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Episode 279: BFs career, Women abusing men, Video games, Afraid to talk to opp sex, gender theory
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nate g here along with dr jen hawk and dr doug lyle uh except no doug dr doug lyle today uh dr hawk you're going slow today how you doing i'm good but you know doug has a very good reason he's been off working on the book and and uh you know got his nose to the grindstone so he's he's making progress he sent me some new stuff to look over and we're wheels are in motion so it's very exciting that's great to hear i mean for the first time in a long time i sent him a text and didn't get a reply right away and i thought oh i hope he's writing this book i hope he's he's working on the book so yeah no he's he's in self-imposed you know book lockdown so that he he and i both very much work that way that's uh you know why when we're sort of in um collaboration mode we we do tend to kind of hide away from the world and work on the book exclusively because it's just sort of it's how i wrote my dissertation and that's how he wrote the pleasure trap he just kind of we're we're not great at living normal life and writing a book at the same time like some people are so we have to just kind of like carve out this book time um so that's what he's been doing so he he gets a pass this week no no that's that's great to hear so we're anxiously awaiting but we we won't we won't hold our breath but we're anxiously waiting yeah well yeah so are we i mean the problem is that there's you know some new [ __ ] has come to light in the last two years so kind of where we were two years ago with what we you know kind of how we thought we wanted to sum everything up and and the main thesis of the book and um you know that not that the main thesis has changed but obviously the context has massively changed um and we've we've gone from this perspective on you know don't worry about the world focus on your your happiness and and your relationships and um you know basically freedom in an unfree world but now we're really confronted with you know freedom in an unfree world has taken on new meaning um and so we have to consider the external world um and how it is changing and how it's affecting our potential decision matrix in a really new way so we've had to add a bunch of new stuff and rethink some things so it's thrown a bit of a wrench in the gears well i i i'm excited nonetheless but i can imagine if you guys had released it you know december of uh night 20. i know oh we talk about that all the time we'd be like oh my god what way this is a different you have to write a sequel immediately i know that's exactly so that's basically what we've done and the sequel now just becomes integrated with the book so um but the the problem is that the sequel is you know it's not like we just wanted to tack on this kind of okay well you know we we have some we have some new insight that we want to share we kind of have to go back and make the whole thing uh integrated and holistic because we're you know artists like that so i mean if you did do full two full books in like a couple years that would be maybe maybe slightly close to the productivity of dr michael greger you know so exactly exactly and that's an unreasonable one [Laughter] how many books has he written in the many years it's just it's just incredible just churns them out it's it's a it's amazing so yes if if we had that ability we would certainly use it but we do not we're just we're you're moving forward yes exactly well for for any listener that still has not signed up for the living wizard library you can actually read one of the chapters in the upcoming book by becoming a lifetime member and so you can do that at esteemdynamics.com and become a member of the living wisdom library and not only that you can hear dr lyle and dr hawk do a what is it twice a month or so a live q a a video q a uh with the members questions exactly yeah yeah yeah it's uh basically the weeks that there is not a beat your jeans tends to be the the week that we do a membership q a so yeah we have a chapter of the book and the the um the lifetime membership remains the only way to get on the list for the book when the book is out um and so that's not imminent you know it's not not not uh definitely still a ways down the road but um we're we're not publishing anywhere else so that's going to be the only way to get it wonderful well all right well what do you say we get into some questions and then see where that leads us dr hawk sure sure what do we have all right our first question is as follows dear doctors should i be worried if my boyfriend's career seems to be a higher priority than me and our future family if i was the love of his life wouldn't his career still be would his career still be more important than i am he's 40 and a financier on wall street i'm looking forward to hearing what you think about this uh yeah so i immediately want to know a lot more about the context here it's sort of you know it's almost like goldilocks sometimes on the podcast where questions are either way too long and detailed or they're too short and this one is um it's a little it's a little short for me to know what's really going on so um you know how do we know that his career is a higher priority than me what what sort of feedback are you actually like the literal feedback that you're getting i want to know more about what that looks like and um how much of that is subject to your personality distortion if you if you have a personality that needs a lot more of a certain type of affirmation that you're not getting from him then then you might feel like he cares more about his career than he cares about you for example um so we need to kind of suss all that out and and sort out the reality of uh you know does he really care more about his career than he cares about you is is is that a truthful statement um and then you know kind of what is his uh what is his relationship to that that trade-off i mean he's he's 40 he's uh sounds like quite the dominance higher hierarchy climber if he's working on wall street um he is in a time in his life where he is absolutely seeking to achieve the highest heights that he can as evolution is driving him to do so in principle he can attract the most quality mate that he can possibly get so um does that mean he is trying to do well at work so he can trade you in for a better model maybe maybe not um that's going to be a lot of a lot of women are going to be afraid of that if they're getting rejection signals by someone who's in this but by a male who is in this stage of his career and seems to be prioritizing work over them um but we just we we would have to really know the details of what that looks like and how so all right uh okay well some technical difficulties there but we're back so so um so i understand you know having those feelings of potential rejection if you're if you're getting cues that you know he's spending all this time at work and he's advan you know putting all of his time and energy into trying to advance at work but at the same time that is that is exactly what you want a a driven successful high provisioning um you know parabon to be doing it it doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't qualify or that he would want to trade you in or anything like that it's it's sort of this there is a trade-off here that females make to some degree of um you know if you want the signals that come from a high quality mate who is climbing those dominance hierarchies and and seeking to prove himself in the world and to do well uh when he is in this stage of life um that is going to on occasion or quite frequently look like he is valuing work more than you um and and that's part of part of the trade for that kind of male if if you chose instead a male who had no drive and and you know was not uh kind of putting himself all in at work and was was very much more uh oriented toward you and toward family um that sounds like it would be great in theory but in practice you might get slowly a little bit resentful you might not be as attracted to him there there would be a other set of problems that goes along with that so um so yeah baseline we we just need to know more details about the specific situation to help this lady out but i always when i talk to women who are in a situation like this i really like the work it's a little woo-woo so if you're not woo-woo and you're not open to woo-woo stuff then definitely don't read it but um there's an author named alison armstrong who who writes in this very kind of stylized way she has several books one is called the queen's code i believe one is called keys to the kingdom so you kind of get the idea of the of the theme and she stages men's lives into uh you know prince night no i forget no it would be night first right night night prince king um but the idea that it at at different stages of of men's lives that map roughly on to kind of decade you know they're they're at different different points in that achievement cycle and they're seeking to prove themselves in different ways and so when you're dealing with a prince which is who you've got right now he's really consolidating that that empire you know he's really this is when he has to make his mark so he can inherit the kingdom so he can you know prove himself um it's it's not until you have the king who's very settled and very accomplished and and very um doesn't need to prove anything to anybody he's won his wars already um that's a that's a different sort of dynamic where you're not going to have him at the office you know fighting those wars all the time um but at the same time you know he doesn't necessarily need you as much either so so she's very skillful at talking about those trade-offs and what that looks like and and what uh women can expect at all of those different stages that's a fascinating way of describing that because i look at my dad and he's you know he's basically won all his wars set up his life and you know he's he's definitely not you know at the office like he was when i remember growing up and you know my mom commented what time she said she remembers when he used to like wake up super early wear a suit every day you know and it was a totally different totally different competitive process yeah yeah and it means very different things for the woman in his life too you know so sort of the equilibrium that she gets into when he's in prince mode to be helpful to him or you know what she thinks she needs and how she gets it and all of those things change and so of course he's not the only one changing you know life stages she's changing life stages too so other people have written about this in different language there's um there's the the famous book passages um by gail sheehan i think um and other other authors who were in the space writing about this but i like allison's work because she's also very she she's very inspired by the work of david data um who is also very woo-woo you get me alone on the show we're going to talk about what's going to say you wait until [Laughter] [Music] he wrote a book um very well known book and probably many people in in this audience have heard of it called the way of the superior man um and it's it's this kind of um you know big uh tome about you know masculine feminine dynamics and and how they play out in relationships and how that can change over time and so she's very inspired by his work and and kind of tries to write more from the female perspective essentially but it's the same it's this it's this masculine feminine polarity dance and how that energy can get confused and misdirected and misplaced and all of the things that can happen and some suggestions for how to turn it around but um all that to say it sounds like he's he's very much in solid print stage aiming for king stage and during print stage you're you're just there to kind of make life easier for him it doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean that he's looking to step out on you of course that could be true um and and that is how your your nervous system is going to interpret any kind of defection signal um and you know staying late at the office is it feels like a defection signal to most females um but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going on yeah see okay so what you're like does seem like there would be a difference between staying late at the office and then somehow she's confirming that he was actually working versus staying late because he had to go out for drinks with with his co-workers and didn't invite her yeah well the way she's freezing the question is that you know there's not a lot of hint in the question that she feels like the his emphasis on work is a cover story for for his infidelity so she might not even be worried about that um it's it's really just that he's putting his time and energy into resource acquisition instead of provision but but in principle he's doing that so he can better provision you thank you dr hawk i appreciate that and and can you tell us the name of that book again and the author yeah her name is alison armstrong um and she has a couple of them the the they're written in this very kind of storybook um chit chat sort of way uh and um keys to the kingdom i think is the is the main one um but she's all over you can find her on youtube and she's very personable and uh i i find her quite a delight thank you very much she's she's a lot easier to listen to than data data data's intense i mean data's great but he's he is very intense um but way of the superior man is also a really great book for people who are interested in these topics thank you so much all right our next question is now we pivot a little bit towards the the woman's perspective of negativity so the question is dear doctors what are the ways that women might abuse men is the silent treatment inducing jealousy withholding intimacy etc are those considered abusive i'm a woman and i found myself doing some of these things in a toxic relationship in which my partner called me abusive which made me wonder if i actually was huh um well so i i again i wouldn't i'm not going to call these things abusive without more context so they're not great behaviors they're not they're not optimal helpful behaviors they're not behaviors that are going to nurture a healthy relationship but you know where are they coming from so um are are they attempts are they you know every therapist in the world the first thing that they say in a couple session is oh well you're you're just having difficulty communicating right we need to work on your communication and what they're not seeing is that all these things that she's describing are can be attempts at communication um so i don't know if they are in this scenario or not but certainly silent treatment inducing jealousy withholding intimacy those can be attempts to get your partner's attention um or or to try to make a point um they're just not very uh skilled or artful ways of trying to communicate that um and so these are the kinds of things that are very subject to personality distortion as well so if if you have a less emotionally stable personality if you have a more disagreeable personality or a less conscientious personality these kinds of things are likely to be in your arsenal um you're going to reach for them more readily than someone else might i think they exist in the nervous system of not just every female but but probably everybody in a relationship because they are communication tactics um you were doing these things because you you want to manipulate the behavior of the person on the other side and that is by definition a form of communication so they're just it's just crappy communication and it's it's uh it can certainly move into the abusive realm um if you are doing it in a punitive way um if you are doing it just despite um requests to stop doing it if you know i mean this is this is a very context dependent sort of situation so um again we want to know more i'm just going to default to that uh i don't i don't but i don't think they're unique to women um and i don't think anything that a female is going to do in a relationship that is toxic or potentially abusive is uniquely female there are some things that females are more likely to do just because females tend to cluster around certain personality characteristics more than than males do they tend to be more agreeable they tend to be less emotionally stable but there's nothing uh inherently female about any of those strategies i don't think fascinating if i can harp on the word abusive a little bit and of course this is all just my perspective i just you know i it almost feels like if a partner calls somebody else abusive like that's that's a door closing to where you can't really solve a problem is that am i misunderstanding that or what what's your what do you think dr hawk i think when somebody starts calling their partner's behavior abusive then you know probably the the ship has sailed on the relationship to some degree um and so you're picking that up where it's this feeling of the door is closed um so i always think of john gottman here he's he's the um sort of professor and therapist in the seattle area who has his love lab and he's very famous for being able to observe a couple um in an informal setting and tell you within a minute or two if they're going to be together in five years and he has this very good success rate um and it's because he looks very good success rate like in the in the you know high 90s percentile and it's because he's looking at what he calls the four horsemen of behavioral signals in this couple um and this is like a it's like i'm being quizzed if i can remember all these so the first one is contempt contempt is the big one if if one or both partners are showing contempt for the other that is super deadly um another one is stonewalling so the silent treatment another one is sort of wholesale criticism like you know just a just a general statement about you about something that i don't like um and the other i believe is generalizing um and so you always do this you never do this um and so you know any of those four things is problematic often he'll see all four of them it's like this relationship is completely doomed and so i've always likened gottman's analysis to your yes you're very skilled at predicting the demise of a relationship just like a doctor would be very skilled at predicting somebody's cancer diagnosis by observing a tumor like it's it's you know you're not you're seeing something that has already progressed to a point where the signaling that is going on is is if not completely past the point of no return it's pretty far gone and so getting to the getting to the point where you you subjectively believe that your partner's behavior is abusive um and you you you accuse them of it um it means that there's just a lot of toxicity going on in the relationship and a lot of a lot of early signals have been missed um and there has been a i mean a failure to communicate has happened the the communication that was attempted was rejected because one the you know partners did not like what was being said or what was being signaled um and so things escalated uh and things escalated to a point where now we're in a situation where um you know people probably don't want to be there anymore thank you so much yeah that's a little love lab that sounds really interesting yeah gottman is you know he's he's a broken clock is right twice a day and gottman gottman has a lot of really good tips and a lot of really good relationship like observations about relationships and and techniques that um i like to use and and recommend to people he's still very psychodynamically oriented in a lot of ways um but he does he's another good resource for people to look into if they need communication help i don't know i think the best resources you were dr lyle but that i'm just biased here well obviously right yeah um but you know it's it's also worth pointing out that you know there can be a degree to which uh somebody calling somebody's behavior abusive is also in itself a communication strategy um you're you're essentially trying to to to say okay you know i'm really going to make it clear how how far past my red lights you've gone here and i'm giving you one last chance to kind of correct this and relate to me in the in the way that i've been trying to get you to relate to me and like we've talked about on the show many times including in the last couple of weeks it's there sometimes this is an issue of communication skills and people needing to figure out how to use their words instead of instead of passive aggressive signaling like is being described in this in this question um or in the earlier question i guess the the uh jealousy and silent treatment etc um but uh you know often these things are coming from an authentic uh cost-benefit analysis on the relationship and and the person is running that cb and their partner is no longer qualifying at the level that they were qualifying and even if they're not entirely decided that they want to defect on the relationship they are definitely testing the boundaries of it um and they're sort of pushing around and re-parameterizing and and trying to detect exactly where they stand and if they are reading the situation correctly and so that's where a lot of the so-called toxic um communication is is going to come into play and so you can have a little bit of a power struggle with all of that um where one partner drops the abusive word in in an attempt to gain a little status in that power struggle yeah that sounds horrible yeah this just doesn't sound good it sounds exactly how this question was described as a toxic relationship in which the partner yeah so yeah yeah yeah i mean you're doing this likely because you're you're getting signals from him that you don't like um and those signals are probably from him coming from he he's rethinking his cb on the relationship in some way um and so rather than interrogating that directly you're you're testing around the the perimeter um trying to figure out if any of these things kind of change the way that he is signaling you so would it be fair like in in the context of this question uh whether the person the woman it's herself is abusive would it be fair to say that that people aren't either abusive or not abusive it just depends on the context of of the the person on the other end and how that esteem dynamic is playing is that or or am i missing is my understanding that right yeah i think that's probably mostly true um with exceptions being you know of course they're just horrendous people who are truly abusive just generally um and so you know you you could i mean you go look at a prison population right you know let's let's go into either a men's or women's prison population and you're going to find some people who i'm not sure you could put them in an esteem dynamic where their personalities are going to allow them to be non-abusive and some of that is communication skills absolutely but a lot of it is high high disagreeableness high high instability low low conscientiousness um and you know it's just you can only do so much um and so some people are just kind of vicious and they're they're going to be vicious in relationship okay all right well let's uh let's pivot a little bit and talk about video games okay my segway was never a dull moment yeah but i believe you you both you and dr law talked about video games a little bit on the living wisdom library q a recently so we did just this week yeah all right dear doctors you've only briefly touched on video games on the podcast but i'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the psychology behind them what do you link their popularity as an entertainment medium or form of escape to yeah um so yeah we we did um we had a question on our on our other podcast we actually have two other podcasts i guess so there's the there's the membership one and then there's the political one that we do um and uh so we just talked about we had a woman whose husband is essentially kind of apropos of the earlier question here where instead of spending all of his time at the office he's spending all of his time playing video games rather than spending it with her and um it's upsetting to her understandably so i think you know we covered a couple of things in that question um and i you know there's there are lots of different ways to think about this the the this is a super normal stimuli for sure um where it's mimicking especially for men um war games so there's there's kind of a very most video games that men are going to be interested in playing are very war-like um and so there is that kind of uh hijacking of the natural process where he's trying to show off in the village to to the other men and eventually to the females of his great war prowess um and so that is that process is being hijacked by the video games um so that's that's a big part of it plus all of the i don't think we got into it this week but you have to keep in mind that these things are designed to be addictive it's not just that it's mimicking something in our natural history that is very stimulating it's um it's that it is purposefully designed just like modern processed food is highly engineered to hit this bliss point video games or social media or any anything virtual has been highly highly highly engineered to capture and keep your attention so all of the colors all of the movements all of the sounds um these you know are the same people who design the slot machines in vegas and they're very very good at their jobs um and so it is a it's a it's a highly designed um uh distraction that you know once somebody is in there it's gonna be hard to pull them out so so that those are the main things and then doug talked a lot in that answer um about how if you have a male who is choosing to spend all of this time with video games rather than you know having dinner with the family or spending time with the female you do have to wonder if um he is running the cb on the relationship and if he does value her this this is kind of going back full circle with our first question valuing her more than the time with the video game and so the solution to that is that you start to run some experiments you start to say hey you know notice that you're spending 24 7 with your video game instead of hanging out with me how about we have a weekly date night um where you know you we we we intentionally uh plan to go out and have dinner together and go out on the town and get away from this virtual realm and just see how resistant he is to that see you know if if that's something that he is enthusiastic about or if he's a little resentful that you're taking him away from his preferred way of spending time so not that this questioner i don't i don't know if this question is dealing with that dynamic in a relationship or not but it very often certainly when i talk to clients it seems to be a lot of men playing video games and kind of disappearing into their caves and not spending time with their females um so it's a combination it's it can be a mate value signaling thing um but it can also be you've been hijacked by a super duper addictive process or both [Music] have you ever played any video games dr hawk not since i was a wee child i think you know on the atari super mario brothers or yeah yeah we had even we we weren't cool enough to have super mario brothers at home um we had to go to friends houses for that or babysitters but we had like a very old school atari where we had some really cool games pitfall um we had uh like an old star wars game we had some cool stuff but yeah that was probably the last time i played anything other than you know also going to the pizza parlor at an arcade in 1987 that would have been the last time that i played a video game i remember when we we my i think we got a little bit like a super nintendo me my sisters and it was always fun to we would play then go to bed and then my parents would shoot us to bed so they can play by themselves afterwards at least my mom loved super mario brothers oh yeah my brother uh got a game boy at some point it was a big deal as a christmas gift or something um and uh you know they they were fairly recently out and i think my grandma got it for him that seems like what would have happened um and and the game boy was a hot commodity you know he was forced to share it with me of course which i'm sure he was bitterly resentful about um and so there you know we had time we each had time that we got to spend on it and i got quite hooked on tetris tetris was um was very compelling and i remember dreaming about it um and being very disturbed that i was dreaming about it and so it's one of those early moments in life where i was like oh it's gotten into my brain it's gotten into my brain and i don't really want it there and so it kind of put the brakes on it a little bit for me just just like reading listening to prozac when i was in high school kind of you know planted a little seed that made me resistant to when uh every therapist i ever visited wanted to put me on antidepressants so um there's these things kind of just are little early warning early morning signals in your nervous system so i was highly highly highly disturbed that my dreams were just consumed by these little solving little little attachers problems yeah yeah the the next time that that happened was when i was learning r in grad school which is this command line statistical program um and i had dreams about r and that was like oh god at least at that point i could recognize that i was trying to you know solve i guess that's what i was trying to do with tetris too i was trying to solve the puzzles um and you know there were there were things that i hadn't gotten during the day that i was synthesizing at night um but it's always a little disturbing when that happens yeah every time when my mom got me into sudoku that's what would happen is i'd we just go through pages and pages of the of the different skilled ones and then by by the time i'd start doing it over and over and over again for several days in a row then i'd like think of it while i'm going to bed or think of it and daydreaming and whatnot that's how i knew i'd like had too much and then i'd take a break yeah these are not things that we would have had around the stone age campfire yeah they're definitely being registered just very important to figure out and that's that's a double-edged sword well speaking of very important to figure out we have our next question oh your segways man oh yeah yeah i worked on them all night [Laughter] all right i feel like we need sound effects in the background all right what do we have all right dear doctors i am a 35 year old female who is afraid to talk to men i'm so nervous when talking to the opposite sex that it's affecting my work and my studies to the point where i chose to pursue a professional degree in which the majority of students are female i avoid interacting with males wherever i go i always choose female doctors or dentists and only speak to female salespersons when in a store i'm 35 i've never been on a date which my friends who of course are all female and my family think is weird i've never been traumatized by a man i've never been raped and i had a good childhood i know though that this is not normal and i would like to overcome this problem any help or advice would be greatly appreciated huh so i'm curious if she went to college um work and studies or if she so yeah she did so she chose to pursue a professional degree um so there there has been this long standing discomfort even when you're in kind of low stakes you know situations where you have potential repeat exposure which i think would be if there if there is a solution to this problem that's what it is so it's you know find a female dominated but not entirely female um social activity you know hike meetup or some kind of some kind of class or volunteer activity that you could do where there are going to be a couple of men there but you're buffered by enough females being around that you don't feel overwhelmed by it um but presumably you would have had that situation as an undergrad um which is exactly that situation dominated by women um but you still have plenty of men hanging around um so i mean it sounds like there's there's a lot i mean i can hear doug now just throwing up his hand same personality it's just personality um and it largely is personality uh you've you've had um you know lots of kind of common opportunities that just have not uh affected you in the same way that they affect the the bulk of the bell curve and so you're just sitting out there sort of in your own spot um and it doesn't sound like you're scared of men um other than just being afraid to talk to them it's not like i i guess i i'd want to know more about you know what that fear is is it a fear of their sexual interest is it a fear of um you know what what exactly is that um but there's also at this point at 35 you know it's it the the costs of changing behavior get higher and higher as you get more and more entrenched in your behavioral groove um and so the the longer you go without being on a date or having a relationship or being intimate with a man or any of this kind of thing that the more and more sort of um the more you build it up in your mind essentially and so the the harder it gets to to make that happen um and so we would approach this similarly to any kind of um you know exposure therapy to a traumatic incident even though this is not this doesn't originate in trauma um where if we could just expose you to some nice guys in a community group that you could have some conversations with in a very low stakes way without any overt romantic interest or anything like that and just you know desensitize yourself bit by bit to it that's going to be pretty much the the best way to tackle this i think fascinating fascinating all right all right uh yeah my brain kind of lost the segway but it's okay we'll go to the next question that's all right it's hard hard to uh to figure them all out but it's a little hard to relate to this question i guess that's that's the thing um as a more extroverted yeah yeah and so i've met women like this and um you know it's not it's unusual but it's not unheard of um but what i have observed is that you know as as they get older it's you know they they sort of they're not they've never parameterized properly the whole dating experience and so because they've never done it they don't feel like they're missing anything they're very very uh in a groove with their habits and with their lives and very comfortable and very unchallenged and so to be challenged a little bit becomes very very scary um and so it started off as a it's it's the same thing as like if you're afraid to drive on the freeway and so you go way out of your way to take little side streets and you just never drive on the freeway um you actually you know we check in with you a couple years later now you're really never going to go on the freeway because you've not done you haven't desensitized yourself at all in that process um and so yeah i i know quite a few women who have caught themselves in this trap and obviously the the modern dating environment doesn't help matters um and if you're a little introverted and you're and you're purposefully selecting environments where you're not running into a lot of men for repeat exposure it's very easy to just avoid the problem altogether but that comes at a price it comes at a price where if you do decide that you want to try to resolve it it just becomes that much more difficult later in life but not impossible do you think this falls under the uh like a higher on the bell curve for me for egg guarding or is this uh i mean maybe i'm just yeah like is it mate guarding or hi basically i mean it's this person has to be high conscientious right yeah yeah i think it's just it's yeah i wouldn't i don't think it's necessarily mate guarding um although we we could we could or a guardian um but we could test that by you know bringing prince charming in and seeing if you if you have had reactions if there have been men that you've been interested in that you feel you know differently about interacting with um and uh obviously that's going to be true to some degree but yeah i get the feeling this is more just a very nervous personality in general and nervous in this particular way just like the you know you've got the nervous house cat who hides in the attic and you don't see it when guests come over uh come like three days later you're like oh where have you been she is that house cat um and um and that's fine you know it's it's not impossible to you know find relationships and and um find someone who can kind of understand where you're coming from it's just going to be that much more difficult now how dr hawk how or if at all would your answer change if this was a male saying that he was afraid to talk to women i would think it's pretty much exactly the same story um yeah it's i would interpret that i mean if it's the same sort of self-reported you know no terrible story no traumatic events no no essentially no learned experience that is holding him back and distorting his view of how relationships look um then yeah you chalk that up to personality and you know personality can be can be moved by or can be expressed differently with a different environmental change to some degree you just have to discover how far that degree can go by changing the personality and in this case we're going to put you in a in a you know a spanish class for adults you know for the the that meets at the community college once a week um and it's mostly women in there but there are a couple of nice guys and you know maybe everybody goes out afterwards and wants to get dinner or hang out and and so you find you can find yourself in social situations where there are men around but it's not it's not in this sort of um really scary situation where it's one-on-one um and you know bring bring girlfriends along with you and these endeavors as well to be your wing women that's going to be helpful as well all right dr hawk so our final question for this evening dear doctors i am a student in my third year of a bachelor of psychology no matter what the subject the courses always manage to devote a section to gender theory it's i'm shocked it's taught as a fact that gender is a series of norms socialized into us and have no basis in biology where does evolutionary psychology fall on gender theory oh man yeah it's not at all surprising that you're being inundated by this this is gonna happen anywhere in the social sciences uh psychology sociology political science all over the place it's it is um we've talked about this to some degree before um but yes at some point in the last i don't know even the last 10 years this this has become no longer an issue of debate it is it is just absolutely everything is um blank slate everything is uh social norms that socialize into us can be fixed by the right institutions um i'm old enough to remember when this was uh just a paradigm that we would look at among many and so you know that you would sort of consider um something like uh gender relations or even relations between states to to to be subject to social norms as a theoretical hypothetical question um not not the sort of uh status quo of instruction so um i feel for you that you're being exposed to this i don't know that i can speak for evolutionary psychology broadly on where it stands on this question other than to say um it is even though evolutionary psychologists are not biologists they're happy to to take a stand on biological sex and the differences um between men and women and that that are rooted in biology predominantly so i you know that does not mean that there is not a social aspect and construction of gender that happens so so this would be an interesting conversation to have with doug because i have a feeling he would be a little more um potentially conservative on this question than i am so i i am open to a discussion around the ways that we we could think about biological sex and gender differently so um again that used to be the kind of the the gold standard for the way that this kind of question was taught when i was getting my bachelor's degree which was you know biological sex is biological sex you you're you are you got the chromosomes you have you're you're you're the sex that you are but you know depending on your social context you might experience your gender in some other kind of way whether it's a completely opposite sort of way or you know some some more fluid way or something that is essentially more incentivized by your social structure which we have currently found to be very much the case we we have a social and political structure in the western world right now which very much incentivizes gender fluidity in the expression thereof does that change the reality of biological sex it does not and so this got conflated and collapsed at some point in the last couple of years and it totally baffles me how that happened where you now have um you know people straight faced in in psychology classes in a bachelor's program um saying that uh all sex and all gender are just a function of of social processes which is just insane anyway that is my my brief departure on this question i'm not sure if that's totally what you're experiencing um but as far as i can speak for evolutionary psychology as a field um i think it's gonna pretty much be congruent with that more conventional way of making that distinction all right thank you for clearing that up dr hawk yeah well i don't know anything's cleared up it's a huge huge huge map all right dr hawk well thank you so so much we really appreciate the candid answers and uh i'm sure uh we will we'll look forward to hearing more from both you and dr lyle but in the meantime we hope you have a wonderful evening and we'll chat with you real soon you
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