Bankers no longer buying bottle service? Laid-off construction workers unable to summon the swagger to whistle at a pretty girl? Urban tales of the emasculating effects of unemployment in a society that still measures men by their bank accounts are perennial. But that doesn’t explain the recent media frenzy over Dating a Banker Anonymous (DABA)— a blog where the female partners of Wall Street warriors ostensibly vent about how the economic meltdown has morphed their men into “emotional train wrecks,” deflating their sex lives along with the Dow. As co-founder Laney Crowell admits, the site was a “joke” in which the rants were in fact amped-up parodies, snookering readers because they echoed an emerging bit of conventional wisdom: that this recession is messing with men’s heads.

Most guys still derive the bulk of their self-esteem from work, psychologists say, which makes the latest unemployment data ominous for the male ego: of the 3.6 million people canned since the downturn began in December 2007, more than four fifths have been men. Women are poised, for the first time in history, to become the bulk of the labor force, while fewer than seven in 10 men over the age of 20 are employed at all—the lowest number since World War II, says Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress.

That’s the bad news. The worse news is that despite stories (in the New York Post, Advertising Age, and The New York Times,among other publications) that some men are embracing new roles as diaper changers and domestic engineers, the fall in workplace testosterone is unlikely to lead to a decline in the kinds of behavior usually associated with boom-time male hormones. That’s because the fundamentals of American manhood have gone remarkably unchanged over the last century. Sure, we men today may be taking care of our kids, our skin and our feelings more than Grandpa Ralph ever did, but we still grapple with the same core problem: proving that we weren’t just born male—we’ve become Men. And during economic crises, men humiliated by their loss of work often compensate by reasserting their worst hypermasculine impulses—doubling down on old alpha-male stereotypes, rather than happily baking the bread that women now win in the workplace.

But if we look behind us, male misbehavior during recessions shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, as American men have responded to layoffs with consistency through the years: seeking solace in the bottle, railing against women, walling themselves away in all-male enclaves and searching for vicarious achievement through sports and popular culture. During the first three decades of the 20th century, for instance, when thousands of men lost their jobs in a series of recessions and many more found themselves crowded by a new breed of fast-talking, cigarette-smoking gals around the office, the male reaction was typical.

According to “Manhood in America,” sociologist Michael Kimmel’s history of masculinity under trial, big-city saloons flourished, despite flooding the market with more than one taproom per 200 residents, while bookstores overflowed with guy-friendly tales of the mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan (1910) and the new adventures of Tarzan of the Apes (1912). Men also carved out their own new space in the house, christening “the den” around 1905 in the depths of another 20-something-month economic meltdown. Meanwhile, rather than extend a hand to the fairer sex, men blamed women for their professional woes. AuthorNorman Cousins even offered a straightforward, albeit ridiculous, solution to the Great Depression: remove the silk-kneed imports. “Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men,” he advised. When that didn’t happen—women were paid far less than men—many laid-off men went to the gym—which was good news for Angelo Siciliano, a.k.a. Charles Atlas, who opened his first training center in 1927. By 1942, Atlas Bodybuilding was the most successful mail-order business in U.S. history thanks to men who pumped their bodies as their egos deflated.

So how do we break this cycle of sitcom behavior? A good first step would be for men to stop defining masculinity in market terms—and for women to feel comfortable with that. As the DABA girls suggested, laid-off men are often less sexy to their female counterparts. During the Depression, one study found that almost 60 percent of men experienced a chilling effect on their conjugal relations. “When money goes, love flies out of the window,” said one man. Of course, not everyone is losing in this shifting male landscape. PornHub.com now has more monthly traffic than Fox News.

(An article from CNN.com, by Elizabeth Landau, originally posted Feb. 19, 2009)

It may seem obvious that men perceive women in sexy bathing suits as objects, but now there’s science to back it up.

Images of women in bikinis prompted brain responses in men associated with using tools.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.
(more…)

Fear of anger is just as preventative for growth as is anger itself. For men, a lot of times being afraid of their anger and the effects of playing out their anger makes their mental health worse off. 

Many men I speak to are afraid of the damaging effects of their anger on other people. They are simply afraid of unleashing what they think will be destructive anger onto their mates, partners, co-workers or family, so they muzzle it. Men are known to stuff their anger, suppress it, mute it or fail to communicate it. This creates a host of problems. The anger is in their, building up over time like a pressure cooker, and needs a release valve to depressurize it.

So, without a good valve, the anger gets mutated. It comes out as sideswipes, quips, sarcasm or criticism. It is worn on the sleeve and becomes part of one’s personality structure. It becomes “who we are,” and we forget or simply don’t have a clue about how to deal with it effectively, for fear that we’ll do it ineffectively and be rejected by others for our rageful behavior.

We get afraid of our own anger, but the reality is that anger is a normal and natural force that needs expression just like the other feelings that we experience, such as sadness, pain, happiness, etc. But, somehow along the way, either by cultural forces or gender expectations or both, we as men learned to stuff that natural force that is anger. We hid it, and stopped its organic and expressive flow. 

So, learning to express our anger in a healthy way is a must, to find better mental health and more open and happier relationships. Learning to simply say “I’m angry about this,” or “I’m angry at you” are acceptable and non-violent ways to express yourself. It’s difficult to do, because we’re usually fixated on the person that caused us to be angry, and subsequently spend all of our time and psychic energy damning them and their actions that caused us to be angry. Taking responsibility for our own anger is a must, and we must learn to get better in touch with our own anger, so that it does not drive us into the ground and run our lives.

(Article taken from Newsweek.com, published Feb. 14, 2009)

By Mary Carmichael:

If you aren’t already paralyzed with stress from reading the financial news, here’s a sure way to achieve that grim state: read a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain. Stress, you’ll learn, is crippling your neurons so that, a few years or decades from now, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will have an easy time destroying what’s left. That’s assuming you haven’t already died by then of some other stress-related ailment such as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a long period of uncertainty—a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling assets, home foreclosures and two continuing wars—the downside of stress is certainly worth exploring. But what about the upside? It’s not something we hear much about. 

In the past several years, a lot of us have convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone, all the time. We’ve blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory lapses to full-on dementia—and that’s just in the brain. We’ve even come up with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into stressful situations: they’re “adrenaline junkies.”

Sure, stress can be bad for you, especially if you react to it with anger or depression or by downing five glasses of Scotch. But what’s often overlooked is a common-sense counterpoint: in some circumstances, it can be good for you, too. It’s right there in basic-psychologytextbooks. As Spencer Rathus puts it in “Psychology: Concepts and Connections,” “some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied.” Yet that’s not the theme that’s been coming out of science for the past few years. “The public has gotten such a uniform message that stress is always harmful,” saysJanet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s too bad, because most people do their best under mild to moderate stress.”

The stress response—the body’s hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can energize us, “revving up our systems to handle what we have to handle,” says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient. Even when it’s extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. “There’s really a biochemical and scientific bias that stress is bad, but anecdotally and clinically, it’s quite evident that it can work for some people,” says Orloff. “We need a new wave of research with a more balanced approach to how stress can serve us.” Otherwise, we’re all going to spend far more time than we should stressing ourselves out about the fact that we’re stressed out.

When I started asking researchers about “good stress,” many of them said it essentially didn’t exist. “We never tell people stress is good for them,” one said. Another allowed that it might be, but only in small ways, in the short term, in rats. What about people who thrive on stress, I asked—people who become policemen or ER docs or air-traffic controllers because they like seeking out chaos and putting things back in order? Aren’t they using stress to their advantage? No, the researchers said, those people are unhealthy. “This business of people saying they ‘thrive on stress’? It’s nuts,” Bruce Rabin, a distinguished psychoneuroimmunologist, pathologist and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told me. Some adults who seek out stress and believe they flourish under it may have been abused as children or permanently affected in the womb after exposure to high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, he said. Even if they weren’t, he added, they’re “trying to satisfy” some psychological need. Was he calling this a pathological state, I asked—saying that people who feel they perform best under pressure actually have a disease? He thought for a minute, and then: “You can absolutely say that. Yes, you can say that.”

(Read more here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/184154)

I am going into the studio in the next couple of weeks to record “The Guy’s Airbag: A Relationship Pre-Crash Course.” Here the gist:

What if you had an airbag for your relationship? What if when things went really wrong, or even as a safety measure against a crash, you had solid skills and tools designed to help you ? I picked this title because I want to help you prevent a fatal relationship. I see them all the time.

All too often, men and couples come to counseling after they’ve been through what amounts to an auto accident in their marriage or relationship, and never had the skills and tools to know how to keep it alive.

Maybe the relationship is on life support, or maybe an affair has damaged a marriage to the point of irreconcilable differences.  Everything seems to be held together by a string, and it didn’t used to be this way. 

Worse, I see men start new relationships with the same faulty thinking that got them into trouble the first time. Maybe you know somebody like this. Maybe this is about you.

(Great article from CNN.com by Celeste Perron - Feb. 11, 2009)

When Lynn Houston was 27, she met an affectionate young man during a business trip to Virginia. Although she lived in Arizona, the two began dating; they married six months later. But after she joined him in Virginia, he became distant and had angry flare-ups, Houston says.

He barely resembled the man she’d married, but he did remind her of another man she knew well: her father.

  (more…)

(Great article from CNN.com by Celeste Perron - Feb. 11, 2009)

When Lynn Houston was 27, she met an affectionate young man during a business trip to Virginia. Although she lived in Arizona, the two began dating; they married six months later. But after she joined him in Virginia, he became distant and had angry flare-ups, Houston says.

He barely resembled the man she’d married, but he did remind her of another man she knew well: her father.

“They were both very emotionally unavailable and prone to outbursts of rage,” says Houston, now 44 and a business consultant in Phoenix.

After six years of attempting to rescue the union through therapy, Houston filed for divorce.

Alison Wobschall also married a man like her father, but with much better results. “I have a great relationship with my dad, so I suppose I looked for a partner who shares some of his good qualities,” says Wobschall, 22, head of marketing and public relations for a Minneapolis nonprofit.

Both men are “really interested in politics and the stock market, and they agree on everything,” she says. “Also, when I’m upset about something, they’ll always help me put it in perspective.”

Both share the name Mike, and they even look alike. And Alison bears a striking resemblance to her mother-in-law, in appearance as well as personality. “We always laugh at the same things, even if nobody else is laughing,” she says.

Although Houston’s and Wobschall’s marriages couldn’t have been more different, both women chose partners who resembled a parent. And, say experts, their experiences aren’t that unusual.

Comfort in familiarity

Berkeley, California, psychotherapist Elayne Savage says familiarity is a big reason people may choose someone like Mom or Dad as a partner.

“When you grow up familiar with a certain type of person, you’re attracted to that same type of person because it feels comfortable, whether you like it or not,” says Savage, author of “Breathing Room: Creating Space to Be a Couple.” “That’s what people mean when they meet a potential partner and say, ‘It ‘feels like I’ve known him my whole life.’”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that a parent’s physical or intellectual traits may have some influence. A Hungarian researcher studied the facial features of 52 families and found a significant correlation between the appearance of men and their fathers-in-law and those of women and their mothers-in-law.

And in a survey of approximately 2,700 “high-achieving” men — those in the top 10 percent of their age income bracket and/or with an advanced degree — a University of Iowa researcher found they are likely to marry women with education levels and careers that mirror those of their moms.

Miami resident Aaron Gordon, 27, wouldn’t argue. Gordon’s wife, Rebecca, 27, has the same career as his mom — teaching gifted elementary-schoolers — and the women share a love of cooking and talking on the phone.

“When I met Rebecca, she was pursuing a career in advertising, and it wasn’t until well after we started dating that she decided she didn’t like advertising and opted instead to get her master’s in education,” says Aaron. “Although I definitely wanted to marry an educated woman, I wouldn’t say that it was critical that she match my mom’s level of schooling — though in the end, they both earned master’s degrees.”

Rebecca says Aaron is just like her dad. “The longer I’m with Aaron, the more I notice idiosyncratic things, like the fact that they both love politics, and are both bad drivers, and both love going to supermarket for like two hours and buying too much stuff,” she laughs.

Righting old wrongs

Sometimes, people choose mates who resemble their parents not because of fond memories, but to make amends for an unhappy childhood.

“This is most common if you felt rejected or abandoned by a parent and still haven’t worked through it,” says Stephen Treat, director of the Council for Relationships, a Philadelphia nonprofit. “Your psyche wants to go back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, and resolve that parental relationship in a marriage.”

Women who felt abandoned by their fathers are likely to choose emotionally unavailable husbands, for example, and men raised by hypercritical moms will be drawn to wives who pick on them, he says.

It’s not a good idea. “You think you’ll be able to heal this way, but you’re probably no more equipped to deal with the situation than you were as a child, and the parental dynamic gets repeated in your marriage, usually with bad consequences,” he says.

Reclaiming personal history

Does that mean it’s a mistake to marry somebody like Mom or Dad?

Casey Clark Ney, 30, hopes not. She and her dad, who is now deceased, lived in different states after her parents divorced when she was a child. Although they had a warm phone relationship, Ney only saw him once or twice a year, and he wasn’t very physically affectionate.

Her husband, James, 31, resembles her dad and has a similar “hard-working, calm, kind” quality. But James, too, isn’t very affectionate.

“He grew up in a family who didn’t do a lot of hugs and kisses and ‘I love you’s, and that does bother me,” says Ney, a freelance journalist in Boise, Idaho. “I think there could be some truth in the idea that I’m working through my history in my marriage.”

Breaking the chain

Despite evidence that suggests some of us are attracted to mates who resemble our parents, it’s not a foregone conclusion, says therapist Barbara Swenson, director of the Couple Center in Sherman Oaks, California.

“If you want very badly to have a different and better relationship than the ones you grew up with, you can accomplish that if you go about it very consciously.”

Swenson offers these pointers:

• Don’t jump in. ”Ideally you should date for a couple of years before engagement — and not just long distance,” she says. “You need to be together on those days when your car won’t start … to see how you and your partner support each other.”

• Don’t be afraid to disagree. ”Assert yourself and see what your partner does with that,” she says. “Can they put their needs aside and follow your lead once in a while? Make sure your relationship has room for give and take.”

• Talk about life issues. Some questions to discuss sooner rather than later: If we have kids, will one of us stay home? Who will manage our money? “Premarital counseling can get these questions out on the table in a civilized way, and prevent problems down the road,” says Swenson. 

Control is such a basic and fundamental issue underlying men’s behavior, especially within the context of a relationship. I often hear women complaining that they feel controlled by their man’s behavior, and end up reacting against this perceived control. Men often times don’t know what they are doing, and have no ide nor desire to control their women. At least that’s what they say.

Control issues can rear their ugly heads in relationships, and cause a lot of destruction. It defines a relationship in terms of a power imbalance, and activities and interactions then become a sort of power currency between mates. I don’t know too many men that would readily or easily admit that they have control issues, let alone start to communicate about them in their relationship. Saying “I feel helpless or out of control” is a lot less harmful to the communication and to their spouses than is trying to control someone or their behavior overtly. It’s difficult to take ownership or responsibility for wanting to control someone or someone’s behavior that is somehow unacceptable to the controlling person.

Control issues within a relationship are subtle, and I think that they underlie other types of problems in a marriage or a relationship, and can manifest themselves in different ways, such as jealousy, anger, compulsiveness, rage, etc. 

To start to have an honest conversation about control is to start to depressurize it, and to stop letting it affect your relationship in the subtle and myriad ways that it does.

(This is a good article from the NY Times, January 25th, 2009, about female desire)

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.

Rest of article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?emc=eta1