Читать книгу Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 14

Have you ever suspected that a man who was treating you badly and putting you down was secretly jealous of you, even threatened by you? Many theories suggest that men have been driven to dominate women because of a deep envy and awe of women’s creative power. Women’s bodies go through mysterious changes that men cannot understand; women seem to be endowed with certain intuitive and creative abilities men do not have; and most of all, women can conceive and give birth, certainly the most magical feat there is – all of these factors may contribute to the male need to dominate women.

More recent is the theory that male dominance grows out of a man’s need to avoid identifying with the feminine and reflects every man’s drive to break away from his mother. Because the mother is the primary model and relationship for a little boy, he will identify with her, with the feminine, unless he does something to separate himself from her. We’ve all seen this behavior in boys approaching puberty – they don’t want to be kissed or touched by their mothers; they even insist they hate their mothers in an attempt to define themselves as different, as men. Nancy Chodorow, author of The Reproduction of Mothering, explains.

Internally, the boy tries to reject his mother and deny his attachment to her and the strong dependency on her that he still feels … He does this by repressing whatever he takes to be feminine inside himself, and importantly, by denigrating whatever he considers to be feminine in the outside world.

The rebellious little boy in men, still seeking to prove he is not his mother, continues to attempt to dominate women and see them as inferior as a way of saying, “See, since I have control over you, I am better than you. I am not you!”

Later in this book, I’ll explain how the little boy’s desire for autonomy from Mommy still affects the behavior of the grown-up men we love.