Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pucc-h
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:aeq
From: aeq@pucc-h (Jeff Sargent)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Trish revisited, calmly
Message-ID: <977@pucc-h>
Date: Fri, 24-Aug-84 03:30:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.977
Posted: Fri Aug 24 03:30:11 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Aug-84 06:30:19 EDT
Organization: Tucumcari Divinity School
Lines: 30

I received an article from Trish Millines in response to a net.women article
of mine.  This put me in mind of the great controversy which surrounded one of
her postings; and I decided to try to illuminate some of the reasons (as I see
them) why men may come across as insensitive et al.  Note that this is not
intended to provoke further controversy!  (Calm discussion is permitted....)
The following is extracted from the letter I sent to her.

Remember that boys are (or at least used to be) trained early that
big boys don't cry or otherwise express "weakness".  Thus they do not avail
themselves of all the mothering they could get if they would admit their need.
Hence they go into manhood with a desperate need for someone to love them, a
desperate wish for those days of early childhood when they were allowed, by
society and parents, to just relax and take without giving.  Had they been
allowed to be comforted for all their childhood fears and hurts when they
were children, they might be better able to handle an equal relationship,
since they would not be suffering from such a desperate, long-time hurt/need
for love.  (In fact, I have recently been painfully discovering the fact that,
contrary to the fantasies of so many men around my age [29], there is no such
thing as a free lunch; if a man wants a woman to give him what he wants, he
bloody well has to give her what she wants.  This is painful because it means
that the wish to return to childhood is forever frustrated.  It is especially
painful for me because my childhood was, in a way, truncated at age 8 by the
divorce of my parents and the departure of my father; I had to become, in some
ways, an ersatz husband for my mother.)  But anyway, this might enable you to
understand those 999 of 1000 men who seem so insensitive and undesirable.

-- 
-- Jeff Sargent
{decvax|harpo|ihnp4|inuxc|seismo|ucbvax}!pur-ee!pucc-h:aeq
[the man with the cornrowed chest hair :-)]