The Two Body Solution

 I have been deeply reflecting upon gender issues and reviewing a lot of social media content providing different theories on gender relations, and I have come up with a number of thoughts.

First, the best way to understand gender is to imagine that we are all souls that have both a male and female have.  We are each a complete yin/yang symbol, not just male or female. When born, the half of our soul that is NOT reflected by our physical body will instead reflect our psychological body. Thus, men have a female psychological body and women have a male psychological body.

As a side note, this theory explains the existence of transgenders, as this happens when the "wrong" halves of the soul connect with the body and mind.  (I put the word "wrong" in quotes because I do recognize that using a word with negative connotation may be imprudent here, but I am not sure if this soul "mismatch" is properly viewed as a flawed outcome or a health albeit highly rare outcome, but I simply want to express this is the "abnormal" outcome from a statistical perspective.) While it may seem insensitive, in the interest of simplicity, the rest of this blog focuses on the more common cis male/female dichotomy so that "man" and "woman" used herein refer to cis men and women. I invite any trans advocate to improve upon this to better incorporate the trans experience. I do home any trans advocates to at least appreciate my theory fully validates that the trans experience is completely accurate and real, that their physical body really does have the "wrong" gender compared to their innate feeling deep to their soul as to what physical gender they should have.  Even the gender fluid experience fits, as it would exist if there was a circumstance wherein the gendered halves of the soul keep switching between the physical and psychological body.

While the physical body has a brain with our intelligence, the emotional body has a corresponding soul with our wisdom.  Thus, the "brain" of the emotional body is the soul in this visualization.  I have conceived other ways to visualize the relation of our male/female halves and the psychological/physical and soul/brain dichotomies, but this is the best / simplest I've come up with.  I expect others can improve upon this.

The "strong" body for men is the physical body, including the brain. This makes men more connected to physical sensation, physical drives, and intelligence.  The "strong" body for women is the emotional body, which make women more connected to emotional feelings, emotional motivations, and wisdom.

Women are more and more identifying as demisexual, indicating they require emotional and/or loving connection before physical sexual arousal happens.  In fact, this seems quite normal, and may prove to be the norm which not everyone has yet recognized.  I believe men have a corresponding condition, being "sexomotional," so that they require sexual / physical affection / arousal before romantic / emotional feelings happen.  Thus, in this regard, women and men are mirror images, opposites, of one another.

I believe that one of the best moral compasses we have is the Golden Rule, to treat others how we wish to be treated, but it is actually terribly destructive for romantic relationship between opposite sexes.  The Golden Rule has us expecting others to seek and avoid, to enjoy and dislike, roughly the same as us.  However, in many respects the exact opposite is true for the genders, so we wind up doing exactly the wrong thing if we follow the Golden Rule.  My two-body solution gives us a way to conceptualize gender relations to avoid this problem.

Based on this theory, men and women are, in fact, opposite mirror images in many ways, being essentially jigsaw puzzles that fit together only if they are precisely opposite one another along one side.

This theory explains, in part, why women tend to underperform in regard to intelligence. I believe women have just as much intelligence as men, but they are simply not as connected to it, as it is one step removed from their primary connection to the emotional body.  For the same reason, men have the same capacity as women for wisdom and spirituality but are one step removed from it, being more connected to the physical body than the emotional body. This explains why, even though women have IQ's just as high as men, they will always be disproportionately underrepresented in areas that rely primarily on intelligence, such as chess or science or math.  This is not a bad thing, it is simply "playing to your strength."

The physical body creates drives that "drive" us.  The psychological body creates emotions that motivate us.  Men are more driven by drives (e.g., hunger, sex, avoiding pain, avoiding external threats) while women are more driven by emotional motivations (e.g., fear, love, anger, envy, embarrassment, etc.).  In fact, if a woman wants to know how a man feels about romantic love, she should consider how she feels about sex, because that is roughly the same.  And a man should understand a woman feels about romantic love roughly the same way he feels about sex. 

Men are reluctant to fall in love because for them, it is a huge commitment.  They are expected to care for, protect and provide for the women, much the way a parent is responsible for protecting and providing for a child.  This is analogous to how women are reluctant to have sex because for them, it creates risk of a huge commitment, childbirth.  Women are not so reluctant to fall in love with a man because having a man fall in love with them means they are taken care of and protected.

Now, this theory does NOT suggest men do not want love or cannot feel love as deeply as any woman.  Look at the analogy to sex.  Women may be harder to "get going" sexually compared to men, harder to arouse, and perhaps harder to please, but when they are aroused and then pleased, they have greater orgasmic potential than men, and they can have multiple orgasms.  Thus, women have greater capacity to enjoy sex than men.  Similarly, men have greater capacity to love romantically than women.  While we may be slow to allow ourselves to get emotionally aroused, to reach the climax of romantic love, when we do reach that point, we love more deeply and permanently than women.  

In fact, for the man, after orgasm, our arousal actually disappears completely, resets to zero, and we now much be re-aroused before we can have sex again, whereas women stay aroused after orgasm.  This is analogous to how women experience romantic love.  A woman feeling romantic love with a many reaches an emotional "climax" that I believe resets her loving feelings to zero.  This is why women need to be re-wooed by their lovers, boyfriends, husbands, etc., on a frequent, even daily, basis.  

Thus, men often complain about women being too needy and insecure.  They do not understand why their girlfriend or wife keeps testing their loves, keeps needing him to continue courtship activities.  It is because, though she does not want to admit it, she keeps falling out of love with him. He needs to keep winning her back.  Yes, his past efforts that have won her love do count for something, may help create a "short-cut" to her heart.  But the short-cut path is still a path that must be trod, still requires some effor. (On a side note, this theory may somewhat explain post-partum depression in women.)

This theory also explains why women are less honest than men.  Ideas are true or false, emotions are not. Emotions are all valid.  Women life in a subject world where, to them, people are primarily experiencing pleasure and pain through their emotional state, so they primarily attempt to manipulate emotions to help, heal, protect, hurt, etc. And lies are key tool for emotional manipulation.  If words are to emotional manipulation as hands are to physical manipulation, then lies are akin to thumbs.  They open up vast if not infinitely more possibility.  Without lies, we are limited to words that express what actually happened.  But if we can express literally anything at all, all the things that did not happen, that is infinitely more, an infinitely more powerful tool.  Demanding women be honest is like asking men to fight off wild beasts without thumbs, and thus without all the tools we can make and hold because we have thumbs.

Ultimately, women live in a subjective place where they are primarily emotional, and ALL emotions are valid, there is never a question whether an emotion is true or false, so they simply prioritize truth and falsity less than men. Conversely men lives primarily in their physical body, and their primary sensations are physical, not emotional, so they care very much about truth, about what is real.  In short, men are not "better" because we are more honest, and women are not "worse," any more than a man is "better" because he has a penis or her worse because she has a vagina. We each have gender-specific advantages and tools, and optimally we use them in tandem, cooperatively, to tackle the world, not to battle one another.

The two-body solution that I posit herein is to some extent a literal truth, I believe, but it is sufficient for others if they do not believe it, but nevertheless recognize that this way of visualizing our gender differences actually works.  It actually explains just how people are really acting toward one another.  If a woman imagines that the man she is dating basically has an emotional vagina that takes time and effort to get arouse, and wherein generating love requires stimulating an emotional clitoris, which may be difficult to find, and very sensitive, must be approached just right, etc., then she will have much greater success in her romantic endeavors. This visualization is a life-hack for those seeking romantic success.

On a last note, I would point out that one of the greatest wounds, perhaps the greatest, that can be inflicted upon a woman is rape, wherein a woman is sexually ravaged by a man. Our society is conflicted about how to view female rape of a man or boy.  However, based on my theory, the true equivalent "rape" of a man is emotional abuse.  Emotional abuse of a man by the woman he loves is equivalent pain, to him, as sexual abuse of a woman.  The worse forms of emotional abuse by a woman to a man in which she is in a romantic relationship causes the man pain equivalent to that a women feels from a violent sexual rape.  However, our society largely turns a blind eye to this.  

Right now, hundreds of millions of men in our society are silently suffering the past trauma of emotional rape of a man, and our society does not even recognize this exists.  When a man finally lets his guard down, gives his heart to a woman, falls deeply in love, and gives her access to his emotional vagina, emotional clitoris, and she betrays it with sudden and unexpected anger, verbal assault, violent rage, he experiences the feeling of being raped on an emotional level.

Our society has a problem in that we only "see" physical injury, physical assault, so we too greatly discount emotional injury. We do not realize that we each have a psychological body that is every bit as real as our physical, and can experience analogous wounds to every wound that the physical body can suffer, including rape. This likely is most unfair for women, in that our laws do little to protect from emotional harms and wrongs, whereas the slightest offensive or harmful touching is outlawed as criminal battery.

Note, I do not at all like the idea of moving to a society wherein we outlaw hurting the feelings of others, as that seems too extreme a measure, restricts our freedom of speech too much.  But I do think we can do more to ameliorate this problem.

Initially, the absence of laws that prohibit the kind of violence that half our population finds most hurtful (i.e., emotional abuse) can explain to some extent why women tend to be more fearful and cynical in general in life. How would men view a world in which they could not say anything offensive, but everyone was free to hit, kick, stab, etc., so long as they did not mortally wound another? Men would be much more violent towards one another, much more reluctant to go outside, more wary of strange places, etc.  Women live in a world that does almost nothing to protect them from the pains that hurt them them most.  

As an aside, my theory explains why women can tolerate physical pain more than men, as women are less invested in the physical body overall, and conversely men can tolerate more emotional abuse then women.  The wrong of rape is a unique juxtaposition, in that women have more nerves in the sex organs than men and may feel that pain worse than a man and, too, for women their ability to give birth is sacred, and for that to be assaulted goes beyond a physical or emotional wound and, I believe, is a form of spiritual wound.  On the other hand, while men tend to be more emotionally distant, and less bothered by emotional abuse, when they open their heart for romantic love, and that is seemingly betrayed by their lover through unexpected violence, anger, emotional assault, that hits a place of emotional sensitivity that exceeds female emotional sensitivity.  

I also have a theory that just as women have the sacred role of creation by giving birth to offspring, utilizing a seed from the man they love, that men have their own sacred role of creation by giving birth to external achievements, utilizing a seed from the woman they love, which is what is commonly referred to as having a "muse." I believe that, quite literally, behind every great man is a great woman, and this is because male greatness is contingent on him having a loving female partner who energetically, in love, donates a creative spark to him that then gestates inside him, so that he becomes "pregnant with ideas" and creative potential, and he can then achieve great things.  I have felt this sort of gestation, pregnancy and birth-giving of ideas following a romantic encounter (not necessarily sex, mind you).  I believe it is as real as child-birth.  In fact, it makes sense that there is creative reciprocity, that women do not just take a seed from the man, but also give a seed to him.  Further, whereas the female creative expression is internal, creating new life within her to perpetuate the species, the man's creative expression is external -- a painting, sculpture, song, story, bridge, business venture, invention, discovery, scientific achievement.  Thus, when the man is open to receiving his lover's creative seed and is instead given unexpected emotional abuse, that is when he feels the emotional equivalent of rape, as it is a wound beyond physical or emotional, but is spiritual.

Well, there are more ways this two-body solution will fix and improve how we understand genders and gender relations, I believe that is enough for a start. I invite commentary, improvement, correction, and evolution of these ideas.