As part of He Said She Said month, I'm happy to present an on-going series of Q & As with the noted relationship expert, me. Our first question deals with the subtleties of the male psyche:
Are all men really pigs?
Boy howdy! A tough one right off the bat. Um, the short answer (and take it from me, I'm not only a noted relationship expert, but I'm also a man) is yes.
Thing is, every man is entirely capable of spectacularly boorish behavior. Doesn't matter how educated, how intelligent, how cultured he is (some of the most famous philanderers in history have been otherwise highly respectable and erudite gentlemen of society). [a particularly leering and lascivious sentence detailing what can cause piggish behavior has been deleted] Evolutionary biologists have speculated that swinish behavior has a primordial, genetic root: the evolutionary need of the male to pass along as many of his genes as possible in a competitive setting.
This, however, does not excuse this sort of behavior. One of the differences between homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to understand ourselves and to resist our baser instincts (indeed, it could be argued that this ability is the basis of civil society). Simply put, men should not be given a free pass because of behavior patterns that were evolutionarily advantageous a million years ago.
Another cause is perhaps because men really don't understand women and have a great deal of trouble relating to them as people. This is an unfortunate state of affairs (which is not helped by the ever-increasing sexualization of gender roles that we've seen over the past decade). In English, this means that men are shallow and often read a book by its cover. A side effect is that men who have been wounded in affairs of the heart often blame the entire female sex for their woes and subsequently act accordingly.
In the interests of fairness, there are plenty of women who act as enablers here. I simply cannot comprehend (perhaps the fault lies with a failure of imagination on my part) what kind of thought process goes through the mind (on the other hand, perhaps I am making an unwarranted assumption here) of a young woman who agrees to participate in a so-called 'wet T-shirt contest' (so-called because T-shirts are often absent entirely from such events). At a minimum, she is not contributing to the advancement of The Cause.
On a more general note, men are simply not as emotionally available as most women are (they're not 'in touch with their feelings'). I don't know if this is a problem of nature or nurture (probably both). Thusly, what a man may feel to be perfectly acceptable behavior (going out until 2 a.m. in the seedier sections of town) would probably not pass muster with his more sensitive partner.
Quite frankly, given the track record of my gender, I'm surprised that any women at all take a chance on us.