{transcipt}
I am Jack Heald, The Dad You Wish You Had. It is time for the afternoon update.
At the moment I’m thinking about toasting This Present Moment with a sip and a nibble. I’ve got my chocolate and my coffee here.
The coffee is from Peixoto in downtown Chandler. Thank you to Peixoto for sponsoring me. They don’t know they’ve done that, but I spend plenty of money with them. I was there just this afternoon.
And the chocolate today is Trader Joe’s Pound Plus. It is 500 grams of beautiful dark chocolate for less than five bucks.
I’m going to talk today about masculine-feminine polarity and why your relationships lack the power and the passion that they used to have.
I was raised at the time that second wave feminism was really taking off. The days of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and somebody else whose name I forget. Basically man-hating feminists who believed that everything about men and masculinity was the root of all evil in the world.
I was taught growing up that what women really wanted was for a man to be sensitive and caring and nurturing. Essentially to be feminine.
And so, the ideal man was presented as a man with fully feminine characteristics. The masculine characteristics were treated as undesirable.
I believed it. I embodied it. And it really messed up my relationships in a significant way.
So, I’m speaking to you as someone who fully bought into the feminist dogma that a man should be essentially a hairy smelly woman. I paid a terrible price for it, as did the women that I have been in relationships with.
My expertise is not from a standpoint of theory; my expertise is from a standpoint of doing everything wrong.
The thoughts I want to share with you today are directed primarily at you men who have been fully immersed in not just second-wave but third-wave feminism. It is actively anti-male – aggressively anti-male – and has essentially controlled the academy and the popular discourse for roughly the last sixty years now.
My entire lifetime we’ve been told that boys’ native aggression is wrong, that our competitiveness, that our assertiveness, that our sense of being able to protect and provide and frankly to be physically dominant – that that’s a problem.
At the same time, we seem to be utterly and completely at a loss as to why our relationships continue to fail.
Interestingly enough, women have been taught that they need to be much more aggressive, assertive, masculine. Anything a man can do a woman can do as well.
And so, we have these images – in the dominant art form of our era: movies – of these badass women who are kicking butts and taking names. They can beat up any man and out drink any man and…
I don’t need to give you examples because you’ve seen it all the time.
Now both of these things – the feminized man and the masculinized woman – contribute to the type of relationships where we might be able to get along relatively well in environments where sexuality is supposed to be completely excluded. Primarily the business environment.
But the result is that there is no longer a strong sexual polarity between the masculine and the feminine. When you bring that neutralized polarity into a relationship with a man and a woman, there isn’t any flow of sexual relationship.
The man-woman, masculine-feminine relationship is fully dependent upon the strength of the polarization between the masculine and the feminine.
It’s very much like how a battery works. A battery has two poles. Inside the battery you’ve got two compartments with chemicals in them. Those chemicals are positively and negatively charged. The power in a battery comes from the flow from the negative to the positive.
That’s why you put a cord on both terminals and you run it through whatever device you want to power. The power comes from the flow of electrons from the positive into the negative.
The reason that a battery runs down is not because the chemicals run out but because the polarization gets neutralized. The positive ions get closer and closer to neutral; the negative ions get closer and closer to neutral. The closer they are to neutral, the less power there is in the battery.
Well, our sexual relationships are exactly like that.
If you’re a man, and you’re attempting to embody the feminine characteristics of caring, nurturing and free-flowing creativity, or if you’re a woman and you’re trying to embody the masculine characteristics of dominance, order and structure – all those things that we know are truly masculine or feminine traits – then what’s going to happen is your essential nature as male or female, as masculine or feminine is being neutered and neutralized.
The power that comes in a sexual relationship is being taken away.
If you want to restore the power and the passion to your relationship as a man. you need to crank up the masculine power. And as a woman, you need to crank up the feminine power.
The masculine is irresistibly attracted to the feminine. The feminine is irresistibly attracted to the masculine. This is a truth of physics and it is a truth of biology. If you want to take the sexual charge out of your relationships, then turn it all down. As men, get rid of your masculinity. As women, get rid of your femininity.
Try to become more of the other and you will find the polarity – the power – disappears. You will not be attracted to one another.
Oh sure, you’ll be able to tolerate one another as friends, but there will be no passion. There will be no power. There will be no sexual charge.
That’s the message for today. That’s why there’s power and passion lacking from your relationships. You’ve allowed your sexual polarity to be neutralized.