sigelphoenix

I went digging through the journal of the guy whose post I linked to, and found a lot of thought-provoking material, including this meme:

"Now, for an activity for those of you who may be bored, I have devised a quasi-meme for all of you. It's quite simple and I call it 'Counter-Intelligence in the Battle of the Sexes'. The idea is this: All of you ladies out there, who greatly outnumber the men on my list, can ask me a question about men in general or myself in specific in the comments and I will answer. The only question is it has to be about guy-type behaviour. If you've ever wondered why a guy will pick his nose, obsess about body parts or generally behave like a guy but been scared to ask, now is the time. However, the catch is two-fold. First, you have to ask in the comments. Second, I get to ask you a follow-up question about girls that you have to answer. All may be fair in love and war, but I rather want to have more feedback and interaction than the simple bellowing of opinions. Guys, if you want to ask me something about chicks, I'll -try- to answer but I make no guarentees about the accuracy of my response. For that matter, I make no guarentees about the accuracy of my responses for guys! But I'll take a stab anyway."

Check here for the actual post and the responses it's gotten. Interesting stuff.

I also found this post on feminist about an article that introduces a recently completed psychological study that finds women connect sex and submission. I'd really like to get my hands on the paper once it comes out.

Now, I understand quite well that psychological studies aren't always reliable, and that their results can be skewed to draw causal relationships from mere correlations. I also understand that generalizations about gender are pretty useless, too. But we're all subjected to similar social pressures, and I think that produces a lot of interesting trends in gender groups. I'm also an armchair psychologist and like to figure out why people may act in the ways they do. :P I actually wish I could do a meme along the lines of arkhamrefugee's, but most of my friendslist is female, and it really wouldn't be fair to make ratzeo answer all the questions. XD;;

But, hey! I like unfounded speculation as much as the next person, so here are two questions for people to ponder and/or answer, as they see fit:

Why do most men not talk about their significant others with each other? I've heard guys talk about them with mild annoyance ("I can't do this because of the girlfriend ...") or casual praise ("Yeah, my girlfriend is hot"), but as far as I'm aware, a group of guys will not have involved discussions about SOs. Same goes for sex: casual discussions only. Girls, on the other hand, can talk for hours about this stuff.

Why do girls need so much reassurance from their SOs? (Actually, this is not a question I want to ask "why" about. It's a questions that makes me want to ask "WHY WHY WHY" and bang my head on my desk several times in succession.) I mean, I guess it's like any new relationship -- when you make a new friend there's always a period of "Does s/he actually like me? How much?" etc. But what is it about romantic relationships that makes us leak self-confidence like a sieve?

Male or female, what do you think?