Woofkitty.co.uk: "It is no worse for the woman than for the man...[they must instead unite] against the common enemy, coercion."-Thomas Hardy, Jude The Obscure

LOVE SHYNESS and SEX INEQUALITY as regards social norms

The many conversations I had with the love-shy revealed a deep-seated attitude of envy towards female privilege. In most cases this envious attitude focused primarily upon the right of the female to be passive in male/female relationships, and to exercise control over her life destiny simply by saying "no" to each male (and amorous advance) until the "right" male (and amorous advance) came along. In essence, merely by playing the odds, women could usually end up getting what they wanted simply by exercising negative control with somebody else's (a male's) assertive risk-taking. In not being able to work this way themselves, the love-shy men perceived themselves as second class citizens--as "surplus refuge" whose feelings and needs society simply didn't care much about.

And there were many other areas of life where envy of the female sex was evident. One young man told me about how his parents would not allow him to use a multi-coloured umbrella he had purchased—because "only females have a right to use pretty umbrellas.' A few people mentioned hitchhiking, and the fact that a girl is usually picked up within two or three minutes, whereas a male will frequently have to wait for three or four hours.

In essence, love-shy males often insist upon singing their own song and marching to their own drummer--quite in spite of their introverted tendencies. Another major area wherein females were often bitterly envied had to do with the draft and the military. At this juncture suffice it to say that the love-shy feel that they are human beings too, just as females are; and that males have emotion and feelings just as females do. Hence, the love-shy deeply resent the military treating males, but not females, as "dispensable pawns", and forcing them to suffer severe physical pain and injury, and exposure to enormously anxiety-provoking situations. They also resent the way military organizations endeavour to standardize male personalities, and the way they put males, but not females, through a host of degradation ceremonies--such as hair cutting.

Again, there is the quite frequently recurring theme in the love-shys' conversations that males, unlike females, are "dispensable" and "surplus"--that they count for much less as human beings than females do; and that their feelings and emotional needs count for nothing. I think these feelings are largely due to the deep-seated introspective tendencies that are endemic in highly inhibited, love-shy people. And they are undoubtedly also due to the heavy amount of bullying and mistreatment the love-shys had been forced to endure throughout all their years of growing up.

"I've been around, and I've never seen any girl bullied the way boys
are bullied. Why shouldn't I be envious when all through life I've
seen males required to take all kinds of abuse just because they are
males. Girls are treated in a far more humane way by everybody.
Parents don't beat girls the way they do boys. At school it's always
the boys who are getting it from the teachers. And the worst cruelty
of all is what you have to take from people who should be your
buddies."
(19-year old love-shy man.)

Some of my colleagues have suggested that love-shy males may have some latent transsexual tendencies. But none of the love-shys with whom I talked had any desire at all to have their genitalia removed so that they could become women. Of course, many of the love-shys did wish that they had been born female in the first place. But they did not wish to become women during their current lifetime. Indeed, if by some stroke of magic the love-shys were suddenly transformed into women, they would all remain highly attracted sexually (and in every other way) to the female sex. This is why I suggested in chapter five that severely love-shy men are "male lesbians" at heart. They are "closet heterosexual" males who, even if they were women, would still want the love and the sexual attention of another woman, and NOT of a man.

Because the anxious person tends to be aware of the element of inappropriateness in his feelings, he is loath to communicate his anxieties to other people. To avoid being ridiculed or censured, he conceals anxiety aroused by stimuli which he guesses do not have a similar effect upon others and which, he feels, ought not to upset him. Thus when

anxiety is aroused a person should tend to seek isolation from others. On the other hand, when fear is aroused and he is unable to flee from the threatening object, he welcomes the opportunity to affiliate with other people.

The love-shy man (deep down) is clearly embarrassed about his inability to "connect" with any woman. Since women do not constitute an objectively dangerous sort of stimuli, the painful inability to approach and to initiate conversations with them represents an anxiety, NOT a fear. In society it is considered socially unacceptable for men (far more than is the case for women) to harbour anxieties. Indeed, it is considered even more socially unacceptable for men to permit their lives to be virtually governed by their anxieties.

Love-shy men do not feel as though they enjoy any significant degree of control over the impressions other people have of them. I asked each man: "How much control do you think you have over the good things that happen to you in life?" And 100 percent of the non-shys thought that they enjoyed a good deal of control over what happened to them. In contrast, only 40 percent of the younger love-shys and just 27 percent of the older love-shys thought that they had any significant amount of control at all over the good things that happen to them in life.

The story remained much the same when I asked: "How much control do you think you have over the bad things that happen to you in life?" Only 6 percent of the older love-shys together with 25 percent of the younger love-shys thought that they had any control at all. In contrast, 73 percent of the non-shys thought that they had a substantial amount of control over the bad things that happen to them in life. Of course, this 73 percent figure is a good deal lower than the 100 percent figure that applied to control over the good things that happen in life. This would seem to reflect the fact that even non-shy, happy, well-adjusted people typically feel that they enjoy less control over the bad which might happen than over the good.

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