VIII. Female Language and Female Emotion Female emotions are comparatively complex. Female language is comparatively complex. The complexity of female emotion seems directly related to the complexity of female language. With women, you can use rich language to generate rich emotions. For women, emotion connects powerfully to language, so let’s examine the differences between the way men and women deal with words. For men, language is informational. We listen in order to gather facts and thereby accomplish our objectives more easily. We say things so that people around us understand what we want them to understand. Speech serves the same function as the newspaper. For women, language is informational, but it’s also emotional. It’s not just news, it’s experience. It’s not reading the newspaper, it’s playing in the sprinklers and eating ice cream and pretending to be a ballerina and going to a junior prom and dancing and cuddling and kissing in the bleachers. Remember what we said before—women use more of their brains when interpreting language than do men. Language, for women, is connected with emotion. They get their emotions out, and find out what their emotions are, by talking—and this works the other way around, too. By listening, they take emotions in. You can very quickly get them to feel powerful emotions by describing powerful emotions to them. Words, for women, are emotional tools, just like hammers and saws are, for men, physical tools. Both reliably produce solid results. Words, for women, are rich experiences, things to felt and savored. Words, for women, are as powerful as bombs or bouquets. When you speak to a woman, you have the opportunity to create a rich, colorful, intense experience which transports her into the world of her own fantasies. When you give her what she dreams about, she finds it easy and natural to give you access to her body. What does she dream about, and how do you give it to her? To learn the answer to these, we need only examine that source which women so often consult, and of which they are often so ashamed: the romance novel. Literally fifty percent of the books which are sold each year are romance novels. Obviously, they help to meet a powerful need. Now, the obvious assumption is that the need they are meeting is the one advertised in the genre name: “romance,” with all its connotations of beautiful, chaste heroines finding fulfillment atop castles set on wind swept moors, this in the arms of rich, roguish, yet passionate swordwielding he-men. It’s true that the content of the fantasy is part of the romance novel’s appeal. But a very, very powerful part of the romance novel’s appeal is its form—specifically, the particular way that it uses language. Adjectives and adverbs fly freely. Description is lush and elaborate. Most importantly, this richness of description is not limited to things one can see and hear and touch. The crucial, driving element of the romance novel—the feature that allows it to hook so deeply into the fantasy lives of so many women—is its use of words to describe subtle, complex emotions. ¨ These “subtle, complex” emotions are second- and third-order emotions, that is, emotions about emotions, and emotions about emotions about emotions. Rich, layered descriptions of intense emotional states will induce those emotional states. A simple feeling is something like this: “The sun feels warm on my skin.” A complex feeling—a feeling about a feeling—a meta-feeling—is something like this: “The sun feels warm on my skin, and this makes me feel alive and renewed.” Somehow the physical feeling leads to a metafeeling of “renewal”—and the meta-feeling will be more important for a woman than the physical feeling that kicked it off. Meta-feelings, for women, explain and make sense of physical feelings. (Men make sense of meta-feelings, to the extent they have them, by relating them to physical feelings and things they can see and touch and hear.) For women, abstract concepts like “communication” and “love” and “relationship” and “connection” and “destiny” determine the meaning of physical events. So, as we’ll explain in greater detail later, you can get her to experience and interpret physical events the way you want her to by relating these physical events to abstract ideas that she likes. Connect the physical events you want to take place with the abstract concepts that she values, and she’ll perceive the physical events through the lens of those concepts—the physical events will then become valuable to her. Meta-feelings are often more complex than the simple example about warmth and renewal we just gave, because women’s emotions easily cascade—one emotion leads to another, which leads to another. Here’s an example of somewhat greater complexity: “Feeling how warm the sun is on my skin sort of makes me feel alive and renewed. It makes me feel like my life is now in the kind of space where it’s safe to be open, and this lets me know our being together like this is meant to be—it’s fate, it’s destiny.” Notice that our hypothetical speaker got from feeling sunlight on her skin to feeling that you and she were “destined” to be together. Was her chain of reasoning logical? No. But it’s not really a chain of reasoning—it’s a chain of experience. You can easily build experiences just like that one, and a woman will find them meaningful and compelling. Men tend not to get wrapped up in metafeelings. Emotions about emotions, to the extent that men feel them, tend to pass fairly quickly, and not feel that intense in the first place—certainly men feel them less intensely than women do. Men are driven most strongly by physical feelings and their immediate thoughts and responses to these physical feelings. For women, on the other hand, meta-feelings are what life is about. Objects and actions—the things men care about—are, for women, just convenient things which give them an opportunity to experience metafeelings. A facts or an action, for women, is like a clotheshanger; mounted on it, like a glorious, glamorous Gaultier dress, is an emotion, and which do you think matters—the dress or the hanger? As we said before, facts and objects, for women, are just the outlines of the picture; the important, compelling, meaningful part of the picture is the emotional coloration. And the colors can easily contradict and overwhelm “the facts”. Metafeelings, for women, are very meaningful and very powerful; basically, the meaning of an incident or an action is the meta-feeling, the emotion, it produces. Emotions lead to other emotions, and the further removed, the more abstracted a metafeeling is from the basic sensation— the more metafeelings in the chain between a given metafeeling and the primary sensation—the higher the metafeeling is in the hierarchy of a woman’s priorities, and the more influential that metafeeling will be. To understand this hierarchy, pretend you’re looking through a microscope. The physical event is furthest from your eye—it’s down at a little plate at the bottom. Imagine there are various plates of glass, color filters, lenses, and so on, between the physical thing way down there and your eye. The further one of the intervening things, like a color filter or a lens, is from the object, the closer it is to your eye, and the more it will affect the way you see the object. A speck on the lens right in front of your eye, though actually tiny, will appear huge, and may even block out or radically distort the appearance of the physical object you’re supposed to be looking at. Meta-feelings are like the various things between the physical object and the eye—they modify perceptions of “real-world” experience. Words, as we know from fMRI scans, produce greater emotional response among women than men; in a sense, women use words in order to stack emotions atop one another, and thereby create complex emotional responses. Words, for women, are the linchpins of emotion. (At first glance, this contradicts what has become an academic cliché, the association of words with the left-brain, and with the male psyche, and the emotions with the right-brain, and the female psyche; perhaps a more sophisticated way of viewing the matter is that the emotionally detached use of language is a male province. For men, words have less richness, less savor, less power, than for women.) 1)These stacked, abstracted, higher-order emotions tend to baffle, or seem trivial, to men. The idea of “being in a space where I feel open to relating to you in a way which allows us to be physical and allows me to feel good about feeling you inside my heart like this while still feeling like I’m really being true to myself” seems, to men, at best unnecessary, and at worst insane. However, the female reliance on very complicated psychological processes is a good thing! Why? 2)You can emulate the structure of these metafeelings in your speech. You can talk the way women think and feel. By talking in the way of romance novels, by talking in the way that women talk to each other and to themselves, you can induce the very powerful emotions which women associate with this kind of language. You can very incite the kind of passion that most women dream about, just by talking to women in the specific way that they need. Note that while some of these examples may have lots of words, the pattern is simple: Physical Feeling or Real-World Stimulus or Emotion X leads to Emotion Y, which leads to Emotion Z. Z is more meaningful and powerful and persuasive than Y, and Y is more powerful than X. X leads to Y, which leads to Z. (Example: “Awareness” leads to “connection,” which leads to “love.”) Z modifies and determines Y and X: Y, to a lesser degree, modifies and determines X. X--->Y--->Z; X<Y<Z I feel Z about Y, which comes from my experience of X. The further you go up the hierarchy, from X to Y to Z to AA to BB to CC, etc., the more abstract and intangible the concept will become, and the closer it will be to her sense of “identity”—that is, who she “is”, what she deserves, what she’s destined to experience, how she relates to God or Allah or The Force or The Universe, etc. And the further you go up the hierarchy, the more the abstraction you’re dealing with will modify and determine—will frame—the things that lead up to it. Review 1. Women experience emotions as environments or physical things. 2. You should describe an emotion to a woman as a place or something you can see or hear or feel or taste. 3. Men process language for information. 4. Women process language both for information and emotional content. 5. Words, for women, produce strong emotions. 6. Meta-feelings are emotions about physical events or other emotions. 7. The more abstract the meta-feeling, the more influential it is. 8. Women stack abstract words on top of each other in order to create meta-feelings. 9. You can stack abstract words atop one another to create strong emotions in women. 10. The more meta-feelings, the more emotions that you describe as following from a single event, the deeper the responses you elicit— each new emotion you describe sends her further into herself and generates a stronger emotional response. 11. Remember: women tend to have built-in, detailed fantasies connected with words about emotion. Therefore, saying an emotional word (e.g., “connection,” “trust,” “sharing”) will tend to cause a woman to feel something of what you are talking about. Using several such words in a row will tend to send her to an inward fantasy-land—that is, put her in a light trance, within which we’ll feel very good and very emotionally responsive.
|
