Thai Women, Part VII

Part seven in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, five and six are here.

I’ve been working on a new theory of the psychology of women. Don’t exit the page, please. Have a good laugh, and then read the rest of the post.

What the adolescent male of any age cannot understand is the need of the feminine mind for context. He understands it in the tactical sense, if he is smart, meaning that he observes the signs and patterns and can come up with strategies to manipulate or bypass those patterns. Essentially he views the particularly feminine part of female sexuality as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as a complement and balance to his own sexuality.

Context is the word I am using right now to describe the complex psychological and emotional reality that I observe surrounding the behavior of women, sexually. To put it in the simplest terms, in order for a man to get a woman to agree to have sex with him he must create a context in which it makes sense to her, not simply intellectually, but emotionally and even subconsciously. Men don’t really need this. In the male brain, sexually attractive female (whatever he has been conditioned to believe that is) = all the context I need. Women are not naturally like that. This is not to say that they cannot become like that. In fact, a good number of men spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that women do become like that.

I believe this need for context springs from a natural sense of self-worth. To observe it, however, you usually have to go back a long ways, right to the beginning of womanhood, and even before. A little girl instinctively believes in her own worth. All little girls know that they are princesses. No one has to tell them this for them to act like it. It doesn’t matter whether she is a girly-girl or a tomboy, she believes instinctively in her own inherent value. Unfortunately this belief is a fragile thing. It can be affirmed, or it can be exaggerated and blown out of proportion, or it can be destroyed. Usually, however, a good portion of it remains into the teen years in all but the worst cases. With puberty it becomes entangled with overt sexual urges, especially in middle and high-schools in our society in which it is almost impossible for a girl to escape being judged primarily as a sexual object.

This inherent sense of worth, in its most natural state, tells the young woman that she is not an object to be used for someone else’s pleasure. She, of course, has her own urges and desires, but mixed with the purely physical desire (which I have no qualifications to judge) is that intuitive grasp of her own worth and the instinctive fear of being used, or of using someone else. Like it or not, for women self-image and sexuality are inescapably linked. In order for her to want to give herself physically there has to be a surrounding emotional context in which the man’s treatment of her squares with her own view of her own worth.

Now, that is a very important point. It explains how context works, both for the true use, and for those who abuse it by using it as a tactical advantage in a sex-war. A man can bring about this parity between his treatment and her self-image in one of two general ways:

1)    Either by affirming her worth and making her feel secure in the knowledge that he will guard her worth more fiercely and lovingly than she ever could.

2)    Or by degrading and tearing down her sense of her own worth until she feels that she deserves whatever kind of treatment he wants to dish out.

It is important to understand that either of these ways can achieve the end result of getting a woman in bed with you. All the man is doing is putting her self-image and his actions on the same level. It is also important to understand that #1 is not automatically virtuous. A man can lie in order to seem like he loves her and respects her, and then betray her. Or he might actually believe it, and then “fall out of love” with her later on. Either way his honesty is compromised, and the end result is likely to be a terrible blow to her self-esteem, but as regards method he still went by the affirmation route. In fact, I would say that is by far the most effective route, even for a total liar and scoundrel, simply because it bears some superficial, temporary resemblance to the real thing.