Men do not have uncomfortable silences.

So I am again shocked and amazed (not about the election, which will be a different post.) I am amazed at the ignorance of my fellow man, and I do mean MAN, male, human, idiot.

See, even if you are not a believer in Darwin evolution, you have to understand that behavior and societal evolution has occurred. Evolution is nothing difficult or strange, but rather a process whereby change occurs in a system over a long period of time. Evolution also has the wonderful effect of defining rules in behavior in the system that has evolved. Regardless of your stance on Human Evolution from a "lower" life form you must understand that even Religion contains evidence of Evolution as a society. We started as Hunter/Gatherer's and have evolved to the technology age where we are owner/operators. What does this have to do with my shock and awe you ask? Let me tell you.....

Men and Women are different. Oh, stop. I am not saying that... Ok, maybe I am. There is nothing that a man can do that a woman can not (except maybe figure out the remote control) however our ability to do something does not change the way men and women think is different.

Take this for example. Men are you constantly surprised when your woman gets upset when you try to fix things? When she is complaining about stuff and you give her ideas to resolve the situation? Women, are you confused as to why your man does not understand that you just want to talk to him? Why does he feel the need to always fix things? Evolution.

This all started some 20,000 years ago (12,000 for you christians) when we crawled from the muck and matter and began organizing into groups of people for survival. When that happened the women (who were naturally smaller and made for the birthing) did much of the gathering and the men (who were built with dense muscle and fast, fast legs) did the hunting. Now this is the important part.

Gathering is a naturally social activity. It is boring and the plants do not mind if you make noise, so women would talk. It was natural. They would talk about their husbands and share the gossip of the village with each other. Soon that became their role. Talk. It is very hard to function as a productive society with no communication so the women took that on as their role. News is gossip - deal with it, accept it and grow.

Why not the men? Why do the women need to be the gossips? Hunting is not a naturally communication based activity. Animals will not let you kill them if you are chatty. Men would spend days and days in a blind, they would spend this time inches from other men, and the entire time they would not speak.

Men do not have uncomfortable silences. That is the invention of a women's mind. When a Man is comfortable he is quiet. When a man is chatty he is generally nervous. It is a defense mechanism for us. When we are quiet we are happy, content and available to achieve our primary directive - kill food, feed family. If we are chatty we are trying to warn the animals that there is a human here, we do not taste good and go away.

Women HAVE uncomfortable silences. When a woman is silent there is a problem. It is a female defense mechanism. She is scared and trying not to be noticed by the predator (human or animal) and so she goes quiet and still. Not to say a woman is not dangerous. A man will use all his skill to protect his family, a woman will use her everything. A man will throw a spear, a woman, herself claws extended and will not stop until her babies are safe again.

These are evolutionary differences. When a woman speaks about other women you have no role at all men. You are a sounding board. Your desired response is something like "That Bitch, well, you were right Honey, I do not care what she said." Nothing else. Not "You should unfriend her" not "She may have had a point", not "I'll take care of it" nothing other than "you were right Honey." If she talks to you about a husband of a friend of hers, that is different, and difficult. In the village example it would have been your job to talk to your friend about the issue with his wife and straighten it out. Maybe straighten him out if he was wrong. This is the difficult part. We are our evolutionary makeup, but modern society has us thinking that talking to your wife's friend's husband would not be cool. Like somehow it is a secret and you would be breaking some commandment by not talking to him. Fuck that. It has been your job for 12,000 years, so do it. Or think for a second and ask yourself, if I was him would I want to know?

There was an interesting study done in the UK that had to do with Pilots. See the most expensive and thus valuable resource in the modern military is the Fighter Pilot. It is estimated that it costs the military more than $2 million to train a fighter pilot and the equipment can be in the $100's of millions, so it behooves the military to keep them alive as long as possible.

So the military began to do some research into the primary cause of crashes and they found that it was mostly related to pilot error. In most cases there was even a trouble or warning light that the pilot ignored that led to the eventual crash of the plane. Now you need to understand at this point that 100% of the pilots are men. Zero women pilots.

The military was dumbfounded, so they placed some pilots into simulators with brain wave scanners connected so they could see what areas of the brain are effected and find a solution. What they found was that the part of the brain that triggered cognitive action was not triggered by either the lights or warning sounds when there was an issue with the aircraft. Interesting....

So they came up with a solution. Voice commands. No looking around for the issue, they would have a voice explain the trouble command. They sampled voices and came up with the ideal solution. A sexy English woman's voice. Mmmmm that accent whispering sweet nothings in my ear makes me want to enlist right now..... And guess what they found? You got it.... it was worse.

Worse you say? How? I would listen... no you would not. Remember the "sweet nothings" part of my above statement? Read it again. Okay - you with me? That is the important part. What they found was before with the lights and noise the pilots did not recognize the problem in time, what was happening now what they NEVER recognized there was a problem. The cognitive portion of the brain was NEVER activated and the crashed occured more often (thank God for simulator tests.) In a panic they rerecorded the voice of a DI (drill instructor) and tried it. Instantly the problem went away.

I do not mean they responded like with the lights and siren, I mean the late notice issue went away immediately and completely with the strong male voice issuing commands. Why? Evolution.

Remember I said that men did not talk on these long hunting trips? Well that is not completely true. There was one moment when silence did not rule the day. Trouble. MOVE! DUCK! JUMP! LION! TIGER! BEAR! YOU IDIOT! Issuing commands for the purpose of saving a member of the tribe was spoken. Loudly. Not in a nice way. And men responded. The result was exactly as desired, less injury and death. 12,000 years of yelling, 12,000 years of saving lives. The part of our brain that holds our animal instincts wakes up when we hear that voice commanding us to act. We act BEFORE the cognitive portion of our brain is able to issue commands. When it is a woman's voice the brain is dark.

Time for more tests. It would appear that the 12,000 years of men listening to women talk simply to be heard had an interesting side effect. We loved the sound of your voice. Loved it. Would do things to be able to hear it if we found it to be sexy (think the pilot's above), but it was all the same. Sweet Nothings. The woman's voice did not awaken the cognitive portion of the brain any more than the sound of traffic outside. For all intents and purposes - men could not hear it. This was the best part. The English spent all this time and money researching only to come to the conclusion all women know - men just do not listen. Only it had one benefit. Our brains evolved to the point where we did not have a choice. We do not hear you when you speak.

That's it. Take aways: Women talk to be listened to, Men talk because there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Women, sorry but science tells us that over the last 12,000 years we have listened to so much of your crap that our brains will not take in any more and we can no longer hear you.