Episode 9 – Tapping Into Gender Energies

Episode Summary

In this show we discussed gender energies, energetic behaviors, maladaptive behaviors, and how you can feel better by tapping into your gender energy.

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Show Transcript

All right, hello, everybody, and welcome once again to the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I’m your host, David Enevoldsen. And here on Emotional Embuffination, we are training to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life. And just as importantly, we are looking at different ways to attain new levels of success and happiness and to optimize all those positive emotions. This podcast is just one of a bunch of different resources I have available. Check out the Emotional Embuffination website if you want to find out more about that. It is embuffination.com. On today’s show, we are going to be talking about male and female energies primarily, and some of the differences between men and women, and more importantly and to the Emotional Embuffination point, how you can use that stuff to make yourself feel better or how you can live a happier life. All right. I feel like this is going to be a controversial one just because there are so many dialogues of late in in media and elsewhere hovering around gender and whether that’s even a thing. There seem to be a couple evolving stances here. One is that there are no differences between men and women. Some are that you can kind of adopt other things. That is, we get into the non-binary realm, the sort of you can embrace a different perspective. You can completely shift gender or you can feel like you’re trapped within your body. All of these things and the trans realm, that sort of thing.

 

So, I don’t know to what extent this is going to be offensive to people or not, but I’m going to tell you kind of how I perceive things. And quite frankly, for me personally, I feel like tapping into my own gender energies has been extraordinarily constructive in terms of how I feel and how I’m kind of managing my life and emotions. And it’s for that reason that I’m offering what I’m going to be talking about today. At the end of the day, you can choose to use it or not. I don’t care one way or another if you want to take on a different gender association, you want to identify as something else. I don’t care if you want to be non-binary. I don’t care if you want to be anything. I don’t care if you want to alter your body such that you can change your gender. I don’t care. I’m just telling you what I perceive and how this best works for me. And I’ve seen it with other people too. And so I’m offering this as a potential tool to kind of get in touch with yourself, get in touch with who and what you are and how you can use that to make yourself feel better. One of the themes that I think comes out of this dialogue is that a lot of people point to, well, we’re really not different. We have I’m not sure what the label is for it, but maybe it’s something like a pure behavioral perspective or a social constructionist perspective, and that is essentially that we are identical. Men and women are no different other than an ancillary biological distinction, what happens with our genitals, that kind of thing.

 

But other than that, we’re perfectly identical. And I had a college class where this was kind of the proposed position, and this was within the I forget what they called it was something like feminist studies or something along those lines. I had taken a class there and I was kind of excited about taking it because I’d previously taken another class within the feminism curriculum and I really liked it. It was a great class. I took it. It was all about United States women’s history and it was fascinating because it just looked at this entire spread of the US’s history, but from a female perspective, and it looked at all the contributions women had made and kind of the angle that you would take if you were looking at it through just the sheer lens of a woman’s perspective. And we were reading all sorts of primary source documents. We’re reading like diaries and all this stuff. It was absolutely fascinating. And I loved the class. So, I took this other class after that, which was, I believe it was entitled Women in Contemporary Society. And the Professor there was sort of a hardcore feminist but had these positions that made utterly no sense to me.

 

And she would essentially just come in without any real support, from my perspective, at least, she would just make an assertion that we are the same. In fact, I remember her specifically saying that if we had been brought up in a different society, men and women could be the exact opposites. Women could essentially be acting the way that men do, and women could be acting the way that they would basically flip flop roles. Right? That we would just be reversed because there was this idea that we were entirely socially constructed, we were entirely behaviorally programed. And there is no sort of biological difference between us. I know that this position has become more and more popular of late, and I’ve seen some studies even highlighting some of the similarities between the genders. And I’m not by any stretch disputing that there are a lot of similarities and in fact, we are way more alike than we are different. Men and women have a hell of a lot in common. My my book Emotional Embuffination was intentionally written, I consciously thought about this while I was writing it, it was intentionally written in a way that was not addressing gender issues. I was dealing with things that I think are true for both genders. Because we are all humans and we have a heck of a lot of commonality in our humanness. That said, we do have differences. There, and I don’t know how you argue with this, quite frankly, because we have an enormous amount of research highlighting differences between men and women.

 

And I think that there’s this impulse to say, “Well, the differences that may exist are all social,” but I don’t know how you explain away the infant studies, because we’ve done a lot of studies showing differences between male and female infants. Just to name a couple, and there are a ton of them. One that I looked at recently was looking at infants between three and eight months old and trying to figure out what these infants were more likely to gravitate to in terms of toys. And the boys were more likely to gravitate towards the traditionally male toys like trucks, cars, that sort of thing. And the girls were more likely to gravitate towards the things that we think of as being traditionally girly toys like the dolls. There was another one I was recently looking at that was studying specifically activity, and this was a meta study, so it was looking at a whole bunch of different studies where they were trying to determine which was more physically active, male or female. And there was a statistically significant difference between the two showing that male infants were more physically active than the female infants. So here again, there was a difference in infants. I remember reading this one when I was very little and it was so I don’t have the cite offhand, but I remember seeing it. There was a study where they if I remembering correctly, they took babies and put them in front of this monitor and then they tied a string to their hands so that when the baby would pull the string, the monitor would light up and something would appear on it.

 

So they get the babies used to this for a little bit, and they’re in this little chair right in front of the monitor. And so the babies learn that they can pull the strin,g monitor lights up, and then secretly the researchers would deactivate the monitor so that no matter how much the baby would pull the string, the monitor would no longer light up. And then they sort of watched the reactions. And what they found was that the at some statistically significant level, I don’t remember what it was the male babies were much more likely to grab it and pull and keep pulling and just start yanking the heck out of it. The female babies almost always gave up and started crying. So, here again, you’ve got this difference in infants that is popping up between genetically male and female babies. And it’s not just infants. I mean, we we have lots of studies looking at adults and a lot of them focus on things like sexuality and whatnot. But there is there’s a ton of research out there showing that men and women behave differently in certain circumstances or are drawn to different things, have proclivities in different ways. One interesting one I was reading about earlier was done by YouGov Omnibus in the United Kingdom, and they did a study of like 39,000 Brits asking how long somebody should wait before having sex with with a partner.

 

And in this study, 28% of the men they looked at said they’d sleep with someone on the first date. Only 7% of women would do so. Not terribly surprising. There’s another study which is frequently cited to where they took college students and they had college students run around on a college campus and approach members of the opposite sex. And they would ask one of several questions. One was, would you be willing to go out on a date with me? Another was, will you would you be willing to go back to my room, my dorm room? And then the third one was, if I remember correctly, would you be willing to have sex with me? And the would you date with me there was a difference between there was a very nominal difference between the men and the women. It was pretty close, I think, if I’m remembering correctly, it was something like 50% said yes, I’d like to go out on a date with you for both genders. But we started seeing more and more of a spread as we shifted into would you be willing to go back to my room. And then the last question would you be willing to have sex with me. Of the people that were asked, would you be willing to have sex with me 75% of the men asked by a woman, would you be willing to have sex with me said yes.

 

0% of the women being asked that question said yes. So, there was a sizable disparity in terms of behavior patterns there that that are popping up. So, I don’t know how you can argue that we don’t have some kind of variation here. I, I think that there is and of course, I don’t want to summarize any political position or political leaning into a single thing because I don’t think anything isn’t that complex. I don’t personally find myself aligning with any political position. So please don’t interpret this as a a political statement. But there are I think there is a certain thought process within the liberal community that we should be exactly what I was describing before, perfectly equal. But then that also doesn’t, in my mind, quite jive with the idea that somebody wants to be a gender that they’re not, because otherwise, why would that even matter unless we truly did have some distinctions. So I would offer we’re different. We’re not we’re not the same. I don’t think that this in any way on in any moral or ethical level means that you should have to do something. And this, in my mind, is where we really start to get into problems is when I start to say, “Well, you’re a woman, so you should be in the kitchen.” Like, that’s a problem, because now I’m trying to force you into a certain behavior pattern based on your gender.

 

I don’t think we should at all be doing any of that stuff. You’re a man, so you need to go do the grunt work and go labor in the mines or something. Like whatever it is if you’re just relying on a pure gender distinction to obligate someone to something, I think that’s a problem. But with that said, we seem to have differentiation in the underlying behavior patterns. I also personally, and maybe this is getting a little too much into the political realm, but I have a little bit of trouble with kind of imposing the idea of surgeries on children. I know there’s a lot of discussion about talking to kids about what their actual genders are. Here again, I don’t really care what you want to do. I don’t care if if you want to have a kid that grows up and flips genders or changes sexuality or I don’t care about anything like that. I do strongly think that children are extremely emotionally immature and very rarely have the slightest clue what they want or are talking about on an emotional, developmental, or even cognitive level. They just they don’t. Most adults don’t even really have a solid grip on what’s going on. Children just don’t have any clue what’s going on. I don’t care how mature you think your kid is for his or her age, they’re just not very mature.

 

So I I hesitate to encourage a child to make a lifelong physical alteration in an immature state. But again, at the end of the day, I don’t care what anybody is doing. I’m only offering this as a possible model by which to feel better. There’s also some scenarios, I think, where the the shift in genders can be intrinsically motivating. For example, if I’m a child and I want to change my gender there is a lot of incentive in doing that because you get to be essentially identified as special and you can roll into some of the victimhood mindset, which if you’ve heard any of Emotional Embuffination, you’ll know I’m an advocate against going into the victimhood thing. So if you are in a position where you’re trying to encourage a child to identify as something else, or you yourself are trying to identify as something else, and especially if you’re considering actually altering your gender, I, I’m not going to say don’t do that, but I would say that you should do a lot of introspection and think very carefully before you do anything to physically alter yourself. At least this is how I would encourage it. Just because it can pop up in a lot of problematic ways, like it can become a function of just that victimhood, and that’s what drives you into it, or the need to be special, which a lot of children are desperate for. Sometimes it can be a self-defense mechanism.

 

So, just think carefully about it if that’s the road you want to go down. But again, at the end of the day, if that’s what you want to do then do it, I’m not I’m not trying to prohibit or condemn that in any way. I don’t think that any of us should be condemned for whatever the heck we choose to be or do on the condition that it’s not injurious to other people. But do think about it, because, again, what we’re talking about in Emotional Embuffination is trying to optimize yourself, escape victimhood, facilitate positive emotions. And if the motivations for your path to look at gender are coming from a place of fear or victimhood or anything like that, it’s not going to take you down a good road. Changing the external stuff does not fix internally broken things. So just contemplate that if you’re in that situation. One more thing I want to talk about kind of on a social level is this idea of toxic masculinity. We and I think that some some people that are sort of in the liberal realm get this right, and some people don’t because I think there’s a tendency to conflate the idea of toxic masculinity with just any masculinity. So if there’s any sort of connection to something that feels masculine energetically, then you just start to label that immediately as something toxic. I don’t think that every every person talking about toxic masculinity looks at it this way.

 

And I would advocate for if you’re going to have a toxic masculinity discussion and I’m going to get into this a little bit later because that sort of falls into the paradigm and umbrella that I’m talking about. I would advocate that you should look at it as when masculinity becomes injurious to other people or becomes a problem that causes you problems. If it’s not doing those things and it is masculine in nature, I would just say don’t apply the toxic part of that. I think there’s a tendency to sort of meld those two. All right. Let’s talk about the model that I have come together with. This is I haven’t heard anybody describe it in exactly this way. So this is sort of my convention. I didn’t entirely make up these concepts. I’ve gotten them from elsewhere, of course, but this is what the framework that I’m using is a model that I’ve, I guess, coined for for my own personal use. So I’m going to offer it to you. So there are, under my model, essentially a couple of different energetic elements. So it starts with the underlying gender energy. And then from the underlying gender energy we shift into the behaviors that manifest from tapping into or not tapping into that particular gender energy. And either a man or a woman can tap into a masculine or feminine energy, either way. The behaviors are just what you’re doing outside of that.

 

And then we also have something that I tend to think of as like adaptive or corrupted gender energies, which is where things kind of go off track and you’re sort of tapping into a gender energy, but it results in a behavior pattern that, kind of like the toxic masculinity thing, that ends up being destructive in some way. So, let’s hear these down a little bit. The feminine. Let’s talk about feminine. So feminine energies are traditionally thought of as being like flowing, dynamic, nurturing, expressive, relational, connected, sometimes emotional, unrestricted, creative, circular, receptive. There’s a focus on beauty. They’re beauty-centered. They’re romance oriented. The masculine energies are thought of as being conquering, assertive, goal-oriented, powerful, powerful in sort of a physical sense, because either one can be powerful, structured, physical, disciplined, linear, very direct, problem-solving oriented, focused, and in motion. My model, I think, reduces it down just a little bit more. So, I tend to think of just really three basic concepts for each of the two energies. So, I would offer you that the male energies tend to float into protective and or combative as one. Two is physical. And three is providing. On the female side my model is that the female energetic outline starts with a representation of beauty. Relational energies. And receiving energies. So protective, protective/combative, physical, and providing for males, For females or female energies, its beauty representations, relational and receiving. And one more thing. I just want to reiterate this.

 

I kind of alluded to it a second ago, but I don’t think that one is inherently strong and the other one isn’t. And I think there’s a tendency to think of the stereotypes as being men are strong because men sort of often seek out physical strength. And this is another one of those sort of biological differences we have. I mean, there is enormous amount of research showing that men are generally physically stronger than women. And just our hormonal cocktail seems to facilitate that. The development of strength and muscle in and just the straight up anatomy that we have sort of facilitates that more in men than in women. But when I’m talking about strength specifically, I don’t think of that as being tied to just physical strength. I think either one of these can be strong. There is there’s an enormous amount of strength that can come out of a female energetic position. It can take a lot of strength to engage in relational efforts. Many of the things that I describe in Emotional Embuffination the book talk about being relational, being diplomatic, being non-confrontational, non-combative. So it’s almost the reciprocal of the male energies. And so, in many ways that might be more difficult for a man than it would be for a woman. So to whatever extent that’s true I think it’s important to tap into the reciprocal energy for for whatever the resolution of that problem is. When you’re talking about beauty representation, especially when you yourself are the focus of the beauty that can take an enormous amount of courage and strength.

 

I mean, think about just stereotypically, and anecdotally, I’ve known an insane number of women who’ve come to me and seem very wrapped up in their self-perception about what they physically look like. They often want to be deemed beautiful, attractive, pretty, and everybody wants to be attractive on some level. But anecdotally it seems like a lot more of the women in my life have been focused on how upset they are that they don’t feel feel beautiful than I’ve known men that are upset that they don’t feel like they’re super hot. And if you are a woman and you are putting yourself out there and you are dressing up really nice and trying to go out and look sexy, that can take a fair amount of courage, especially if you’re feeling insecure about your body. And that’s a strength. There’s a lot of there’s strength in the relational stuff. There’s some strength in putting yourself in a vulnerable position where you’re receiving. If you take sort of a stereotypical nuclear household with kind of a man goes out and works, and I’m not saying you should do this again, but this is one of the stereotypes and I think it’s coming out of these energies, if you take a situation where a man goes out and works all day and the woman just stays home and does child-rearing and cares for the house kind of thing, then if you embrace that stereotype, that’s an enormous amount of dependance from a woman’s perspective.

 

I mean, she’s putting a lot of faith in the idea that this relationship is going to prevail and she’s going to continue to be able to survive. That’s that’s a kind of strength. There’s enormous levels of strength that go into being a woman and exhibiting a female energy in so many different ways. At any rate, those are the energies. So next we have the behaviors. So, the behaviors are things that are coming out of the energy itself. And if you think of some of the stereotypes and this is why they don’t necessarily match up, because just because you are exhibiting or tapping into a particular gender energy does not necessarily mean that you are going to engage in a specific behavior. One of the things I think of as a stereotype almost of women is that they love shoes. Everybody’s heard this stereotype, like women are just obsessed with shoes. When I was in law school, I had a class where I always sat in the same spot and there was a girl that sat in front of me every single class. And I would she had her laptop open. And every single class she would spend pretty much the entire class looking online at different shoes. And I thought it was it was almost comical. And this went on for the entire semester. She was just browsing different shoes, all class, every single time.

 

And that that, to me, seemed to match up with the stereotype, right, that women are all in the shoes. Obviously, not all women are into shoes. Obviously, not every woman out there is going to spend all of her time or obsessive amounts of energy, and I’ve met plenty of women that were not that into shoes. I met a lot of women that were. I’ve had, I’ve had romantic relationships with a couple of women that had more shoes than I can even imagine. But not everyone, not every woman is going to be that obsessed with shoes, right? But a lot of them are. And if you think about that’s the behavior, the the wanting to get the shoes to putting attention into the shoes, going out and buying the shoes, collecting the shoes, etc., etc., if that’s the behavior, where is that coming from? So, if you think about the beauty representation that’s making yourself a beauty. It’s spending energy and time and focus and passion on becoming beautiful. Which sort of lines you up for some of the other stuff because that feeds into the relational element. Because if you’re beautiful and attractive, that brings someone in to engage in relationship and also to a lesser extent feeds into the receiving end, because now maybe somebody’s going to swoop in and be like, “Oh, you’re so pretty. Like, Here’s some stuff.” Which, which is a whole independent fantasy that I’ve talked to a number of women who seem interested in it.

 

And you kind of see that in some of our lore. Think about, for example, Pretty Woman, that movie. I mean, it was this story about an impoverished woman, in essence, who’s just kind of barely getting by living as a street walker. And she has this guy that comes along and says, “You’re so beautiful.” I mean, think about the name of the movie Pretty Woman. “You are so beautiful. I’m going to dote you and throw money at you, because I can.” I mean, that’s a fantasy. A number of women I’ve talked to have, and it’s embedded deeply in our culture. And whatever you think of that, whether you think that that’s a sort of patriarchal, oppressive ideal or not, it’s something that seems to persist. The 50 Shades of Gray is another great example of that. It’s a woman who doesn’t have much money and this wealthy guy sweeps in and starts providing her with money. So, the behaviors, if we think of some of the stereotypical behavioral patterns for each of men and women, it’s all sort of tying back to one of these. Like, let’s let’s talk about men for a second. Men, I think of a lot of men as being into martial arts. That ties into the protective, combative stuff. I think a lot about men being more promiscuous or wanting promiscuity, and it ties up with the research articles we were talking about a few minutes ago. And sex ties into the physical and in sort of a allegorical way or symbolic way, it goes into the providing. Working on cars, I think ties into sort of a physical thing. Being high achievers, entrepreneurial, that sort of thing.

 

I think that goes into the providing element. One of the stereotypes I always think of is like they’re driving somewhere and the guy, it’s almost moot in modern times when we have Google Maps and everything, but you used to have the stereotype of guys will refuse to ask for directions, and that goes into the sense of like men being stubborn and independent, which I think in turn ties into that sort of protective, combative element because you need to sort of have an element of independence and self-reliance. I mean, you think about the military and they don’t train soldiers to sort of be hyper relational. They depend on each other and they work as a unit, that sort of thing. But you can’t just run out and say, “Oh, I need help in the middle of a battle.” You’re expected to just suck it up, do it and get it done. That goes into that protective, combative mode, in my mind. Some of the stereotypes around women think about makeup, and I’ve talked to a lot of women that really think a lot about makeup and their appearance, and it goes into the beauty stuff. Same with clothing. Again, I’ve known lots of women that are very into clothing. With respect to the sexuality where whereas men tend to be very physical women, just like we had that study, 0% of the college students that were approached said they would go have sex with this person that just randomly approached them.

 

Most of the time when I talk to women about sexuality, they want to be wooed first. They want to take me to dinner, buy me wine, that kind of thing they want to receive, which was one of those. But they also want the relational element of it, which so it’s tying into a couple of things so that this also goes into some evolutionary stuff. I mean, if you just wanted to get out of the energetic perspective, I mean, it just sort of makes logical sense that from our different evolutionary makeups, men are more interested in spreading seed around because that’s their optimal way of generating offspring. Women have to be a lot choosier because they’re sort of stuck with their offspring for quite a while. Not only do they have many months of impregnation, but then they’ve got to make sure that the child is cared for for many years thereafter. So a woman has a high drive to be choosier about prospective sexual partners. And so you’re seeing that kind of funneled out. But if we keep on the energetic model that I’m offering here, a woman is going to want to be wooed before sex because that that ties into the other stuff, the relational stuff they’re receiving.

 

Think about sex itself, too, because women, I don’t think, dislike sex per se. They just are much choosier about it. And from again, sort of a symbolic level that ties into the receiving end of it and to a certain extent the relational end of it, because most women think of sex as being, I’ve talked to women literally, who’ve told me they can’t even distinguish between the idea of having sex for its own sake versus sex as a bonding mechanism. So that sort of ties into this relational energy again. I’ve also talked to women who sort of have this fantasy of just being doted on. I’ve literally talked to women more than once who had fantasies of being like a sugar baby. Have some guy that can just come along and throw money at them. And again, this ties into stuff like The Pretty Woman and the 50 Shades of Gray. I think Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I mean, there’s so many different examples of this. It goes back a long time, I think of Cinderella. And again, you may choose to think that this is some sort of Western patriarchal oppression, although I would offer to you that these are something deeper than that. I think that these tie into some of what we are. Keep in mind also that with respect to the behaviors, there can be overlap in this stuff. So you can have men and women that are liking the same thing, but for different reasons.

 

One of the examples that pops into my head is I love playing the game, Fortnite. I got kind of hooked on that a while back. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically this game where you play a character that gets dropped on an island with, there’s usually about 100 people in a game. There’s 100 people running around on this island, and you can grab weapons and kind of shoot at each other. And the end goal is essentially to be the last man standing and the island for there’s a storm that kind of pushes everyone more and more towards the center and you just have to fight off all the other people. And I got really hooked on it, which from the energetic perspective, makes sense. I’m male. I like the idea of engaging in combat and the sort of competitive stuff which ties right into that protective, combative energy. And this is sort of a simulated way of doing that. You’re running around on an island fighting all the other people. Well, my daughter also got very into Fortnite for a while, and she’s sort of been into it on and off. It’s interesting, though, because if she’s playing by herself, she’s less excited about it. But if I’m playing at the same time as her, that is to say we’re both in the same game and we’re sort of fighting off the other people because you can make teams in this game, and if we’re in there fighting off others together or she’s going online with one of her friends, it’s a totally different experience. She gets very excited about it and wants to play. Think about what’s going on there. I’m perfectly content to play by myself because I’m being sucked in under this energetic level of the protective, combative stuff. She’s more drawn to the exact same behavior, but under more of a relational perspective, which goes back to the female energy there. So we’re engaged in the same outer behavior, but for different reasons. So, you can totally have overlapping behavior patterns, but for different reasons. Sexuality is another good example of that. I mean, we men tie into the physical in a different way than I think women do, and women tie into the relational in different ways and the receiving in different ways. And so, sex can have, it can be something that both genders want, but for totally different reasons. And of course, as we’ve established already, there’s some differences in terms of the proclivities to engage in it in the first place. But we can definitely overlap.

 

All right. The next category of things I want to talk about is sort of what I call adaptive energies or adaptive behaviors. Sometimes I call them corrupted energies, corrupted behaviors. And this is sort of coming the way I’m defining it is this is what happens when you take the underlying energy and you manifest it in a behavior that results in some sort of suffering for yourself or for those around you.

 

Oftentimes you see the swing from an energetic level, you swing into either too much of the energy, and this gets back to that toxic masculinity discussion we were having earlier, like if you you have the combative male motivation. So, there’s this combative protective energy and that turns into just the sort of aggro guy who becomes angry, violent, is physically abusing his wife or spouse or something like that. That, to me is one extension of sort of tapping too far into it to the point where it starts to hurt. Or you sort of flip into the reciprocal energy, like if you go extreme into the opposite, I think there also become sort of corruption or adaptiveness. Sometimes these are taken as defense mechanisms, sometimes these are taken as just sort of the way we are constructed. So I think there is, from my perspective at least, there’s been a real fixation on women’s rights, being cognizant of things like the patriarchy and the concerns around that. And I’m not really addressing the existence of the patriarchy or whether or not people how they feel about that. My focus here is again, at the core. So I don’t really care as much about the outside stuff as I do about the internal stuff. You don’t fix the inside by changing the outside. You change the outside by fixing the inside, right? So, what I think happens a lot is we’re so focused on concerns about women, and I personally have done this, I feel like I became hyper timid and hyper passive as a reaction to sort of training through much of my early life in concern over sort of the reciprocal. And so, I became this kind of mousy, passive little creature. So now think about this in these two different scenarios, like if you have a male, he could be hyper passive, hyper disconnected, not assertive. Or you could take the opposite extreme. He could be super aggro, very angry, very violent. With a woman, you could have a woman that goes desolate, needy, mousy, quiet, won’t even speak her mind. That’s sort of going too far into the extreme of the woman energetic level. Or you could have her become sort of hardened, controlling, domineering, where she’s sort of embracing the male side of the perspective. So, we tend to go into these extremes. Now sometimes you see this as just a pure defense mechanism. Here’s here’s a really common example, I see this where a woman who has been somehow injured, you’ll see this sometimes in its extreme form. I’ve seen this in like childhood sex abuse situations, but that sort of thing where a woman feels like if she does not stand up and become almost masculine, she’s going to get horribly, horribly hurt or rolled over or forgotten or something like that. And so, she becomes sort of hardened, controlling, domineering, almost taking on this sort of toxic masculinity perspective.

 

And it ends up with her feeling like garbage oftentimes and so I think that you have to look at where things are coming from. Here’s an example. I’ve seen this more than once. I’ve talked to some women who told me that they absolutely hated the idea of being a woman. And they detested femininity. And then when you start diving more into it, you find out that these people were sexually abused as children. And that, in turn, starts to draw these connections with this person generated an association when she was a child after being sexually abused, that the reason she was sexually abused was because she was a weak little woman who was too ineffectual to combat this monster that was doing horrible things to her. And then after that, she develops an association with the idea that she has to be strong and assertive like a man, and reject all this femininity. And then she’s utterly miserable. So be very careful about when things are kind of stretching into this. You can also see the prostitution I think of can take you down some really dark roads. Obviously, we generally socially condemn prostitution, although there’s debates about its propriety, whether it should be regulated or deemed illegal or whatever. And I’m not going to get into any of that. But I’ve definitely seen scenarios where somebody was a dancer, aka stripper. I’ve seen people that were selling their bodies in ways that we’re making them ultimately unhappy, miserable and kind of destroying their own lives.

 

And that’s where it becomes problematic, I think. I don’t care if you want to be a prostitute or you want to be a dancer or whatever. I don’t have anything against any of these people. You do whatever you want to with your life. But I have seen a lot of those kinds of scenarios where those people are walking around miserable. And so here again, you want to make sure that you’re fixating on the internal stuff first and then dump that out into the external stuff. One more thought on this is that I think that there’s a problem in our contemporary culture with this, this hyper focus on making sure that we’re protecting women’s rights, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it’s it’s manifested a couple of problems. And one of those, I think, is that we we almost turn this into bashing women or prompting women to bash themselves if they aren’t exhibiting hyper masculine energies in various ways. Like, for example, we’ve got a lot culturally wrapped up around you have to be strong and we’ve got movies I think of like Black Widow. She’s this crazy super ninja superhero who can run around and defeat anybody. And that’s become sort of a common theme where this woman has to be this strong, powerful character that can defeat anybody and be combative, be male in terms of energy.

 

And we expect them to be capable of being entrepreneurial. And here again, taking on that sort of providing role that traditionally comes out of a masculine energy. Again, I don’t care if you want to do this, but frequently it causes problems insofar as women might start to fixate on a multiplicity of things. So, for example, you have somebody that might dedicate their life to being a mom, which I think is a perfectly respectable choice. Then it is extraordinarily difficult to pursue full time some sort of career. And then I’ve seen women who say I’ve been a mom and I can’t believe I haven’t succeeded more in my entrepreneurial efforts. And I and then they get frustrated with themselves for not chasing that down more. And that becomes a problem because being a parent is crazy difficult. Even if you have both parents involved. It is super stressful. It is very time consuming, it is very energy consuming. So if you’ve got somebody especially like a single parent where the other parent isn’t involved or they’ve left or something, and then you’ve got this mom who’s taking on the role of several parents or the village, and she’s the only one doing anything. And then she on top of that now has this cultural sense that she has to be more. That can be really damning to her self-esteem and it can create a little implosion. So that can be problematic.

 

So just pay attention to where the energies are taking you. So that’s sort of the model that I operate through. And if you’ve stayed with me up to this point and we can get to sort of the point of this whole thing, and that is how do you use this? So, we can sit here and debate all day long about male and female distinctions, dichotomies, the social stuff around it, the political stuff. I don’t really want to get into that more than we’ve done here. But the ultimate question is how do you use this to make yourself feel better? Well, I personally have noticed a massive shift when I started to try and tap into things that are historically masculine. Just as a simple example of that I have gotten very into martial arts and I feel really good when I’m done doing martial arts, I feel better. That was part of the reason we had the dialogue a couple of shows ago about jui-jitsu is I am just utterly fascinated by martial arts and I feel better. I feel more empowered when I’m doing that kind of thing. There’s something really empowering to me that I don’t think it taps quite, this is not that it’s bad for women or anything, but I don’t think it taps in quite the same way because I’m getting the physical, I’m getting the sort of simulated combat or learning to be combative. It’s tapping into something that is intrinsically masculine. So, finding ways to tap into your own energies, finding ways to feel more empowered, chasing down combative strength can be as a male at least can be really empowering.

 

Same thing with women, though. I mean, if you can I’ve seen this a number of times, especially, here’s an interesting one and this goes back to these adaptive energies. I’ve seen a whole bunch of scenarios where a woman was in a relationship with a guy for whatever reason. Sometimes she picks him because he’s safe and she’s suffered trauma before. And so, she’s sort of embodying these masculine energies and the safe, quiet, mousy dude who’s not very assertive seems like the logical choice. But then in these these couplings, frequently both of them are miserable and neither one is tapping into their actual gender energy. And I think that if you can tap into your gender energy, you are way more likely to feel happy and fulfilled. If you are a guy acting like the lion, you know, being assertive and aggressive or at least having that capacity can be unbelievably empowering. And it’s not only going to make you feel better about what’s going on in your life. In the last show, just to give you one example, I was talking about kind of my fear responses and my fear responses used to be to run. If I can tap into the ability to not run, to stay and fight when I need to. Not that I should always do that, but if I had that capability, man, that really makes me feel differently. As a woman too, you can shift into embracing things around your gender energy. If you can tap into a feminine energy, I think that can make you feel a lot better. Feel free, I’ve seen women in those roles. This is where I was going a minute ago and I didn’t finish my thought. I’ve seen women in those roles where they were sort of having to pick up the slack for a man. I’ve seen scenarios where like a man in a relationship was just utterly worthless, couldn’t solve any problems, couldn’t do anything, was like cowardly. And then the woman had to pick up the slack for him and she sort of had to take on the masculine energy because he wasn’t doing it. And then she feels very hardened and very out of her own character, and she’s kind of miserable and just sort of diligent and working through stuff. And then I’ve seen them connect with someone that is the reciprocal, and then all of a sudden they have freedom to go out and be what they want to and sort of cultivate stuff in a safe space and express beauty and be more relational and do all of these things, go to parties and talk with friends and all of that stuff that taps into the feminine energies, then they can feel better. So, pick obviously, whichever one you’re in, look at the opposite and see if you can tap into some of your gender energies.

 

And I, if this doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything by trying it a little bit. But try it out. See if it makes you feel better. The other major thing on this is if you are in a romantic relationship or even if you’re not, I guess you can, this seems most applicable to romantic relationships, but if you’re in any sort of relationship with someone of any gender, really, find ways to be supportive of their gender energy. Don’t be condemning about it and encourage your partner if your partner wants to, again, do not mandate this, but encourage at least the ability for them to explore who and what they are. If you’re a man, for example, Teal Swan talks about “containment” is what she calls it, of women. And I really like this idea. And it’s essentially this idea that the man can create a safe space for a woman that he’s in a romantic relationship with to protect her from things on the outside and simultaneously encourage her to manifest something beautiful and become herself and essentially receive be doted on, all the while being protected from what’s out there and then create something beautiful. And this, to me, taps into all these stereotypes that we have, like the woman who’s at home and facilitating child-rearing and making the home beautiful while the man is going out and sort of protecting from the evils of the world, providing, making sure that there’s food on the table, that kind of thing.

 

Again, I’m not saying you have to do that or a woman shouldn’t be working or anything of that nature. But if you can find a way in whatever from remember, start from an energetic level and then allow that to manifest into whatever behaviors want to be and try to provide a space wherein your wife, spouse, significant other can do that. If you are a woman, on the other hand, kind of be supportive of the male aspirations. Be supportive of the desire to engage in the physical. And that can be sexual or it can be like working on the cars. At least acknowledge and encourage the ability to engage in the physicality. If we’re talking about the sexual stuff. One of the things that I would encourage guys to think about is to be relational. Remember, that’s how women are. So, if you’re complaining about the sexuality, the relational stuff is often what the objection from women is. Like, you’re not, you’re just asking me to do it and you’re not wooing me kind of thing. So be cognizant of your partner’s energies. Encourage them wherever they want to. Do not mandate it. Do not require that someone engage in it, but you can at least highlight it or allow it to be so that your partner can feel more fulfilled. So that’s it. You’ve got the energies, the underlying behaviors that manifest from the energies, and then you can apply that by trying to tap into those, avoid the corrupted energies, encourage your partner to become who and what they want to be, and allow them to express themselves in an energetic way and see what that does.

 

I personally found it extremely empowering and I feel better when I tap into that. I hope that you do too. All right, that’s where I’m going to leave it for today. I’m running a little over my sort of ideal time here, so we’ll end it at that point. I hope that you have found something here useful. I hope you can walk away with some little nugget that’s going to help you improve your life, help you feel better. Please try out the concepts we’ve talked about here. Just play around with it, at least. Keep an open mind with it. Remember, at the end of the day, the objective that we’ve got here is to become more emotionally embuffed. And just like going to the gym, you don’t just do that one time and walk away and say, I’m buff forever. You just keep on doing it every day. You keep working on it more and more. At the end of the day, I want you to go from saying things like, “The Struggle is real,” to being able to say, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. Have a great week and I will see you on the next show.