to
Build a Relationship That Brings out the Best in Both of
You
by
Karen Jones @2007
founder of The Heart Matters
THE CURRENT
(SAD) STATE OF AFFAIRS
 As
I did research for this book, I read and watched for jokes, ads,
commercials, magazine articles, movies, television programs and
whatever else was out there that was imparting negative messages
about men. I also came upon material (which is included in the
recommended reading list at the back of this book) that
documented and commented on this issue. These authors describe
a worrisome trend of male-bashing that’s weakening the social
fabric of our culture. We already know how damaging and painful
it was when women were systematically seen as the “lesser” sex
in American society. I see the same damaging, painful and
pervasive trend going on now, except that it’s men who are being
demeaned and ridiculed.
The New York Times ran a story written by Courtney Kane
in 2005 about the way men were being negatively portrayed in the
media. The title was pretty provocative: “The Media Business:
Advertising; as spots belittling women fade out, men become the
target of the seemingly inevitable gender sneer.” The author
wrote about how men were feeling dismayed at the portrayal of
men in advertising as incompetent, bumbling idiots. Husbands
and fathers were the biggest targets, according to the author,
as objects of ridicule, pity or even scorn.
By the way, this isn’t just impacting grown men. During my
interview with Gordon Clay (www.menstuff.org),
he mentioned results from research conducted with boys in high
school. They found a big thing for these boys was to get
through a day without shame – that was a good day for them.
Clay feels it is what men do, though: “be a man; handle it, deal
with it, and it still hurts.” I got a bigger sense of what is
happening to boys today through reading
The War Against Boys
by Christina Hoff Sommers (and if you’ve got sons, I urge you to
read this book). She shows us through many examples, and
through the many experts in education she talks with, that
there’s a attitude in schools that masculinity is something
bad. The culture is suspicious and frightened of boys. In her
own experience interacting with these kids, Ms. Sommers wrote of
finding boys expecting to be attacked for who they were.
Yikes! What’s in store for these young men as they grow up?
Even women who have a good attitude about men are affected by this
trend. Eva Gregory is the author of The Feel-Good Guide to
Prosperity and an expert and coach on the Law of Attraction
(which we’ll delve into later). She recently shared a story with me
about catching herself at a party where she joined in with some
women who were loudly complaining about men’s tendencies to leave
the toilet seat up. Later that night, Eva’s partner told her that
he’d been shocked to hear her joining in with the complainers,
because it had never been an issue for her. Eva realized that her
partner was right, and found that it was another great example of
how the Law of Attraction can be so powerful. She added, “…that
kind of momentum is easy to build unless people are really aware of
their thoughts, and conscious of what they are buying into. Is that
truly you that’s speaking, or is that someone else speaking through
you?”
If you are a woman who wants to be happy and fulfilled in all your
relationships with men, whether romantic, professional, or with
family or friends, begin to notice what kinds of messages,
complaints, and comments you are being exposed to on a regular
basis. As you notice them, ask yourself:
Is
this helping my attitudes and expectations toward men?
If the answer is no, why tune in?
Many years ago, long before I was doing any relationship work, I
was one of those women who were more apt to see the negative aspects
of men rather than what was positive about them. I was greatly
influenced by deeply held beliefs, which had been formed in large
part by the prevailing attitudes that were everywhere.
Here were some of the ones running in the background of my
relationships with men, often outside my awareness:
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Watch men like a hawk, or else they’ll take you for granted. |
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If you don’t stay on top of what they’re doing, they’re going to
let you down! |
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You can’t trust a man to love you the way you want to be loved. |
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Men will not be there for you through the tough things. |
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Men are insensitive and can’t be really be there for you
emotionally. |
Funny thing, too; in comparison to many women I listened to, I felt
like I had a pretty good attitude about men and believed I had good
relationships with them, overall. Little did I know!
When I met my first husband (back in 1979), I was not very good at
looking for what was right and being able to assume the best motives
and intentions in him. I was pretty quick to do quite the opposite,
actually. One way this showed up in our marriage, and it was
excruciatingly painful for both of us, was in the way I interpreted
what he was doing with his parents. He had a tough situation on his
hands, with both of them being sick; he spent a huge amount of time
with them, trying to fix things. Every time one of them was in
trouble, or needed him, he was right there. I wasn’t able to see
what he was doing for the loving, committed gestures they were; I
saw a weak and easily manipulated man who was taking away from me.
And I made it very hard for him to win in any of the places he cared
about: I got in the way of his being able to fully give to his
parents, and I was angry and hurt so much of the time because of his
wanting to be there for them that he couldn’t ever satisfy me. The
poor guy; he tried so hard to make everyone happy, and just
couldn’t. I did go back to him and apologize a few years later, and
still wonder at times what kind of damage I did to this man who had
let me in so deeply, and loved and trusted me enough to marry me.
Jim Bracewell, editor of the online MENSIGHT Magazine, has
this to say on the subject:
"For over thirty years women activists have thoroughly excoriated
the dark side of masculinity with little, if any, balancing
validation of the vast sacrifices and contributions to family and
society that have been made by men. The result is that today there
is a new paradigm of gender in the collective unconscious that says,
“women good, men bad.”
An interesting side note: Jim shared with me that he created
MENSIGHT Magazine and
www.TheMensCenter.com after searching for male-positive material
and finding a profound lack of that type of material.
According to A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more
than four hours of TV each day (in case you’re curious, this totals
28 hours a week, 120 a month, 1,445 a year – or about 60 days in
total).
If you’re somewhere in that statistic, what are you watching? There
certainly are educational, amusing, and interesting shows on
television, but there are also shows that are contributing to an
increasingly negative perception of men. During one week in May
2006, I had a group of volunteers watch their normal weekly shows,
and asked them to pay closer attention to the comments that were
made - whether positive or negative - about men and women. Here are
some of the televised negative comments about men that these
volunteers recorded during the assignment. As you read them, imagine
the same thing being said but about women (and how unlikely it would
be!):
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“Are men always this stupid? Do they ever get over it?” |
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“Men don’t want women to be human.” |
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“He’s a doorstop that eats.” |
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“You are such an idiot!” |
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“Like you know what goes on in a library!” |
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(Three straight friends talking with their gay male friend)
“What do you expect, Jake, he’s a guy?! If you want monogamy,
commitment, and honesty, then date women.” |
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In one show, men were described as “cheaters and liars” who,
“when they become fathers they become bad husbands.” |
In one half-hour episode of one show, there were 11 overtly
anti-male comments. In another, there were 22. The volunteers
noticed how skewed the results were in favor of negativity toward
men. One female participant said, “I was surprised at the results.
I have watched this show before and never noticed the number of
anti-men comments.” This was a frequent sentiment among my
volunteers, who were now being more careful to listen to the
messages in the shows they had spent so many hours watching in the
past.
With these results in mind, take a look at some eye-opening
statistics compiled by TV-Free America in Washington, DC:
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Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 |
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Hours per year the average American youth watches television:
1,500 |
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Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 200,000 (what’s
important for our consideration here is that a very high
percentage of these televised violent acts are committed by men,
thus reinforcing a view of men as violent) |
What difference does it make if you never notice the anti-male
depictions and comments all around us, you ask? I don’t believe
that you don’t notice. Our subconscious minds process a great deal
of information our conscious minds aren’t aware of. That part of us
sees and experiences things under our radar screen, and yet, through
what our subconscious minds are creating, we develop beliefs and
attitudes, we get impulses to do things, and moods overtake us with
no apparent cause.
I urge you to read some (or all) of the books I have listed at the
back of this book. The first book I read as I began my research
into this phenomenon I was observing of negative portrayals of men
in the media was
Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Hatred of
Men in Popular Culture, by Dr. Paul Nathanson and Dr. Katherine
K. Young, professors at McGill University in Toronto. They have
spent years researching and writing about their subject. The book
is incredibly eye-opening, and quite disturbing. Here are some
excerpts:
To the extent that television movies “teach” viewers anything, they
do so most effectively in noncognitive ways – which is to say,
intuitively or subliminally. And the “lesson” is more likely to be
about identity than morality.
Viewers identify themselves with the archetypal figures seen
onscreen night after night just as their ancestors did when
listening to folktales around the campfire or myths on sacred
festivals. But – and this is extremely important – male
viewers identify with male characters just as surely as female
viewers do with female characters. Women are encouraged to identify
with female characters in jeopardy from men, but men are encouraged
to identify with male characters who put women in jeopardy.
Even more problematic than female viewers, we suggest, are these
male viewers. At a time when virtually all positive sources of
masculine identity have been sexually desegregated, some boys and
men will inevitably turn to the remaining negative ones.
Both
men and women often fail to see misandry as a problem, because
sexism has been defined exclusively in terms of misogyny.
The traditional universe on which men relied for self-esteem and
self-confidence is crumbling. A suitable replacement has not yet
emerged. And almost any attempt to create one is quickly denounced,
whether correctly or incorrectly, as misogynistic.
Read Part 2
Copyright © 2007 by Karen Jones
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