Women are very different from men. We can’t help it. We were created that way. But let’s face it. One of the things you guys like about us is that we’re more emotional, and we appear to be more sensitive than you are. We’re not as big or strong. But we can also be very, very confusing to you.
And in part that’s because of our biology. But it’s also because of the way that we’ve been raised as girls. We get treated very, very differently than boys do. From the moment that our expected parents know that we’re going to be a girl, they use very different language to describe us.
They talk about, “Oh, this sweet baby. She’s going to be so delicate.” They might talk about a princess, and the things they pick up for the nursery can mean lots of pink. Just lots of different ways of looking at a baby even before she’s born that give us this feeling for what is going to be ahead for her.
Fast forward, and she is at the park. She’s playing and having a good time with her friends when another child starts to pick on her. It doesn’t matter if the other child is a boy or a gril or bigger, or the same size or whatever, if somebody is picking on her.
Most often, the parent or the caregiver, that’s with her at the park will move very, very quickly to rescue her from the invader of, of her Princess-hood, if you will. She gets lots of hugs and kisses and reassurance, and she gets this idea that her tears mean something. Her tears communicate that she needs something.
That’s a very different experience than a little boy has. With little boys, the caregiver will very often pull back a little bit when a child is picked on. If the child happens to be male, they’ll wait to see what he does. If he does approach the caregiver with a complaint about what’s going on, then the caregiver is more likely to say, “What’s the problem?” Then ask him how he’s going to solve it.
So you can see we get very different training even as toddlers about how we need to respond to some sort of a crisis or a need for help. So we’re going to continue to try to peel all this stuff apart, get the layers out there and figure out what it is about women that makes them really so simple to understand. We’ll be talking about that very, very soon.
Look for Decoding a Woman: Part 2 next week!