Thursday, November 2, 2017

Book Review: Men and Women can't Be Friends

'Men and Women can't Be Friends: Honest Relationship Advice for Women' by Oliver Markus Malloy sounds true. "..imagine if the heroine in the book was much better at ironing than you, and reading about her perfect ironing skills made you feel pretty inadequate by comparison. That, in a nutshell, is what it's like for a man to read about the super-romantic fictitious men in romance novels", and author begins his task.
Starting with  the meaning of life, author goes on to explore the many facets of man woman interactions, like monogamy, cheating by men, man's sexual drive, etc., to pick up the non conforming. And presenting it in a unique style. Like men and women are not equal when it comes to sex. There is a very big difference between the sex drive in us men, and the sex drive in you women. “Desire is in men a hunger, in women, only an appetite.”
I found this a simplistic approach, though in the right direction. Many of the findings of this book, like "human beings are clearly evolved for sex lives featuring multiple simultaneous sexual relationships. Men, especially, are designed by evolution to be attracted to sexual novelty and to gradually lose sexual attraction to the same partner in the absence of such novelty", do touch serious issues concerning us, but only superficially. There are ample instances where scholarly comments, like "Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place", describe the human race in a nutshell. However, the analysis following those need more depth. (Had the author persisted with the study, I am sure, the ideas expressed would have included some of my thoughts.)

I liked this book. This book conclusively, and in better words, explain the primacy of sexual signals in social interactions. With good real life examples, it makes the human behavioral paradoxes plain and simple. However it does not attempt to notice and explain, the easily seen peculiarities of male female interactions. Or provide reasons for the particularities, the book attributes to sexual urge. For example, why, among all the forms of life, only the human male shows a higher level of desire, when it comes to mating?


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