10 posts tagged “sex”

For a woman, finding the right man to love her the way she wants to be loved, to be a good father to the children they create together and to provide a healthy, vibrant, creative and enjoyable family environment that will last a lifetime is almost impossible.

Why? While there are many reasons, a few stand out.

Most commonly, a woman goes looking for the wrong guy. Back in prehistoric days, a woman wanted a strong man, the best warrior in the tribe, someone who could provide for and defend her family. If he was good looking, even better. If he fertilized other women, so be it, so long as he looked after the best interests of her family.

That attitude persists today, even though almost everything else in life has changed. Women still want the handsomest, strongest, sexiest guy with demonstrated ability at leadership as he gathers other guys to follow his lead. Anyone who doubts this should check out how girls in the latter years of grade school and in high school tart themselves up for the guys. They may want to be treated as sweet and innocent, but they look and act like hookers because they know what guys like to look at.

No question, guys like to look at attractive women. If they could, they would take every one of them to bed. But they wouldn't necessarily want to spend their lives with them.

If I guy can score with a girl who looks and acts like a hooker, but not have to pay fees, he considers himself a winner. And so would his buddies. But guys don't want to marry hookers, because...they have proven that they have too many other sexual interests. Girls who look like hookers and put out sexual vibes like hookers may get the attention of guys, but those guys don't want to marry them.

The same applies to the captain of the football or basketball team, or any other jock who looks good stripped to...well, stripped. While most girls are attracted to these guys, many have none of the other qualities a woman should be looking for. That "get the best possible male to mate with" attitude persists even though we no longer live in tribes.

The best warrior in the tribe in prehistoric days seldom lived past age 24, almost never past age 30. Since the tribe did much of the teaching of children anyway, getting the best set of genes seemed wise. The warrior would always be busy with matters other than those relating to the family, and women knew that. Today, the same guy would be a terrible person to depend on for personal and family values.

Today, most men live past 30. It's the next 50 or 60 years after that the women who marry them can't stand.

Very few of the skills a young man learns in high school apply to the fulfillment of responsibilities of a family man. We don't teach the skills that families need, that women should be looking for. So young women continue to want the best looking guy they can get. And when they marry and he fails to satisfy the needs of her or their children, they can't figure out why.

The most popular girls and guys in high school get so used to constant attention from members of the opposite sex that they continue to want that attention into college, into their work lives later and into their time as parents. They don't need commitment, they need attention. Girls should want a life partner who gives attention, not one who seeks it from them.

Girls naturally favour men with confidence. Whether in men or women, confidence is the most important characteristic of beautiful people. An average looking person with lots of confidence and a big smile can be a sex symbol. Just look at the stars of movies, only they have the addition of makeup to make them look even more perfect. Brad Pitt may be great for the imagination, but few women could tolerate spending a life with that kind of man.

As great as confidence is--I firmly believe it is critically important to a person's well-being--it does absolutely nothing to make a man a better husband, lover, father, provider or planner. Confidence is but one characteristic of a person. That characteristic can be taught and learned. Most people who have confidence learned it by themselves, though it can be learned by taking classes of various kinds.

Those who don't have confidence in themselves and their abilities and strengths should take a class to learn how to show confidence, to feel confident.

Men need more skills than confidence, good looks and rippling muscles to be good husbands, fathers and long term friends. For a woman to depend on the looks of a man as the main feature she loves and wants would be the same as a man loving a woman because she has breast implants, a tummy tuck, butt rounding, a nose job, reconfigured ears and a hair transplant. Every study ever done shows that most men don't want those features in a wife and mother. A majority of men want "natural" women, no matter if they have body features that are not perfect.

Women shouldn't depend on good looks and popularity as characteristics that will make a man a good husband and father. In fact, nothing about the appearance of a man, good or not so good, can be held as predictors of what he will be like as a husband, lover, father, provider, friend or sleepmate.

Advice to women: When looking for a mate, search for one who has the characteristics you want in a man for what you want to do with him in the years to come. If one you like doesn't have those characteristics, make sure he is the kind of man who will gladly learn what he needs to know. If he won't, look elsewhere, quickly.

Advice to men who have read this far: The same applies to you when looking for a lifemate. Paris Hilton or Salma Hayak or someone with the name of Diaz or Cruz may be great to ogle, but they won't necessarily have the characteristics you want at home. And they will always want the attention they get now from other men.

It's not just a matter of caveat emptor. It's a matter of looking for what you really want rather than wanting someone who looks good but has nothing else to offer that you will find valuable in the years to come.

Think ahead. Unfortunately, most people don't get better with age. If you want a partner that will, look for that characteristic before you settle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to cope with the needs of their lives instead of depending on television and movies to tell them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
- Granville Hicks, American novelist, educator, editor (1901-1982)

First of all, censors are no longer just men in western countries. Women comprise half of most censor boards.

In Canada, film censors watch three films per day, with usually a break between the first two and a lunch break before the third.

Some refuse to have a meal before their final movie of the day in case what they see in the last one causes them to lose their lunch.

Very seldom is anything censored in Canada, that is, removed from the list of items which may be sold to or viewed by the public, forbidden from public scrutiny.

There are those who oppose any kind of pre-screening of anything going before the public. Generally speaking those people are idealists who have little idea about what the censors actually have to take in. It's not just "dirty movies" and books about sexual encounters any more.

Censors usually only last a few years, at most, on their respective boards. By then, so a few claim who have spoken out publicly, their minds have become so enured by a constant assault of movies where people abuse each other that their lives are changed forever. They leave to try to recover what they once had, some semblance of respect for the vast majority of their fellow countrymen who are not abusive.

While most of us would rather not have anyone scrutinize what we see or read, we must admit that some people produce print or film material that is abusive to the point of being illegal if the people involved in the films could be caught. When one has seen many such movies or read many novels of this type, they tend in one of two directions. Either they become desensitized to the welfare of their fellow humans (in which case they no longer care if someone is abused) or they become abusive themselves.

Censors do not become abusive because they undergo psychiatric and psychological tests before they begin their service and once or more each year to check their reactions to certain shocking human motivators. Average citizens (who may not be so average in their lack of social and emotional well-being) often do not have the support systems that prevent them from straying off-centre into anti-social behaviour if they subject themselves to anti-social material repeatedly. Once an already unbalanced person comes to accept that a certain kind of anti-social behaviour is acceptable within a particular context (the film or book), that person may stray too far from what is generally accepted and chose to use some of the abusive methods he has seen or read about.

Censorship today is not about "protecting" God fearing citizens from shameful sexual exposures. It's about maintaining a level of respectability beyond which average people don't want to know people do to each other and the police should possibly intervene.

There is no doubt that censors see and read everything that people create that may border on the anti-social or may be intentionally outright anti-social. I, for one, thank them for taking the brunt of the most disgusting stuff that people produce today. I have seen some of the filmed material and I don't want to think that people do that to each other.

In times past, censors prevented average citizens from seeing or reading about sex, something that almost everyone did but no one was permitted to talk about publicly or to show any signs of it taking place. Those were the days when people devised euphemisms to refer to body parts and to sexual activities because saying the words for the real acts was horrendous to some. Today those who "cross the line" in literature, art or film are abusive. Abuse of others has never been socially acceptable.

Countries whose militaries are engaged in wars fairly often have soldiers who return to civilian life and some have trouble adjusting to non-violent ways of solving problems, including their own. Those countries tend to have the highest rates of civilian violence. Just recently a few have begun to offer psychological re-programming and some retraining to returning soldiers so they will be able to fit again into the society they had been working to protect. They got used to violence, now they need to become un-used to it.

We should not need to institute social reprogramming for people who have seen too much abuse in movies that they can no longer fit into society by staying within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.

Remember "Banned in Boston!" It was a surefire way to sell a book a few decades ago. Today kids watch more sex than what was in those book as they watch soap operas on television during the daytime. Sex is acceptable now. Let's hope that abuse of any kind never becomes a common way of life.

Censors do the job that most of us would not want (could not take psychologically) so that the police have something to use as evidence if the producers of abusive movies sell their product to the public. Most of us don't want to contemplate the fact that some people accept money to be physically abused so it can be filmed and shown to the public. Most porn is like sandbox play compared to what the hardcore abusive stuff is producing.

We really don't want to know. Censors protect us and those less psychologically stable than us.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know right from wrong and to avoid what will be harmful to them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
- Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes

If only...

Those who claim that organized religion is on the wane may be correct. A few key reasons come to mind.

First, religion is supposed to benefit the individual believer, yet it more often benefits the leaders of the various segments within each religion. Religion benefits the leaders more than the individual followers.

Second, historically as well as at the present time clerics have been widely known to be among the worst violators of the sins their religions speak against in commandments.

Third, the massive expansion of media coverage of violations of the law among religious leaders among religious leaders has made following some of them like belonging to an organized crime family.

We must be suspicious of any religious leader who claims that what we do on earth is supposed to be solely to please God. While most of us want to be cooperative and follow religious and moral rules, we must question what kind of God had to create humans to be his servants and slaves. Does this sound like the beautiful and beneficent God our clerics tell us about?

Why did God give us free choice so that we could violate what he wanted of us? Isn't that like a master-slave relationship where the master gives the slaves free reign to do what they want, then punishes them with eternal damnation if they do anything other than what they have been commanded to do? That doesn't even make sense.

Clerics have over the centuries attributed every bit of misfortune to breaking of God's commandments, resulting in everything from fires and floods to AIDS, bankruptcies and divorce. Enough people believe this nonsense that the rumour mill keeps churning behind the scenes even when the real causes and sources for natural disasters and personal misfortune can be proven.

It's God's way of paying people back for their sins, say some. But isn't that what the hell they threaten us with is for? Either we should be punished here on earth so that we can all go to heaven cleansed or we should have free reign here and pay for our sins eternally after we die. If we get punished both here on earth and in hell, isn't that double jeopardy?

If the strongly religious people truly believe that their God is all-powerful and will punish sinners accordingly after they die, why do the self-righteous want to punish people here on earth? Are they concerned that God might miss a sinner? Or do they have God-envy?

Let's look at the self-designated upright pillars of society in a different light. If we examine their behaviour carefully, ignoring their message while focussing on what they do, they are really closet bigots. In fact, the self-righteous may be the most prejudiced people we have in our communities. They ignore that part of their holy book that says "Judge not that ye be not judged." They tend to be the most judgmental people we have in our societies. Yet prejudice, they claim, is a sin. One for which they personally have no intention of paying any penalty.

On the surface, every religion is designed to help guide an individual through a complex and confusing life. In practice, most organized religions are tax collecting agencies who want to control the behaviour of their taxpayers so that they will give more.

If God is ashamed of anyone in our society, he could find no better objectives than the highly religious.

Every religion has good at its core. Every religion goes corrupt over time. Every religion has people who profit from donations and who know how to maximize them for their own benefit. Every religion has people whose prime objective is to bend the minds of the followers to do their will.

That's what religions do. Not what they say they do, which is quite different, often quite the opposite.

Attendance at religious services is declining in most parts of the world where people are well educated. Not because the core of religion is at fault--because it isn't--but because educated people understand fraud and choose to avoid it.

This doesn't mean that belief in any doctrine is disappearing. I suspect the opposite. I think that we have more people who believe in what the core of the religion they were born into teaches while attendance at places of worship declines. Of course there will always be places where charismatic speakers can charm large audiences. We also have advertising that sells product well and politicians who can get themselves elected by making all kinds of promises they have no intention of fulfilling once elected. It's hype. It works. It brings in money.

I find it ironic that I have never met an atheist who is anything other than a good person who tries to do his or her best for their family and their community. What they don't believe in is the false gods that organized religions use to manipulate the minds of their followers. Most haven't yet figured out how to find the real God.

The more self-righteous among us rail against false gods. Maybe they should look into a mirror.

Where are those lightning bolts when we need them?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can tell truth from fiction, what is worthy from what is deceptive, what is real from what is devised by the greedy for their fraudulent purposes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The secret of the law of abundance is this: In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give.
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)

I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.

However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."

This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.

Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.

Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.

Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.

The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.

A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.

That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief. Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.

Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.

No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.

They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.

The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.

The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.

No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.

Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.

For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.

Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.

Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.

Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.

Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.

Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.

But they may appreciate a good tickle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
- Carl Sagan, American author and scientist (1934-1996)

Let's deal with the most obvious example of the truth of this quote, marriage.

In most western countries, the rate of failed marriages (as determined by the rate of divorce) hovers around or above fifty percent. That means that at least half of the people who entered the ceremony believing that they were deliriously happy because they had found their soulmate for life were wrong. What they found was beautiful romance which lasted about as long as most romantic relationships, from two to eight months.

Why the huge failure rate? We humans are built for two fundamental kinds of relationships. Romance worked well for our prehistoric ancestors because it allowed them to find the mates that would produce their children. The other kind was more akin to friendship, a healthy and lasting kind whereby a man and a woman would raise a collection of children, most of which were the direct descendants of one or both of them.

This worked well in tribal conditions where mating happened frequently between various combinations of couples. It wasn't important to the tribe who birthed the children once they were there, it was important that the whole village or band contributed to the raising of them. Having everyone take an interest in raising the children meant that the kids would have built into them the values of the community.

Prisons were non-existent. If punishment was necessary, it was administered often by means of social ostracization from the offended party or from the tribe for a period of time. As everyone knew what everyone else in the tribe was doing most of the time, crime within the tribe was rare. While there might have been fights between men over who would mate with a woman at a given time, there were usually enough females so that each male had one or more of them available. This is true today in bands of our nearest genetic relatives, the great apes.

Even when couples had paired off to live together and to take responsibility for raising the children for which they adopted obligations, mating took place with others. Maybe with others who didn't have mates, maybe with some who did. Of course they didn't copulate around the community campfire. What mattered was that the male and the female came "home" when they were supposed to be home to fulfill their other responsibilities.

Today we continue that pattern, though our religions and our media have tried to pretend that we humans were built for monogamy. We aren't. No species of primate or even of mammal is totally monogamous, according to recent scientific studies. What the animals are is committed to a monogamous home relationship, not a monogamous sexual relationship.

Romance was natural, especially for those in their teens years, because each person looked for the mate who would father or mother their offspring, the strongest and healthiest possible children. As mating and pairing off for living purposes were often two different matters, no one was surprised when the natural mother of a child did not live with the natural father. Living together as a cohesive group was, after all, what the family was all about. Sexual intercourse existed within the family, but was not necessarily restricted to the family.

Judging by what we see on television, the most common reason why marriages break up is sexual infidelity. Yet sex with various different partners was in our genetic and hormonal makeup for tens of thousands of years before religions and the media made us believe in monogamy and sexual fidelity within a marriage.

Do we even today, in what we believe is an advanced condition of humanity, have the tools, the skills and the knowledge to maintain sexual fidelity within a marriage? I submit the unequivocal answer to that is an emphatic No. Women, especially in the early years of raising children, often do not have enough energy left by the end of the day for their bodies to produce enough hormones to have a strong interest in sex. Every few days, maybe, but not every day for most. The male, however, is built for daily or even more frequent sexual experiences during his years of maximum sexual strength.

As the male gets older and adopts more responsibilities, it's apt to be him who loses the energy battle, resulting in insufficient body strength to produce hormones to have regular interest in sex. While the male reaches his sexual peak around age 27, when his body tells him to have sex with every female he can get his penis into in order to spread his genes around, the female doesn't reach her sexual peak until at least age 33, sometimes several years later. When the male's interest in frequent sex is slowing, the female is more rarin' to go than ever before in her life. By then her kids may be past the high maintenance stage so she has more energy.

We don't have the social structures to match our rising and falling sexual interests (pun noted, I almost said mate our interests) with our basic physical needs. This is the environment into which we place "Till death do us part." And the public social commandment of sexual monogamy (which has never, ever, been widely accepted in private).

Where does emotion come into this? In this case, the response to a rush of hormones is what we call romance, which is a strong emotion. We can be madly in love with someone we want to mate with because that's how our hormones cause us to react.

As you can easily see, our social structures are not equipped to deal with public social demands which do not jibe with private hormonal/emotional needs. This gap will not soon be resolved or closed. We are in the midst of trying to cope with a chasm that has opened up now, but not ready to put the broken social fabric back together into a new form of arrangement that is as widely accepted as the old arrangement was in our tribal times of the past. The old one won't work and we don't have a new arrangement ready to take its place.

We are in the midst of a transition period in human history, in many ways, but one of the most important regards our interpersonal relationships. No one knows how it will shake out. Right now it seems chaotic.

The best we can do as parents is to make our children aware of the realities of this human condition and to give them the social, emotional and family tools and skills to manage their personal affairs with their heads up, knowing what to expect. And being prepared for what to do when they reach each stage of a relationship with another person.

We may one day end up with three phases to our adult lives, first romance and mating, second the raising of children (families) and the third a pairing for living together through old age. There is evidence for the beginnings of that possible structure for the future even now.

It's exciting if you see the transition happening before your eyes around the world. Scary as hell if you don't realize that our species is in the midst of a transition which will likely firm up long after we who read this are all dead. We need to see the big picture.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their growing children to be ready to face head-on and to cope with the changes that will happen in their lives as they pass through adolescence into adulthood and beyond that into old age.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The more developed we become, the more technologically connected we get, the more we regret the loss of our privacy. The media and internet blogs and chat groups wail that we can't keep anything private any more.

What I wonder is: Why?

Granted, there are personal matter such as finances that are none of anyone's business except the owner of those finances. Yet many of those same people do their banking over the internet, which is anything but secure.

A recent study in Canada showed that the major Canadian banks pay their customers who lose savings as a result of their identity being stolen from internet banking transactions about $250 million per year. The banks deem it much cheaper than improving their security, which would cost about two billion dollars (a one-time cost).

Those same banks have their staff assure customers that internet banking is safe--indeed, even urge them to open internet banking accounts. Meanwhile, even the scammers are onto this, sending out "account confirmation" notices by email and notices of "upgrades" that require confirmation of banking details (name and password, at least) that look dangerously similar to emails from the real banks. The fraudulent emails even include bank logos and fake bank email domain addresses that look identical to the real thing.

Meanwhile, the same banks offer little encouragement to customers to do their banking over the telephone, which is far safer. True, it is possible to break into a telephone line and steal banking information. However, this is wiretapping, which is deeply frowned upon by the police. And it's fairly easy to track the sources of the illegal taps. Criminal charges follow.

What we hear about bank fraud and identity theft is enough to make anyone think that their whole life could be in the toilet by the end of the day if their identity were stolen.

I remember "the old days" where people in cities didn't have to lock their doors. In many rural areas, it's still like that today. People know everyone, so they know everyone else's business. It's almost impossible to keep secrets from rural neighbours. Isn't that loss of privacy in the extreme?

At the same time as city dwellers are losing their privacy against their will, they are losing the concept of real friendship. Real friends help real friends in trouble, no matter what. Friendships in cities today resemble more business relationships where each party must contribute an equal share to the relationship and each party must benefit from the other's efforts or the friendship is dropped. "What have you done for me lately?" is the key to many relationships.

Meanwhile, our loss of trust has caused us to want to keep our children indoors instead of out playing sports or investigating life away from the security of home. The kids stay home, eat junk food and play video games (both readily and willingly provided by parents). The kids get fat. But the parents don't notice because they are putting on the pounds as well due to lack of physical activity and overindulgence of prepared foods.

Many people fear going outside their homes after dark. That's not just a caution for them, but a real and substantial fear.

Now I wonder whether we are not teaching ourselves to be afraid of everything. We don't even look at strangers in an elevator, presumably because we fear they might rob or rape us. We don't count our change in convenience store because we want to be out of there before it's robbed the next time.

Parents watch and monitor the activity of their kids, in some form, all day, every day. The children, not used to much freedom of choice or independence from their parents, want to get away from the parents when they become teens. At that age, when the kids have learned very little except fear and dependence from their parents, they go out into the world and get themselves into trouble.

Of course that only accounts for a small percentage of adolescents. But how small a percentage is small enough to ignore?

When my wife and I had young children, we routinely taught them how to cope with the situations they would face when they went out alone. We taught them what to expect, what to do if unexpected things happened and how to react in as many possible situations as we could think of.

How many parents do that today? Ninety percent? That's a pretty high figure. But it leave ten percent of children unprepared to face the world they live in. It's no coincidence that ten percent is about the amount that get into trouble, either with the law or by indulging in illegal activities, including drugs and alcohol.

Where everyone knows everyone else's business, a child can walk down a street and every neighbour who sees that child will know what he is doing and where he is going. In most cities of fear, the same child would be a stranger to the neighbours. In which situation do you think the child would be safer?

Loss of privacy only matters when private information becomes known to the wrong people. Lack of privacy can be a great benefit when the right people know what they should.

We need to stop fearing the good guys and learn to trust them more. They will not trust us or our kids so long as we don't trust them.

The bad guys aren't that hard to identify. They don't wear black hats, as they did in the old western movies. But they follow patterns. We can learn those patterns and teach them to our children.

Long ago it was said that it takes a village to raise a child. Most kids don't live in villages these days. Some kids in cities are treated as enemies by neighbours who don't know them well.

It's time we taught kids and adults about living in large, modern urban complexes. We have the technology, but we don't have the updated social practices to go with it.

Teach the children what and who to trust and what and who to not trust. If we don't, they will learn to fear and lack respect for everyone and everything. Does that sound familiar?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow competent children who know how to cope with their world. The book comes with learning guides.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

That's "bonding" in a social sense. It doesn't mean a male and a female stuck together, mid-copulation, for life.

Monogamy in a sexual sense virtually doesn't exist in nature. The red fox, noted for its devotion to one mate, slips away occasionally to spread around the good will. The Adélie penguin, also famous for its monogamy, gets away occasionally (the females, that is) to mate with unattached males.

The female penguins exact a fee for this service. The male has to pony up a bunch of stones to bolster the nests of the female. Some skilled female penguins can even get a male to offer up the stones without offering her services later.

"Genetic testing has put the lie to the myth of monogamy" according to narrator F. Murray Abraham, of the PBS series Nature. Ninety-nine percent of mammal species never form pair bonds. Of the few that do, the genetic material of the devoted pairs can still be found in offspring of others. In the case of the red fox, that figure is about 80 percent.

So, in nature, monogamy means devotion to one mate in a relationship sense, not in a sexual sense. Nature cares about genetic diversity, not relationships.

Though life began on our planet some 3.8 billion years ago, sexual reproduction didn't evolve until about two billion years later. Scientists aren't sure why it even developed since they believe asexual reproduction has advantages over the sexual variety in several important ways.

The excuse that close relationships of paired animals required it falls apart when you realize that sexual reproduction developed first in plants. Unless, maybe, plants that reproduce sexually send signals between each other that we can't detect. "Hey, Baby, how about we put your pistil together with my stamen?"

The earthworm Dendrobaena rubida has the best of both worlds, with both male and female reproductive equipment. It can mate with any other of its own kind. In a pinch, it can even double itself around and mate with itself. Successfully, without having idiot offspring. And they don't call each other by nasty names either.

We know a fair amount about the mating habits of monkeys because they have been studied intensively for the past few decades. Bonobos, which are quite similar in appearance to our nearest DNA relatives, chimpanzees, are notorious lovers. They go at it many times each day, with no thought about jealous mates. Bonobos are also known as the least aggressive members of the ape family. Do the math.

Barbary macaques have maybe the noisiest mating procedures. Once the male engages the female, the female yells to get the male to ejaculate. Without the yelling, the males often don't climax. My sources didn't say if the yelling was of the "Get it on, you....!" or of the accentuated sweet talk variety.

If people did that, it would be on YouTube. Or YouPorn, a new site for amateurs.

The spiny anteater, native to Australia and New Zealand, has a penis with four heads. (You can't make up stuff like this. No one would believe it.) However, only two of the anteater's penis heads will fit into a female at once. No mention in my sources about threesomes.

The ultimate in mating--at least the ultimate in mating sacrifice--must be the tiny paper nautilus. It's an octopus. The smaller male impregnates the much larger female by shooting his penis into her. Then he has to leave it there and take off or the female gets mighty grouchy.

Nature has lots of examples of homosexual behaviour. About 1500 species of mammal, fish, reptile, bird and even invertebrates do it.

When two male geese decide to keep company, a female will often slip between them and mate with both. Later, the males share fatherly duties. I have seen that happen with mallard ducks as well. It was a bit strange to see two males and one female together constantly for weeks at a time each year.

Fruit flies have been studied in laboratories because they are such easy subjects. At the University of California at San Francisco biologists exposed male fruit flies to high levels of alcohol, then turned them loose. The males were ready to mate with anything they could, including other males and other species of flying insect (if they could).

One expert said that eventually the test turned into a homosexual orgy, with "a chain of males chasing each other."

The more alcohol the males had in them, the less likely they were to mate successfully, despite their lack of discrimination. No wonder they're a great model for studying human-like behaviour.

While bonobos and orangutans join humans as the few species to mate face to face, few other primates do. Hamsters and beavers are among them.

French kissing is rare in nature. The white-fronted parrot is the only species other than humans known to do it. The birds open their beaks prior to mating, then touch each other's tongues. After that, the male spews his lunch over the female's chest.

While the latter behaviour is not common among humans, it's not unknown among college frat boys.

Size does matter. Tall people tend to choose each other as mates. People also tend to choose mates with the same hair colour (check out how many blonds are coupled with blondes), skin colour and education level.

One British study even showed that obese people tend to choose mates with comparable levels of body fat. While the reason for this may seem self evident, the mates usually select each other before they become obese.

Finally, nature plays some dirty tricks on us dumb humans. Young women with the most curvaceous figures usually become fat as they get older. Rounded butts and eye-catching breasts are almost entirely composed of fat. For many women, fat collects first in the places that men pay most attention to. Then it spreads. As always, caveat emptor.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today' Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach kids what they most need to know to avoid getting into trouble, before the trouble presents itself.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
- Lenny Bruce, comedian (1925-1966)

It's a good laugh line for a comedian. Just about everyone remembers that when they were eight years old nobody wanted to include them in adult affairs or conversations. And the adults in Lenny's audience likely did the same with their own kids.

I remember a man I overheard speaking to another man, when I was about 15 years old, saying "I don't bother trying to have conversations with anyone younger than 25 because they don't know enough to hold a decent conversation." It impressed me so much I decided to learn enough to be able to hold a good conversation by the age of 25.

I certainly didn't consider including my own children in conversations I had with my wife when they were that age. They weren't interested anyway.

I was wrong.

My kids were wrong, but maybe because of our practice of excluding our kids from adult conversations they just got used to how things were.

It's the sole purpose in life of a child to learn what it's like in the adult world they are enter within a few years. The young of every species has that same purpose.

If we, as parents and grandparents, don't include kids in our conversations, they miss out on opportunities to learn from us.

What we don't teach with intention, kids learn by our example. If our parents didn't talk about sex or even indicate that they had sex with each other, they likely didn't say much to us about the subject. We learn the hard way, probably the way our parents did. There's a pretty good chance that we and our parents both missed out on much of what we could have had and done if we and they had known more.

In turn, our kids miss out if we don't know what to teach them and how.

Kids most often follow the examples of their parents when they reach the age of majority and have to choose a political party to vote for. They have overheard discussions among their parents that led them to the conclusion that one party is better than the other(s). Most parents don't even indicate to their kids that voters have more than one choice. The young adults vote the way their parents would.

We're forced to learn too much the hard way. We make too many mistakes on stuff where there was no reason we shouldn't have known better, stuff that someone should have taught us.

Why should a child learn a foreign language and trigonometry in school if that child will never use it as an adult, but that child never receives proper instruction about how to make and keep friends, how to be a good spouse in a marriage or how to be a good parent?

We fail at friendships, marriages and parenting. We never get a chance to fail at speaking the foreign language or using trig in most cases, but that's just as well because we likely forgot most of it since we had no use for it.

Do the arithmetic. Which is more important, knowing how to make and keep friends, how to have a compatible marriage and how to be a good parent or how to speak a foreign language and do trigonometry?

That's not to put down learning languages or trig, only to state that we have other more important needs that our parents, our grandparents and our teachers seldom or never address.

We accept this because "That's the way it has always been done." It's clearly wrong, so does that mean that many generations of our ancestors were wrong? It's a sharp edged pill to swallow, but, yup, they were wrong.

When we chose to exclude ourselves from the natural courses of nature in our modern world, we didn't compensate for the important lessons that nature teaches to every other species on the planet. We miss some of the most important lessons in life. Parents don't know them so they can't teach what they don't know. Or they are reticent about teaching what they learned themselves by doing and making mistakes.

No matter, we have sports, drugs, other addictions, abuse, volunteering, exercising and lots of other ways to compensate for our lack of knowledge about important human subjects.

That won't change until some of us decide to change it. The longer we wait to change the system by teaching kids what they need to know as adults, the bigger the job will be.

It could all change in a flash if school curriculums were changed. That's not hard because curriculums change almost every year to some extent.

Doing nothing is easier. Except the problems keep getting worse.

Maybe we should talk about this subject more.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers that provides material that all kids should know but that most never get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.
- Jim Rohn, motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur

The fastest way to make people like you is to give them the gift of your attention. That's attention without distraction, without doing something else at the same time.

Listen to what they have to say and look them in the face while they are speaking. Don't stare because that indicates you have become distracted by something other than the words being spoken. Such as a pimple, a scratch, the colour of the other person's eyes or something that doesn't belong on his or her face. Staring is bad because it achieves the opposite effect to making them like you.

You don't have to look the person directly in the face, at the same spot--such as the eyes, or one eye--for long. A sentence or two should be enough. Then look somewhere else nearby, briefly, to give the impression that you are thinking about what the person said.

Then look back at the face.

In order to give the impression that you are paying attention, you have to actually pay attention. You must pay attention because you will need to add a comment, ask a question or suggest something that indicates you are considering what has been said. Since you won't care about making someone you dislike or have little respect for like you, you needn't fear that you will give the wrong person the wrong impression.

People like when others pay attention to them. We live in a busy world where seldom enough does it happen.

What happens when you pay close attention to what someone is saying--someone physically close enough to you so that he or she knows you are paying close attention--is that the self esteem of the person rises. Even a self confident person feels gratification when someone unexpectedly pays attention to them.

People like others who raise their self esteem. That can be your opening for friendship.

It's also worth remembering that allowing yourself to be distracted while someone is speaking, especially paying attention to someone who has interrupted your conversation, is a great turn-off. Self esteem plummets when in the middle of speaking someone who has been listening suddenly turns away to give attention to an interloper. You might as well say to that person's face "I don't like you and I don't respect you."

Giving your attention to someone is relatively easy. You can repeat it for those you see regularly, if you want to ramp up your relationships with them. For those you will never see again, you will have been a bright spot in their day. They will remember you the next time they see you, if you cross paths again.

When you end each conversation, be sure to smile. Leave the person on a high note, a smile and some sort of wish for their welfare.

If it works into the event, touch the person briefly on the arm as you say goodbye. Touch is another indicator of liking and of wanting to enhance the relationship.

Next time you see that person, offer something from the previous conversation to indicate you considered their words valuable enough to think about when you were apart. It need only be something brief, an enhancement of something the other person said. Then move on to another topic because neither of you will want to rehash the same conversation.

At some point, if you want to make that person a friend, you must offer something of value to him or her. If that offering relates somehow to spending of money, you are telling the person that your relationship is based on a kind of friendly business association. Such casual friendships evaporate when two people no longer see each other frequently.

Most new relationships that begin with people intending to find a mate fall apart because they are largely based on something relating to money, not on the value of the people to each other. For example, if a guy begins a relationship with a woman by buying a dinner and buying a movie, the woman will feel that her interest is being bought. If there is nothing more personal to the date--even if it includes sex--the relationship likely won't go anywhere because it's fundamentally a gigolo-prostitute association.

To make it a more meaningful relationship, you will need to offer something more valuable than money, your time. That may involve your skill, such as help to put up a chandelier and attach the wiring, or it may involve just your time and effort, such as helping the person accomplish something he or she is having difficulty with. Or help to do something the person wants company doing.

Making a new friend is not hard if you know the techniques. What is much harder is to be able to figure out whether the person is worthy of being your friend. And, more important to that person, whether you are worthy of being his or her friend. Remember, if you want the other person to want to be your friend, you must offer value to that person as well as that person must for you.

In any successful relationship, each person usually feels that they contribute more to its success than the other does. That's natural because we can seldom know all of what the other friend does for us. It just seems unbalanced.

In a marriage, that apparent imbalance may seem as high as 80-20, with each person believing that they contribute 80 percent to the success of the relationship. That's how much most of us miss of what our spouse does for us and to contribute to our security, our welfare and our comfort.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers about what they need to know regarding child development, how important each kind of development is and when to tweak each. It's the handbook everyone needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The most important issue where women overestimate men is in believing that men know what they're doing. We don't. Most of us know how to do a few things very well. Some not even that, though they think they do. We convince ourselves that it's enough, that we have value because of these few bits of knowledge or skill. We may be totally ignorant about most of what's around us, but we cling to those few things we know as if they have eternal worth.

Men learn very young (usually in early adolescence) to not ask questions. ("Never let them see you sweat." "Act confident at all times." "Make them think you know what you're doing all the time, even if you don't have a clue.") As most men don't have time to read--they're too busy furthering their careers--and they don't dare ask questions, most men live in a self imposed state of blissful ignorance for much of their lives. Only one man in 20 reads more than three books a year; most read none that are not related to their work.

When it comes to what men know about women, most men would have trouble writing more than two paragraphs. The rare man could fill a whole page. He's probably gay, or a psychologist. The psychologist is probably wrong.

Women seem to believe that all men think about is sex. This is patently false. We also think about sports. And occasionally about work, at least until a female walks past.

The one and often only purpose of males in animal species that reproduce sexually is to reproduce, to pass along their genes to as many offspring as possible. Nature programmed men to assess the potential as sperm donor recipients of every female with curves greater than a lead pencil. No exceptions, including no exclusions for odd numbers of appendages, size of tits, length (or indeed existence) of hair, height, weight, skin colour or brightness of the eyes. Although these may be factors that come into play in the actual assessment.

Humans offspring require about two decades (these days, even more) to become self sufficient. This means that fathers must provide both protection and provision (financial) services for much longer than they do in most species. Human fathers have turned the job of protecting their young over to police and teachers, whom they can now blame for neglect rather than themselves. Most don't teach their kids how to protect themselves. Few teach them how to earn a living or to live a balanced life.

Judging by the number of books and courses available to prospective, impending and new fathers, society places little value on fatherhood. Most men become fathers knowing virtually nothing about what a child needs from a father. What they know about fatherhood is what they learned by example from their own fathers, which is usually faulty and shockingly incomplete (to be kind).

If the primary purpose of men is to have sex (by far the preferred method for reproduction), you might suppose that men have highly developed skills and knowledge about how to get a woman into bed. This stuff would have passed from father to son, brother to brother, friend to friend, for generations immemorial. No.

Most men have little more knowledge about seducing women than their prehistoric ancestors did. The ones who lived in caves and trees. A few men know a great deal about seducing women. Unfortunately, these are not the kind of men that most women want to father their children. The women who marry men who know a great deal about sex and seducing women regret it later. They practise too much away from home.

Men often ask the question "What do women want?" If they ask this of themselves when they are alone, the question remains unanswered until they fall asleep. If the question is asked among a group of men, the silence is so thick you could almost taste it, for an unusually long period of time. Then someone suggests getting another beer and the conversation moves on to something to do with sports.

Many men have lots of opinions about sports, at least about their favourites. However, they usually know little more about the subjects than they do about battles of the gladiators. An encyclopedic memory for facts works for broadcast commentators, but it's not appreciated among a group of men. Men can discuss a sport for hours precisely because not a single one of them knows enough to be the ultimate authority.

Men are, after all, physical beings. Like our ancestors who hunted while their females stayed at home gathering berries and inventing agriculture, most men like something heavy and physical in nature to do, even if they have to sit in front of the TV for hours watching it. Some even participate. For a few, mowing the lawn serves the need for physical activity without the conflict involved with most sports.

Conflict in sports always involves touching each other, even in non-contact sports such as basketball. Men will never admit to liking to touch other men or to be touched by other men. It's all done in a macho, team spirit, inspirational kind of way. Loving touch, we believe, is only for gays. We don't know why we believe that. Somebody told us. Often.

Consequently, men know almost nothing about their own personal need for touch from others. When it comes to lovingly touching their mate or the female objective of their current quest, most men are more ill at ease than they were on their first day of kindergarten. They don't really know what to do, unless they have watched videos. Men who have watched videos about enhancing their sexual lives are few, which means that those who can satisfy their women in this way are scarce. We believe there is something perverted about watching videos about people having sex. Unless it's porn.

Many men have seen porn movies. However, when they try to reproduce what they saw in the movies, they find their mates less interested in groping, thrashing and moaning than the porn queens. Which results in their believing that their partners simply don't know how to do it. Their women are sexually inadequate, they believe, though they consider themselves quite knowledgeable, having learned from the professionals.

Their partners seldom want to "do it" as often as the porn queens, so they feel they must look for extra sexual gratification elsewhere. This is usually not received by their committed female partners with grace and gentility. The women usually want more too, but more of what their men are reluctant to give, including loving touch, extended foreplay and some sweet talk. For most men, sweet talk involves praise for specific flavours of ice cream.

In conclusion, lady readers, you may incorrectly assume that your men want the same things as you do. They could, eventually, but only if you teach them. Couch what you say in words that suggest that what will satisfy you most is what you want them to learn. Men want to please women, if only to make their mates more interested in more sex more often.

And men, if you read this far without getting angry or falling asleep, get over it. If you disagree with most of this, you're not "average." For average, you have to lower the bar quite a bit. But, chances are, you're aroused again.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that will teach you nothing about sex, but lots about how to be a good and effective parent after your days of sexual excesses are over.
Learn more at http://billallin.com