For Women Only - Book Summary

Here is a short summary for those of you that were not able to read the book in time for our breakfast on Sunday. I hope those of you that have read the book are finding it helpful. It has really helped me thing about my relationships in healthier ways.

There are seven things the book addresses in regards to men and their behaviors and forms of processing information.

1. Men need respect: Men would rather feel unloved than inadequate and disrespected.
2. Men are insecure: Despite their "in control" exterior, men often feel like imposters and are insecure that their inadequacies will be discovered.
3. Men are providers: Even if you personally made enough income to support the family's lifestyle, it would make no difference to the mental burden he feels to provide.
4. Men want sex: Your sexual desire for your husband profoundly affects his sense of well-being and confidence in all areas of life.
5. Men are visual: Even happily married men struggle with being pulled toward live and recollected images of other women.
6. Men are romantic: Actually, most men enjoy romance (sometimes in different ways)and want to be romantic - but hesitate because they doubt they can succeed.
7. Men care about looks: You don't have to be a size 3, but your man does need to see you making an effort to take care of yourself - and be will take on significant cost or inconvenience in order to support you.

Remember, these are general ideas and all of them might not apply to your husband, but they are good to know when dealing with any man in your life.

See you Sunday!!

The Women's Crusade

I read this article a couple days ago in the New York Times and thought I would share it with you. It is especially important for us women to know what is happening in the world and how we can help bring true equality and dignity to women. Here is an excerpt:

"Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 107 million."

"WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually focus their assistance on women?And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week."

"Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier."