Publicado en el blog I scratch it because it’s itchy
http://iscratchit.blogspot.co.uk
MAN, DON'T LISTEN THE MESSAGE
Ana Galera
To my dear men friends
I was considering talking about Morning Glory and how forgotten man’s
sexuality is, when I received a whatsapp message from a friend, girl friend,
regarding some speech from a professor in Stanford University. He was
talking about the relation mind-body and how healthy it can be to have
good friendship with friends. Fair enough. It sounds like a very good topic.
So the message quotes that professor with these words: ‘One of the best
thing that a man can do for his health is to be married to a woman
whereas, for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health is
to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends’.
‘That’s so unfair!’ I thought. So according to that professor men are fucked
up. Their health is compromised only because they born with a penis. They
never could feel the healthy pleasure of releasing a lot of serotonin during
a nice conversation with a friend. They can just feel something slightly
similar chatting with their wives. Is only me or that’s the sexiest thing I’ve
ever heard? At the end of the message they ask you to forward it to all
your girl friends to celebrate how nice is to be a girl who has girl friends to
have a coffee with and shoot up some serotonin. Yey!
I wondered how a person as educated as that professor head of psychiatry
of Stanford University could say something like that. In order to write this
post I tried to track down the source of that message and surprise,
surprise. I couldn’t. I could find only some blogs where they mention the
same message but they don’t know the source either. The only origin
seems to be the same message in some Facebook page. So, as I was
guessing, this story seems fake. The message never said the name of the
professor, or when or where exactly this happened. This is because the
professor was Dr David Siegel* and what he said it was a joke!
Thus the message itself it was nothing more than people pretending to be
cool and feminist. Well, my friends, this is what I call fake feminism. It’s
that kind of things that pretend to revere women but using the same topical
sexist concepts. ‘Women are more sensitive than men’. Namely, when we
consider something is feminist because it says rubbish about men. That
message is not horrible only because it says that men aren’t sensitive, it is
horrible because it insists in the idea that men and women are different.
Not only physically, they are mentally different, they feel different, they
behave different. Then after reading the message and feeling tempted to
forward the message to all my friends, I stopped myself because I realized
that a lot of my friends are men. I had many good and profound
conversations with my male friends. Of course! Therefore, sending a
message like this to them would be very offensive. Although I’m sure a lot
of people think that men really behave differently. Men have this way to be
that they don’t like to talk about they business, especially with other men.
Is it because they really don’t like to talk? No, it’s not. Of course, they love
to talk about everything. The problem is often they feel they’re going to be
judged and mocked if they talk about some sensitive topic with their
fellows. But that’s not written on their DNA. That’s the way men are
educated. They must be strong and don’t show their feelings because this
means showing weakness.
And what was that thing about the Morning Glory? Well, it seems
something completely disconnected with the topic but it’s not. I tried to find
out why this phenomenon happens. It seems to be some kind of
maintenance works of the body, but it’s nothing for sure. Surprisingly there
is not a lot of information about it. Basically, there are not many studies
about men‘s sexuality. It seems that everybody think that men’s sexuality
is simple and obvious, nothing worth to be studied. Men just want sex in
any which way and as much as possible. Because they have no feelings,
no emotions. Even all their erogenous zones are condensed in one only
area: the penis. That’s very unfair and very demanding as well. How many
time men don’t feel too much pressure about sex in general, not only when
they are in the bed, even when they are just walking by the street or
watching TV. Their feelings, the same with women, interfere in the way
they live sex. In the same way that in the last decades, thanks to the
women liberation we know a lot more about women sexuality, regarding
men it seems that they are far from this liberation and feel the sex as
natural as it is. With no judgments or prejudices. Proof of that is that men
don’t seem very open to sex toys. That’s because men have many many
issues in their mind about how things must be. But again, it is very difficult
for men talk about how they experience sex if people keep saying men are
not sensitive, men are not good talking, etc.
If we want a better world for women it must be a better world also for men,
because we are in the same ship here. Going further, encouraging men to
think about their feelings and their sexuality, to open their hearts about
anything that worries them is the most feminist or equialgender thing we
can do.
After all that I can just say: Let’s have coffee with all our friends, whether
they are men or women. We have a lot to learn from each other and yes,
it's very healthy.