Male/Female emotional core and my own experiences

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Just remember that what goes up, must come down eventually. CRASH!
haha

That reminds me of this song:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFFmgonykc[/youtube]

Wow
This thread.
Best thread.

Some of the ideas expressed here are probably what Jung had in mind when he spoke of the anima and the animus.

The masculine is that hypomanic feeling. That epicness. It's grand, focused, driving.

The feminine is that deep melancholy. Introspective, vulnerable.

The former was often expressed by Liszt (such as in his hungarian rhapsodies) and the latter was often expressed by Chopin (commonly in his nocturnes). In my teen years, I was very feminine. I've recently started to explore my masculine side. The only problem with this is that I think I give women I meet the wrong impression. They think I'm always excited and in command. But in reality the feminine has always been closer to my heart. Perhaps this is a healthy part of my developement as a human being? You know, trying to achieve balance. Like the yin-yang philosophy.

Lately I've been pining for my feminine side. I like to be awash in melancholy and introspection. This is what's most natural to me. It's deep purple and electric blue. So beautiful, yet also a bit painful. Like an ache in my heart.
Right now I'm in a groove of increased masculinity. I feel confident, jovial, and ambitious. It's colors seem to me to be blaring reds, oranges, and yellows. It doesn't have that profoundly beautiful feeling like the feminine but there is something appealing in its epicness. A surge of the heart so to speak.

I think there are a lot of ways that epicism could be felt or expressed but I'll try to give you a few fragments of what I think drives the male core at least as much as another kind of warmth tends to drive the female core. I won't say that there isn't an 80/20 rule on this that 20% of each gender doesn't cross the other way on it, nor would I ascribe this to people who are so washed out by life that they're sense of self has been stolen - some people are just pragmatic junkies as well to where they have grave difficulty feeling that much outside of their own practical sphere to make any sense.

Caveats aside though for epicism...in guys... I think of it like an extension of religious emotion. Its finding the profound in things, having the right scenes in movies or the right sounds in music drive you to tears but in a much different kind of way. To hit the outer points more and be a little bit more specific - I notice a lot of aspie guys like anime or things like the Matrix, as I think its more that they like that strange sort of elegance in ultra-intellectualism meeting sort of a sheer and larger than life reality built into the action of the characters - I can't help but get the sense that its much more likely to be something that touches a guy and gives him chills than it does women; at least on % of viewership (and trust me - I'm generally not a fan but - I understand why people could like it). On a whole different front - for anyone who's familiar with Tool - I literally couldn't think of a female singer or band hitting that intensity or going in those directions. There are some that have found their own angles, Tori Amos, Dido, Sarah McLaughlin come to mind, but overall though when emotion goes religious/spiritual but in a 'through-the-concrete' rather than eliminating it kind of way, in a way that blends intelligence, logic, and beauty, its not that its never women doing this - I just think women may feel this but....it doesn't do as much for them. As for just an example of something that does a lot for me: http://soundcloud.com/sunchase/sunchase ... e-survival , I get a lot out of this kind of music and other bits like it much more in a sense that it seems like its grabbing at something deeper and more transcendent - whether or not the artist believes in a God or even whether I do for that matter, I think its just fundamental.

Don't know if I'm making more sense or perhaps less now? I don't think these specific differences are hyper-pronounced, maybe in some guys or some girls, but generally speaking I think that's one of the major areas where emotional styles diverge a bit more.

I'm not sure on how best to answer this because I'm not sure what you would consider a facade or what your considering to be the psychological thought process in play. Ideally we all wear some degree of a mask in life because we have some sides of ourselves that we like, some that we don't, and unfortunately in the case with AS often enough skill sets that are partially or completely paralyzed. What I've really aimed for and why I am very careful in terms of dating - I want to find someone that I don't have to wear a mask around or who can emotionally interact with me on a level where everything is fluid. Everyone has physical limitations, strengths and weaknesses, our emotions thus work on different algorhythms and wavelengths because of this. The reason for this thread though - I just want to get a better sense of that sort of emotion because, the brittleness that I have toward it is bad - not a guy cowering or ducking an emotion that he thinks he's too macho to feel - for me its far more of a neurological issue than any kind of set attitude past or present.



I think that's a good way to look at it if someone's really an outlier in one direction or another - ie. very feminine or very masculine, and even then it depends on how (from what directions) and how does it really work with society. A guy for instance who's huge on sportbikes/motorcycles but has a bookish demeanor will have a bit of a challenge looking at himself and saying that he's more masculine therefor he needs to find a woman that needs a provider; it works if on the masculinity spectrum he's 8 out of 10 clicks in all things male but, if he's a mixed bag he has to assess himself based on what he knows his internal reality to be.

As for myself - I really don't know. I had a feminine side when I was younger, I became more masculine at the core, really ended up with a more elaborate and balanced interplay of both. I think at this point what I need is something close to a true equal, someone to grow, experience the emotions of life with, in tandem. Having someone who needed me to take care of her or who needed to take care of me - I tend to be a bit too independent or free-spirited for both, it seems like from experience the more horizontal the relationship is or the more of an equal a woman seems in intellect, character, social strength, etc. the more I feel like she absolutely drives me wild - in a good way.

I've never met another guy who openly shared my opinion on that. So either guys tell the truth more to you, or you're overestimating this.



It can last anywhere from 15 minutes or so up to hours in its strongest form, but the milder it gets the longer it can last. Attempting to control it involves either various substances or sometimes things like being in certain surroundings or even listening to certain music. None of these are 100% reliable, though.

A lot of us are predictably inclined to like people who we can relate to on some level. If you have interests or traits that are not favored by your (male or female) friends, tone them down a bit in their presence.

Otherwise, I'm afraid I have no idea what anyone in this thread is on about.

No, no problems with the friends. Its about emotional style differences between genders - I'm explaining how I've noticed a guy's core self to operate differently on an emotional level, I'm trying to get a more concrete/intuitive sense of that with women - mainly in a certain tragectory of emotive communication that I feel like I've had challenges with.

I've read it through about 3 times now and I find it fascinating - but I don't understand it either!
Deep internal feelings are hard to put into words, I guess. Anyway, I'll step in and take it off on my own tangent...

I *think* techstepgenr8tion is describing an essential difference between male and female emotional response. This was the key for me:



This aroused my interest as I do recognise those two as extremes of feeling. I rarely feel the 'epic', though. Unfortunately for a man, I seem to spend about 98% of my time in the introspective, melencholic, feminine state. I wonder if any other males feel this way too? Is there a connection with AS?

Another question I have is whether this emotional response is 'hard wired' into us or can be conditioned through upbringing. Or. most likely, an element of both.

We could assume the typical female will be looking for a male who exhibits the 'epic' feel you describe. This seems to contradict your experience, but matches mine perfectly in that it could explain why the vast majority of females have always been totally unattracted to me as I display what they see as 'feminine' emotional behaviour. This is a huge subject, linking in to the ubiquitous 'nice guy' syndrome. Maybe the 'nice guy' concentrates on developing the introspective, feminine, introverted emotional response assuming that this is what is desired by females (as it is evident in their behaviour). Conversely, he buries the hypomanic epicness. And then gets stuck in a negative feedback loop of getting rejected, so assuming he needs to hide his maleness even more, and so on, drawing exactly the wrong conclusion each time. I would guess that in general, the more a man cultivates this female emotional response, the more female friends and confidents he gets, but less wanting to be relationship partners.

Also, we'll all be positioned somewhere along a spectrum of this, it's not black and white. 'Male' and 'Female' are not the best terms as a biological female may experience more of the epicness and, as I mentioned, a biological male may experience more inrospection. Maybe this is what yin and yang is all about? Should we cultivate the emotional response appropriate for our gender, or should we strive for balance? Is this being too introspective?

The implications would be controversial in our current cultural belief system. You mention music specifically, and what you're suggesting could explain why 98% of music (or therabouts) is composed by males. It's the male emotional drive, not the Evil Male Patriarchy.

ManErg, you said you rarely feel the 'epic'. Well, I was the same way in my highschool years as I vaguely alluded to in my previous post. I noticed someone mentioned stimulants and how they trigger that epic and hypomanic feeling. Even though I had been slowly teaching myself to feel 'masculine' over the past couple years, it didn't really strike me poignantly until I (for the purpose of cutting down fat quickly after successfully gaining much needed bodyweight) went on an ephedrine-caffeine cycle. I took this rather potent mix for a mere 2 weeks and then immediately tapered them off; however, during this time I was in a permanent hypomanic state. Being that way for 2 weeks solid helped me to be able to consciously recapture that feeling by will alone. (not that I'm encouraging anyone to irresponsibly use stimulants. I went about that whole cycle very carefully from the way I ate to how much sleep I got.)

I liked the connection you made to the 'nice guy' phenomenon. From my own persoanl experience I would say this is accurate.

As I said in my previous post as well about yin and yang, I tend to believe there should be some balance. I hope to pull myself down from my current excessive 'masculine' expression into a more harmonious balance after I have cultivated an intimate understanding of 'masculine' as I had acquired for its opposite from my earlier years dwelling in the 'feminine'. It all sounds very abstract but I can feel what I mean intuitively and I have hope that this will bring me closer to contentment in my life. Perhaps I will even gain a sort of charisma that will finally make me attractive to women.

As you can see by my avatar and signature, this whole comment really stole my attention. I said something about Liszt and Chopin in terms of masculine and feminine expression before, but I was also thinking about Tool as the masculine expression and A Perfect Circle as the feminine expression. You might be aware but they both have the same singer (maynard james keenan). I'm prettty sure he has said something in an interview about Tool being a masculine outlet for his art and a perfect circle being a feminine outlet for his art. Hell, some people are even convinced thet he has AS. I'm not so sure about that though vOv

Hi tech, I think you have eluded the questions altogether.

As for the epic feeling being male, I don't think that is a male trait. It is an intellectual ideal.
I love tool, but it seems like most of the males I know don't get deeply into music. They seem to prefer the adrenaline of it more than appreciate it because it is sentimental, or they find that the lyrics contain some sort of eternal truth, or lose themselves in the beauty of musical symmetry. That is just an example to demonstrate that what you consider masculine may not be a masculine trait. I don't think intellectualism is a masculine trait. I think males identify with Tool on a masculine level because it exudes a sense of power, strength, and that sought after adrenaline rush which males seem to get off on. Females do to, but when they do it's their masculine side that is being activated. The epic quality of it is purely intellectual though.

Here is a little analogy to get my meaning across, that intellectualism is not a masculine trait. Emotion is a feminine trait. Power is masculine. Intellectualism is the crowning height of both roles, the yin/yang.

A person who uses the word "platonic" may simply mean a neutral sort of friendship. But to a person who is an intellectual, who has read the Symposium, is spiritual, and has experienced deep emotional relationships with many people, the word platonic means so much more. It is a deep and profound state of being that is epic, but to the average male or female, it's just a word that means friendship, it is a skimmed over word that is overused and rarely understood. When a person loves someone platonically, it raises the vibration of the male and female side to such an extent of spiritual intellectualism to the point where the desire for power and the attachment to emotion is transcended.

Last edited by Magnus on 09 Dec 2009, 4:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Oh man, great call on the Symposium. If you haven't read that techstep do so in short order, and if you have, read it again. I never would have thought of that in reference to this discussion, but it really does have a great deal of relevance (if in a pretty abstract way; although being that the thread is pretty abstract in nature, the correlation fits right in IMO).

You do have a point in that I could be sensing myself as a very rare sort of guy who will, each gender having generally less of a social sphere with the other, find friends of the same gender who are like them but struggle more in finding and identifying it in the opposite (more an illusion perhaps of just esoteric life dynamics than anything).

I'm out iof town again and walking through Whole Foods with my boss some Tory Amos came on, probably an older tune - but with her, Fiona Apple, I start hearing that same sort of angle that I really enjoy as well in a lot of the music I like. As far as Tool goes for masculinity and power though - I tend to think if someone's going for that why not Pantera or something like that? Bands like Tool or Alice In Chains had as their crowning aspect a very driving and intense flow of emotion, kind of like what Muse works with today; its like the Training Day or No Country For Old Men of the music world, less action but a lot more viscerally evocative and yeah - room for a lot more splintering and layering of different kinds of emotion as well. I have to admit though; I can hear that in Tory Amos, older Bjork stuff, etc..

I guess that does shed some doubt on my sense that epicism is more esoteric to guys. Usually assumptions like that anyway are something fleeting, arising from the right events and falling away rather quickly - its the danger of having a mind that telescopes in and that tends to only see the big picture by just moving around as rapidly as possible.

What I'm kind of surprised by - I still don't know where I've seen any women come out and answer my first question; I don't know if that's because its a taboo topic or that its almost impossible to describe by its own mechanics. I think of a situation like this though - we were over a friend's house, she has a guy friend of ours that - dating, friends with benefits, I have no idea as they both deny the heck out of and hold hands half the time (yes, at 30 - I have no idea). She's flirted with me in the past, we were at the table (me, her, and two other guys), and she was doing something that women will do often which is sort of beam across the table - I caught it with my peripheral vision but felt like a) not a direction I wanted to take, was very flattered no doubt - she's definitely attractive and b) I partly tried to ignore it because I knew she was smoked up - likely a passing feeling she had no desire to do anything about, and even more so logistics of friendship and social ties; not somewhere to go. That situation, although yes - I'm almost 100% certain that it doesn't mean a lot, I do remember that I did something, said something pragmatic, it was a question - I felt like I'd completely popped her bubble and almost felt bad about it; I didn't get an answer but just a long look. What I think about in that situation, it comes back to me all the times through my 20's that I was getting that sort of static attention but had no idea what to do with it because it was an emotional and neurological plane that I couldn't finesse my way through like most people can. There's vulnerability in a healthy sense, and then there's dropping everything and proving once and for all that your socially disabled - the last bit which I don't get the picture is really what they want. To be able to maintain though through a social situation where lets say I do meet a really cool girl but she wants to emotionally go in those directions - yes, I can feel it, but I almost need some sort of solid reality to be able to tack it to in order to keep myself in the same room; usually the more I overload the more it feeds into a loop where it keeps hitting them harder, even more of that gets generated - I want to keep it at a healthy and enjoyable level rather than emotionally maxing a girl out and having myself barely able to stagger out of the room (yes, its something for a 'brain on drugs' commercal with me - you can practically hear my brain sizzling).

Its not that this topic is about some hugely pivotal part of my life, there's lots of those, this is just something that at this point in my life I'm thinking about a bit more just because - I don't like feeling like the shut-in kid (or man) or like I'm missing balance in some degree or another. It seems like growing older is an exercise in learning to change what you can, gaining the grace to know the things you can't, and having the wisdom to know the difference - I don't mean changing things that you like or shooting strictly for conformity but rather trying to have your mind and body conform to your spiritual core and what the deepest parts of you find most important in life.

My bad for writing a book here - stuff like this is abstract though, I'm not a good enough writer to ever be as concise as I'd like sometimes .

See, to me that is not abstract in the least. That makes perfect sense to me. I wouldn't sell short your writing abilities dude, that is precisely how I feel and is the exact issue I struggle with, but I could never have put it into words period, much less explained it that well.

I KNOW deep down that I am capable of navigating these situations, not just sufficiently, but very well; however in the moment when the need comes to put it into practice, it is hit or miss at best and seemingly 100% out of my hands.

I guess I felt like that when I was very young. The thing that would happen when I liked someone is that I'd get all embarrassed and unnerved by it, but the guy would always enjoy that or so it seemed. I didn't find that to be a problem. However, if I was a guy and I got like that, I'm not sure how the average girl would respond. I would guess that most girls who are younger would laugh at it, see it as weakness and feel empowered by it in a sense where the feeling is so foreign and new to her that she takes advantage of it in a possibly cruel way due to her immaturity...If that happened I would suspect that such an early experience like that would cause a scar, make you very leery of females, possibly cause you to dislike that aspect of yourself and to patch it up you may try to demolish that side or put up such a defensive wall that no one could get in there again.

It is a very vulnerable thing, to have that sort of attraction in our formative years. I know you are no longer in your formative years, but I suspect that the social imprint has caused such a groove in your brain, that you relive what has not been brought to your conscious awareness.

I'd suggest you get really honest with yourself and look back at the first time you were attracted to a girl. Who was the first female that you were attracted to? Are there any similarities to what you were feeling the other night with your friend's girlfriend? Not to get too Freudian with you, I can't really help it though...Think about the Oedipus complex...
That is a private nature, so you can do your own psychoanalyzing about your relationship with your mother. Did she make you feel like you were incapable? Or did she praise you often? If she offered you lots of praise, what did she praise you about? If at times she made you feel handicapped or made you feel like you were less of a man, think about that or write it down. Did she devalue certain aspects of you such as your intellectualism or did she praise that? By that I mean, did she notice/understand/appreciate your intellectual side?

Geez, tech, you are interesting...very elusive...I'd like to solve the riddle just because it seems impossible or maybe because I think if you can heal yourself, then you can offer insight into this phenomenon and then others could benefit from it.

"I'm out iof town again and walking through Whole Foods with my boss some Tory Amos came on, probably an older tune"

Tori Amos sings beautifully, and I think her style is one of the most feminine I've heard. And very distinctive too--I like to think of it as a "rural" style because it evokes the sense of the country but is absolutely not "country" in the redneck cowboy sense.

And back to the thing of epic, in my case at least the "epic" is no less contemplative than any other state of mind, it's just more ambitious. I get in this frame where I feel like I'm capable of understanding the whole world--like I am above everything. Not literally like I understand everything--because believe me, just in my area of biology there are so many things I don't know--but it's a feeling that the world fundamentally makes sense, that I potentially could understand it. And not just in an intellectual way, but just that there's such a clear feeling of purpose to it all.

The downside of that feeling, if there is one, is that it isn't conducive to dealing with the matter-of-fact, sometimes "dirty" parts of reality. If you spend all your time looking at the horizon (figuratively), you may never get there. And, I'm thinking this may be at least some of the reason women are less prone to that, because they often feel they can't. In other words, there are many cases in life where women are "behind the scenes" helping facilitate with the more low-level things as others plan out the big picture, but fewer men are in this role, so generally a more ambitious atmosphere helps men "rise" more than women. Just a theory of course.

Interestingly, this thread also ties in with the thread I posted in the other forum about grad school. I'm used to thinking about science in a rather ambitious, "epic" way, in other words trying to visualize huge, complex systems as wholes and trying to wrap my brain around the fascinating complexity of it all. However, now that I've joined a lab it really hits home how many months or even years it takes to decipher even something relatively basic. It makes me realize that I will need to save the more ambitious thinking for my spare time, and in the lab learn to take more pride in the little accomplishments.

I think we can actually skip all the Freudian stuff and say that its really no mystery, this is exactly what happened and what it is. Knowing that of course doesn't help the problem because it wasn't just a few people who dealt severe trauma - it was hundreds if not thousands, and to the small levels that I get it even today I know that I can't just refurbish that area of myself that was gashed out - it's just as much banned by the world as when I was 15 and will be just as much when I'm 35, 40, 50, etc.. To even function in this world I had to technically smash all the impulses (or as many as I could) of who I was and rebuild from scratch. To tell the truth, technically, I should not even be who I am today - the likely alternative to that though I'd either be dead or be the guy writing "I'm a deformed mutant loser" posts at home in his 40's. That's just how far both what I've been through in life and what my own self-reengineering have had to be for me to even be remotely happy with my life. My decision was really this; regardless of how people had treated me in the past - it caught up to me at 18 that I literally can't allow myself to act the part and be the part or accept the identity that was being forced on me by the world around me, that to me was the most perverse form of victimhood - really something that amounts to daily rape on a lot of levels. I had the choice of either killing myself or going all out, 200%, at being as successful as I could and refusing to stop short of my higher ideals - or just have my body fall apart and die young from pushing myslef that hard. I have mellowed out a lot since then of course just because - that was idealism and a lot of reality has set in. I did learn that there are certain things, like I my exterior appearance or sensory/neurological overload, that I can't control - pretty much anything else is there and I want to pursue whatever angles I can at really fulfilling what I want out of life. Sadly the things I can't control still are the first and formost things that will dictate what people who generally don't know me will think on the fly and off the cuff on first impression and yes, how they will react. At the same time though - I can't let myself be a victim, I refuse to acknowledge it, I refuse to see myself as such, and technically - this is something completely beyond any of the people who have in a sense ever given me grief, to have a few traumas means that you can actually dial in on the few people who did what they did to you, when its hundreds or thousands on an ongoing basis - you have to realize that something about you just taps a societal nerve.

That's why I had to try to find new ways of communicating; I couldn't get normal or proportionate reactions from people. I know that my social skills are stunted in certain areas, likely more in terms of just quick wit rather than any sort of general polish or courtesy issues (I probably don't get revealed often until I'm pushed into a situation where I have to emotionally flow on NT terms - that's when it generally doesn't work or when I have to hope that there are enough people in the conversation that my relative silence won't be noticed).
The area that this topic brushes up on is an area that I know that will have to manually try to find another way of understanding it, seeing it, thinking it, feeling it, ultimately finding a way to engage it that does not rely on any of my genetic-instinctive reacions.

My take is - if there is a particular brand of emotion that I'm restricting my outward articulation of too greatly; I realize I can either fix it or keep getting the same results I've been getting. Though honestly, I can't step backward and recover something that was there before, I have to find a new way of getting my mind into it and yes, in a sense, almost foster or construct a new articulation of myself that is able to give back in that sense. Its quite possible that in the remaining years of at least relative 'youth' that I have left there's really no hope for me overcoming this - I understand that's very possible but I still don't see the point in retiring yet, if that time comes my mind will find a way to make peace with it, right now's still too soon not to have regrets later though.