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A selection from:
Men,Women, and Prostate Cancer
Page 20
Then there's the issue of retirement. Many men who are
diagnosed with prostate cancer are in the process of ending a lifetime of productive work: either they're planning to retire in the
near future, or they've just recently retired and are still adjusting
to their new, ''nonproductive'' status. Both situations leave a man
typically different from the way women are raised and come to
envision life; as a result, differing, gender-related modes of communication emerge.
For example. Dr. Jean Baker Miller, a prominent psychiatrist
and authority on the subject, has found that when a woman talks
with another woman, each is predisposed to respond to the other
with empathy and to relate to the other person as someone who
shares a ''woman's agenda.'' This serves to give the two women a
sense of connectedness — a psychological state that women in
general have been culturally conditioned to seek in order to
avoid social isolation. Two men, by contrast, are more likely to
talk to each other in a back-and-forth ''point-counterpoint''
manner. This gives each man a sense of individual competence
and self-sufficiency — a psychological state that men in general
have been culturally conditioned to seek in order to avoid feeling
incompetent.
When a man and woman get together to talk, these differences can easily trigger problems that baffle both genders. For
example, when a woman tells a man something that she considers
important, it's very possible that he won't respond with the
degree of empathy that she expects. Therefore, she may get angry
and accuse him of not understanding her. In fact, the man's failure to express empathy may not mean that he doesn't think what
she said was important, or that he doesn't understand her. It may
be just his gender-related way of responding-or even of offering
stoic ''down-to-earth'' help. If so, he may react to her anger with
indignation about being falsely accused.
In the popular 1992 book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from
Venus, Dr. John Gray discusses another common theory about the
difference between male and female communication: namely, that
men are less inclined to talk at all, especially during a crisis. Due
to the different ways that each gender is culturally conditioned, a
woman may want to talk things out as soon as a crisis hits (perhaps due to her urgent need for connectedness), while a man may
first want to ''go into his cave'' to think things out (perhaps due to
his urgent need to believe he can solve matters all by himself).
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| Unless otherwise stated and credited, the content of Phoenix5 (P5) is by and the opinion of and copyright © 2000 Robert Vaughn Young. All Rights Reserved. P5 is at <http://www.phoenix5.org>. P5's policy regarding privacy and right to reprint are at <www.phoenix5.org/infopolicy>.
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