The Emotional Whirlwind of Lesbian Relationships
November 19, 2014
IN AN interview at Lifesitenews, Robin Teresa Beck talks about her former life as a lesbian:
Women are emotional, that’s our strong point, and when you put two women together in intimacy, you’ve got drama all over the place. It’s like a soap opera on steroids. That’s something that most women in a Lesbian relationship will not tell you. You know, God made men more sexually driven, and women are just more emotionally driven. And that’s the beauty of men and women coming together in partnership: Somehow, it balances out. Men and women balance each other out. But when you put men together sexually, you get guys who become unsatisfied and always looking for something more. That’s why some gay men go through a hundred relationships, some even a thousand. It’s similar when two women become sexual together: There is nothing but emotion, turmoil, and all kinds of upheaval.
— Comments —
Katheryn writes:
When I was in grad school in the early 2000s studying 20th-century Brazilian history for a Latin American Studies/Library and Information Studies concurrent master’s degree program at UCLA (I didn’t finish, but that is another story), US-Brazilian relations on both the macro and micro levels intrigued me. Perhaps the most famous example of US-Brazilian relations on the personal level during the 20th century is that of the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. I read several biographies of Bishop, as well as a collection of a selection of her letters (One Art), and the Bishop/Macedo Soares relationship seems to concur with Robin Teresa Beck’s description of lesbian relationships. A film about the Bishop/Macedo Soares relationship, Reaching for the Moon, came out in 2013: I plan to see it soon on DVD.
Once I see it, I hope to tell you about it. Reviews have been mixed, but it seems that it does go into the triangle of Bishop, Macedo Soares and Macedo Soares’ ex-lover (and Bishop’s friend from Vassar), Mary Morse, and how the Bishop/Macedo Soares relationship had a negative impact on Mary Morse’s life. It also apparently goes into Macedo Soares’ friendship with the conservative Brazilian politician Carlos Lacerda in the years before and just after the coup of 1964.
Laura writes:
Interesting.
I knew nothing about Bishop’s private life, though I am familiar with her poetry.
Abigail writes:
I was struck by Ms. Beck’s comment that “[w]omen are emotional, that’s our strong point . . . ” and that ” . . . women are just more emotionally driven [than men].” One hears this thing a lot on conservative blogs. And it always leads me to wonder whether people who make such comments, like Ms. Beck, have spent any significant time around men at all.
I have. I’ve worked in male dominated offices, and let me tell you, my impression is certainly that men are just as prone to drama, emotionalism, gossip and backbiting as women are, if not more so. The only difference is that women seem more prone to tears, but that is no basis to assume that means women are more emotional or more emotionally driven than men.
In fact, one issue, I suppose, is that it is impossible to prove empirically that women are more emotional or more emotionally driven than men. After all, at any given time, we are experiencing an emotional state of some sort or another, and how do you measure the degree of influence that emotional state has, if any, on a person’s actions? It is all too easy to accept the unsubstantiated stereotype that women are more emotionally driven than men, and view all human behavior through that a priori assumption. Strip away that assumption and you start to see the emotionalism in men’s behavior that often does not get labeled as such. For example, we easily label a woman’s tears as evidence of excessive emotionalism, but we do not necessarily view a man’s expressions of anger in the same light.
Laura writes:
The greater expressiveness and empathy of women, which I consider obvious in everyday life, has been confirmed in psychological tests. In his book The Essential Difference, Simon Baron Cohen examines some of these studies. Women’s expressiveness is perhaps related to their superiority in many aspects of language use. In relationships between women, there is much more talking about emotions.
Terry Morris writes:
Apparently Abigail doesn’t get out of the office much, or she has her head up in the clouds when she does. Ha, ha.
How many daughters have you raised, Abigail? One of the things you may be completely oblivious to given the world you live in is that there is a great deal of (institutionalized?) accomodation given female emotionalism pervasive throughout our society, which can have the overall effect of making it appear to be less an issue than it actually is. But appearances can be deceptive, and you have been deceived.
Women are more emotionally driven than men. That’s a fact Beck gets right in her interview. Where she misses the mark is in declaring female emotionalism as a strength (I take it Beck is trying to say that emotional drivenness is a woman’s greatest strength) and not a weakness. And that’s where Abigail inadvertently gets it right in her comments downplaying greater female emotionalism. Abigail downplays the fact of female emotional drivenness to the point of dismissing it because she, unlike Beck apparently, realizes emotional drivenness is more a weakness than a strength. That is why she is slightly militant in her denial of the whole idea of greater female emotionalism. Abigail’s anecdotal evidence about men being equally emotionally driven as women is essentially valueless, by the way. I could elaborate more fully (and we’ve all seen the type of man Abigail speaks of), but suffice it to say that men working in offices alongside women as equals changes the dynamics a little bit compared to men working in offices alongside only other men. … And vice versa. Were you to work alongside me, Abigail, in my line of work (which isn’t in an office), your greater tendency to emotional drivenness would be, almost immediately, very much apparent and everyone would notice it. Except you. And if not, then you’re one in a million, as they say. In other words, the extreme exception to the rule. But in a forum like this one, we tend merely to acknowledge the exception always exists, rather than to mistake it as being the rule.
But speaking of anecdotes, I’ll never forget the first time I addressed our oldest daughter in a negative tone of voice. Her immediate reaction had the effect of shocking me into a whole ‘nother realm of understanding innate female emotionalism. I had never witnessed anything of the kind in her older brother, whom I had spoken to in much sterner terms. In fine, she had what might be described as an emotional breakdown. She lacked that mental toughness innate in boys which allows the latter to receive parental correction (particularly a father’s correction) in a non-personalized way. Over the course of time we had three more daughters and three more sons. Same thing. Yes, I’ve learned how to speak to my daughters for the most part without deeply offending their sensibilities, but I’m perfectly aware that tiptoeing around their emotions is necessary (whereas not s’much with the boys) because they are more emotionally driven. Abigail is, for whatever reason(s), simply out of touch with reality on this point.
Laura writes:
Abigail does seem removed from reality. She has probably not spent much time with children or adolescents. However, I disagree with Mr. Morris that the emotional capacity of women is more a weakness than a strength. Like human reason or judgment, it is constantly susceptible to weakness but also a woman’s greatest strength. Speaking of the differences between daughters and sons, there is a striking difference in how men and women, in general, relate to elderly parents and relatives. Go into nursing homes, hospitals and “assisted living facilities” and there are many more daughters. I realize this is partly because they have more time, since men are working, but it’s more than that. This is female compassion and empathy, which is the ability to be attuned to others. Female emotionalism reaches its highest state in the Blessed Mother and her Immaculate Heart, which reaches out with compassion to all of humanity and feels the sorrows of the world.
Paul writes:
I can verify the vexing relationships among lesbians. As a pre-med major who thought he wanted to be a surgeon, I was gifted with the opportunity to intern in a four-man orthopedic firm. The firm had its own radiologic tech, a talented female lesbian. I wanted to soak up everything, so I learned how to assist her too. She adored me based on feedback from the staff, and I liked her (and represented her successfully years later as an attorney). She began wearing makeup such as lipstick. (This, even though she was the man in her relationships.) Being congenitally naive, I had to be told the changes by the all-female staff. She was pretty when she was in training according to one of the physicians, and he said she intentionally picked her face to undermine her beauty. She was blond (shortly cut of course) and blue-eyed. I could see her innate beauty. And she would give you the shirt off of her back if you asked. But she would come into work bruised from fighting.
Nov. 23, 2014
Abigail writes:
[In response to Laura’s points.]
Well, for once I see some points of agreement between us. How refreshing.
1) I am sure that Dr. Baron Cohen is right that women have greater expressiveness about their emotions and others’ emotions and are at least equal in empathy, if not generally more empathetic than men. That assertion certainly corresponds to my anecdotal experience. But those are different things than being more emotional or more driven by emotion.
2) I don’t disagree that emotional awareness and being motivated by emotional concerns can be a strength or a weakness depending on the individual. Empathy is certainly incredibly important quality in some of the world’s most influential people, many of whom are men. Jesus and the Buddha are the first two who come to my mind, as I sit here.
3) The commenter above who told the story about his daughter breaking down in the face of a rebuke seems to correlate emotionalism with lack of mental toughness. But that doesn’t follow at all. Emotionalism and lack of mental toughness are two different things.
4) Unfortunately, when emotionalism is acribed to women it is usually used in a way that implies extreme mental weakness, lack of rationality, and lack of toughness. My position is that (a) emotionalism need not and often does not correlate with lack of rationality and lack of toughness; (b) both sexes seem to be equally emotionally driven even if we don’t always recognize it; and (c) emotionalism can be a strength or a weakness depending on how an individual uses it and express it.
Mary writes:
On the physical level the bodies of men and women are complementary, like puzzle pieces. Speaking from the most basic level of function, they are also complementary: women have wombs and breasts, meant to carry babies through nine months of gestation and provide basic nourishment, a time which in primitive cultures often lasts another couple of years. Men are stronger and more muscular and to any unbiased observer would be the obvious choice to protect and provide for the mother and baby. It naturally follows, then, that the unbiased observer would correctly conclude that men’s and women’s natures would also be complementary, tailored to these basic roles. It is common sense and can be understood by the simplest peasant, but also beautifully deep for it is the well-spring from which the family emerges and has sustained stable societies for millennia. Abigail counts on the modern corruption of these basic truths for evidence to support her ideas about male/female nature and to promote the idea that blurred distinctions between men and women are beneficial:
“Men are just as prone to drama, emotionalism, gossip and backbiting as women are, if not more so…”
She is unaware that the average, feminized modern male/workplace reveal little about the reality of male and female nature and interaction: they couldn’t possibly as they are the product, the result, of decades of directed, radical social change; no objective reality can be unearthed under these circumstances. So, although I realize we are far down the path of social deconstruction already, for the sake of discussion the burden is on Abigail to find evidence drawn not from current conditions – which reflect no truths about humanity, merely reflecting the success of concerted efforts to change it – but from the endless resources made available in the past two thousand years by the formation of nothing less than Western Civilization itself. She will find little to support her ideas but will benefit in the end from exposure to the most radical – in the best sense of the word – and uplifting era in human history: one from which we all benefit to this day, even as they try to tear it down.
