> I wonder, to begin, what this "powerlessness" is relative to? Is it
> relative to the expectation that they ought to have power? Is it
> relative to their ambivalent relations to the mother figure (the giver
> of life and death) and the fact that they measure their maturity in
> terms of overcoming/rejecting the mother? Or is it that they are
> uncomfortable with the experience of intimate relationships to an
> other who operates by different rules?
>
> My experience with many men is that they are seeking something like
> the gratification they experienced from their mother (or compensation
> for the love that wasn't given).... they want to reproduce that time
> when a woman anticipated and met their every need...but they do not
> want to acknowledge that they desire this because this would reflect
> badly on their autonomy, independence, etc. So, the woman, has the
> power to withhold that which they cannot even acknowledge they desire.
Any or all of these things may be true; you'd have to ask a psychologist or therapist, which I'm not. The point is that a lot of men do experience this powerlessness. It's a real experience, believe me, even though I admit that a lot of women have trouble believing it. Of course, it's what a psychologist would call a delusion or a parapraxis -- a misapprehension of present reality due to the poor fellow's mind having been screwed up by infant and early childhood experiences or something. I think the important thing is not so much where the delusion came from as how to fix it.
One way to do that is the Albert Ellis rational-emotive therapy kind of thing. Teach the fellow to say to himself something like, "You idiot? What kind of screwy thinking is that? Never mind whether your mother loved you enough or not, by your hyper-selfish infant standards. Of course she didn't! No mothers are perfect -- and neither are fathers, or anybody else. You're an adult now, and you want to relate to adult women. So don't confuse them with your mother. Get to know them as individual human beings, find out what they like and don't like in male partners, and eventually -- after a lot of rejections (which by the way won't "hurt" you at all, once you get used to it -- yes, you'll feel unpleasant feelings, which it's important to acknowledge and grieve over for a while -- but you'll survive) -- you'll find a gal who thinks you're the bee's knees, ugly and unloveable as you may think you are." It's a simple enough message, but it can take some guys years to pound it through their skulls, as I can testify personally.
> It's also the case that women are often better able to express and
> negotiate emotional issues, which can make a man feel helpless if he
> does not have those skills...and make him feel that he is always
> operating at a disadvantage.
Well, yes, but I think I would put it a little differently -- men often have ways of expressing and negotiating emotional issues which are bizarrely different from the way women do it, and women often exhibit emotional tangles which a guy will look at and say to himself, "Wow -- how do they cook up those messes?!" (I seldom watch "Sex and the City," the hot topic currently on another thread, but when I do I generally find myself listening to these ladies sitting around their coffee-shop table and think, "Huh?") But the wisdom I have come to in my doddering old age is that we're not from different planets, we're all humans trying to make do in one way or another with what evolution equipped us with on this third planet from the sun.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax