Intro for visitors:

Hello, and welcome to a new interactive book by Tim Ward. I've written four previous nonfiction spiritual travel books (the best known, is What the Buddha Never Taught), and am experimenting with something new: writing a book as a blog, with the opportunity for readers to post comments, queries and suggestions along the way. (If you are interested in my previous books, you can visit my sites http://www.timwardsbooks.com/, and for my latest book, http://www.savagebreastbook.com/).

The topic of my last book led me to this current interactive work. Savage Breast told the story of my search for the lost Goddesses of Western Civilization. I wanted to find out what happened to men when they stopped seeing the female side of the divine, and how that has shaped our relationships with modern women. What I discovered in the course of my travels and research radically changed me as a man. It brought to consciousness many things about my own relationships with women I was completely unaware of. For example, I discovered a bore a kind of a grudge against women, a sort of generalized low-level anger that I carried around with me all the time, and that sometimes caused me to lash out in my relationships. When I speak about this male anger, the feedback I get from many women is that it's so obvious, it barely needs mentioning. And yet most men I speak with about it have no clue what I am talking about. Many are frankly offended by the notion.
Psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein claims we are so desensitized to this anger, we scarcely notice it. She writes: "the hate, fear, loathing, contempt and greed that men express towards women so pervades the human atmosphere that we breath them as casually as the city child breathes smog."
My own journey was an attempt to bring these emotions to the surface and into the light, to find out what lies beneath them. The resulting book chronicled both my encounters with various archetypes of the Goddess, how each Goddess reflects an aspect of men's relationships with women, and how this played out in my own intense relationship with Teresa, the woman I love who accompanied me through much of this research.
The finished book was over 400 pages long in its published form (O Books, April 06). Several friends - mostly men - have since asked if it might be possible for me to condense parts of the book into a kind of practical manual that deals explicitly with male mind and the unconscious forces that drive our relationships with women - and that wouldn't take so long to read.
This is the purpose of this blog.
I invite all readers to participate with me in writing it, with your agreement that whatever you post may be included in the finished work, which hopefully will be published at a later date. However you identify yourself in your comments is how your name would appear in the finished work, and if you wish, you may post anonymously or under a pseudonym. It would help if all who post identify their gender.
To sum up, blog is a manual for better understanding how men relate to women. My goals are to be concise, straightforward, conversational, and open to your input.
Next post will provide a roadmap to where we are going.

Tim