Here's kinds of questions this blog will address over the coming months:
Love:
What happens when a man falls in love?
Do men connect to women differently than women connect to men?
Why do many men have a problem with commitment?
What drives a man towards a specific "type" of woman?
What are men afraid of in a relationship?
Do men bear a grudge against women?
Why are relationships in general so hard these days? Was it easier in the past?
Why do men often have trouble saying "I love you," and what is the cure?
When we fall in love, we think she's a goddess; when we break up, we call her a bitch. What's that about?
Why is the shape of a woman's body so important to men?
Why is our society fixated on slender young women with big breasts -- a figure that rarely occurs in nature?
Why is the pornography industry so vast? Is it a healthy sexual outlet or does it damage men's relationships with women?
Work:
What's in it for men to accept women as equal partners at home and in the workplace?
How did feminism become a dirty word?
Why do men have difficulty hearing women, and what can be done about it?
Do men and women have different innate skills and talents, or do we all have the same basic abilities? What's the current brain science have to say?
Can men truly accept women as "the boss" at work?
What can women do to break through the glass ceiling?
How might the world of work change if women helped make the rules?
Power:
Are men ready for a woman President/Prime Minister?
Is one women on the Spreme course an example of gender balance?
Why is their such widespread violence towards women in the world?
Is patriarchy -- the rule of males over females -- biologically innate, or ordained by God? If not, how did it start, how could it end, and how can we create a different future?
What is the role of climate change and the creation of patriarchy? (The answer to this one is scary).
What can each of us do in our daily lives to contribute to ending patriarchy and furthering equal partnerships between men and women?
How can one replace a system of dominance and win/lose with one of shared power and collaboration?
What's the best response of egalitarian cultures to "traditional" cultures that deny women basic human rights?
Reading over this list, I confess I don't have the answers all figured out in neat little blog packages -- but I sure think the questions are interesting and worth exploring.
Did I miss something important? Please add your questions to the discussion, and I will do my best to cover them in a future post.
Chapter Outline:
Why an ordinary guy like me cares about these questions.
What drives men's unconscious feelings towards women.
Patterns of relationships, and the "archetypes" of the Goddess that define how men relate to the women in their lives:
1. The Great Mother, Gaia
2. The Maiden: Persephone, Artemis, Mary
3. The Lover: Aphrodite, and Pandora, her "bad girl" counterpart.
4. The Wife and Queen: Hera
5. The Mortal Mother: Demeter
6. The Woman at Work: Athena
7. The Homemaker: Hestia
8. Woman the Witch: Hekate
Male archetypes, how they relate to women, how women relate to them:
1. Zeus the Patriarch
2. Heracles the Hero
3. Apollo, God of Reason
4. Aries the Warrior
5. Eros the Lover
6. Hermes the Trickster
7. Dionysos, the Wild and Free
8. Hephaistos, the Wounded Nerd
(Most of the questions in the overview will be dealt with in the course of examining each archetype, above, and what they reveal for our relationships today).
From personal to social transformation:
I believe society gives us most of our cues as to how to relate and respond to the opposite sex. Similarly, self-knowledge about what drives our personal relationships can be an engine of social transformation. The last section of this project will attempt to outline ways in which men and women can act to help us move beyond patriarchy, so that our children may more naturally forge free, strong and sustaining bonds with those they love. Also, how we live makes a difference for other societies where women remain in bondage that is equivalent to slavery. What positive role can we in the West have in creating global egalitarian transformation?
Finally, I intend to add a troubleshooting section to address readers questions and comments - both practical and theoretical - that arise along the way.
Tim
Monday, November 27, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
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
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
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