Balls of Wire and Little Boxes

There’s a guy, Mark Gungor, who gives a delightful presentation about the difference between men and women’s brains. He says men’s brains are like little boxes that must never, ever touch each other. Ever. Every thought is processed and carefully placed in it’s own little box. Women’s brains however, are like electrified balls of wire, each bit of data zinging around to see how it is related to other bits of data. Every thought has a relationship to another and like an internet search engine, it pings around constantly looking for connections.

If you’ve ever been in a room full of women, we can congruently talk about a variety of seemingly unrelated issues, zapping each other with little sparks of imagination, almost like bug lights on a porch. A group of women who really know each other can practically speak their own language. Shoes-meatballs-Putin-PigLatin-4thGrade, yes, I so completely understand what you’re saying. What incredible insights you have! 

If you are a woman, a fairly intelligent and emotional one, you have the power to walk into a room and completely flatten men’s brains. You can crash the whole system, over whelm them with data, and watch those little boxes go poof. If you’re really good at it, you can set those boxes on fire. Fortunately men can recover from this fairly quickly, by backing up slowly and rebooting their brains. Otherwise we’d leave a bunch of collateral damage laying around, with puffs of blue smoke coming out of their ears, like I did to my last two hard drives.

Flattening man-brains is actually bad manners and should be avoided as much as possible. In retaliation, men often try to poke their finger in our brains to see if they can short out the system. This is also not nice and should be avoided, no matter how much you enjoy it. Men can short out our brains but it’s temporary and once we come back online, we will zap you. Remember the 1944 movie Gaslight? The bad guy completely shorted out her brain and convinced her she was crazy. When she was able to reboot her brain, she tied him to a chair and those little neurons pinged from crazy to…not guilty by 

reason of insanity. Be afraid, be very afraid, this is precisely how women’s brains work.

 

I jest here, because for the most part, the differences between men and women’s brains is one of the most delightful things ever. There is much complaint regarding the word subdue. People tend to think it means to suppress, dominate, control. In some contexts it does, but in this context it has a different meaning. It’s actually a very gentle word that means to calm, to sooth, to soften.  The roots of the word subdue go way back, but in old French, it’s taken from suduire, to seduce. Gender is not just biology, it is energy. It is the way we process data and how we perceive the world. It is how our brains operate, not in a hierarchy of superior/inferior, but simply different and complimentary, and quite magical. Men have the ability to sooth, to soften, to quiet women’s brains.

When men walk into a room full of women, I have a feeling most men have no idea how aware women are of their presence. We may appear to completely ignore them, but men are never invisible to us. Never. A dozen little antenna pop up and start processing the data. “Something is different here, the energy in the room has changed, one of these things is not like the other. What is he doing? Is he…compartmentalizing data? How odd!” Women are like natural born scientists, constantly doing research, testing, experimenting, quietly observing the beast in his natural habitat. It’s our thing. We’re so good at it, most of the time we aren’t even aware of it.

Naturally there are individual variations and gender is not always so rigid. Women are quite capable of reasoning, using logic, being objective, and sometimes we actually compartmentalize information. Men are also capable of making connections, relating one piece of seemingly unrelated data to another. The truth however, is that for the most part, we don’t really like to. I don’t care how many lies the world tries to tell us, we are simply different. When we deny our own natures, we’re actually rejecting ourselves, sacrificing the very best of our own essence.

Now for the bad news. Men have something women don’t. They have a box, their favorite box. It’s called the empty box. It’s their happy place, the box they go into when they’re hunting TV channels with the remote, blissfully unaware that women even exist. Women have no such box, we’re never satisfied, never finished. Our happy place is when the energy flows effortlessly through that ball of wire and meets no resistance. In the comedic tragedy of it all, a few moments of that and we start to get uncomfortable, distressed. Our happy place does not really exist internally, we experience it vicariously through men. Oh, we could live without them in the world for a while, but eventually we’d short ourselves out and self destruct. Never being able to rest in your happy place is a bit like going without sleep. It can be done, but eventually you’ll break and start seeing rats.

Men and women live in a type of symbiotic relationship that expands far beyond reproduction. We are like mirrors looking back at each other. One of my favorite sci/fi guys once did a post about “Women as Parasite” that made me think of intestinal worms. Do it again dude and I will flatten your boxes, set them on fire, and sweep the ashes out the door. He wasn’t entirely wrong however, women are a bit like orchids clinging to a decaying log. There is beauty and life in the symbiosis of that relationship. Separate the two and there is nothing but death and decay, pointless decomposition that nourishes nothingness.

Gender is not a social construct people, it is our energy and our essence, and it is hardwired into the system.