Host: So, are men and women approaching sex from opposite ends of the spectrum?
Gloria Macdonald: Men and women are approaching sex from totally opposite ends of the spectrum and frankly, with all the huge differences between men and women it is amazing that wherever you are going to have lasting relationships as human beings.
But you see, women are looking for investment first and then they will have sex. Men are looking for sex and then they will invest. Now, men might invest if they think there is an opportunity to have sex, but literally, we are coming at this from diametrically opposed positions in terms of investment first then sex or sex first and then investment. Again, this goes back to millions of years of evolutionary psychology. You see, women ended up in a very dangerous place if they did not have investment from a man before they had sex.
Go back to cave men. A woman who was seven, eight, nine months pregnant in the cave man world could not take care of herself. She could not provide for herself and then imagine if she had a couple of other little children and she was pregnant, nine months pregnant, she cannot go out and hunt and save the family from lions and tigers and bears. She needed a man to have investment in her and the family to survive. These are survival instincts and while we as women today do not need a man to protect us from wild beasts and things and we do not need a man to go out and kill the game so we can eat.
We do not get rid of these thousands and thousands of years of evolutionary psychology just in a couple of generations. Frankly, it was just a little over a 100 years ago that women could own property. So, 100 years ago women still needed men. 50 years ago, women for the most part needed men, women could own property legally, but most women could not afford just to provide for a family without a man there. So, it's a brand new thing for us in the terms of millions of years that women can provide for themselves in a family and we can't get rid of this psychology behind this in a flash just because our lives have shifted some what.
So, the more we understand why we are different, we can learn to accept one another and that's hugely important.