On Dennis Prager’s radio show today, he spent an hour with relationship expert Alison Armstrong.
Dennis: “I think it is easier for men to understand women.”
“When you told me the pillow is messy and it’s yelling at you, I understood that.”
Alison busts up laughing.
Alison: I would consider my being called a sexist accurate. I am a sexist.”
Dennis: “So is nature.”
Alison: “One of the things that makes women feel safe is commitment.”
“Safety is totally different for men and for women. It’s also masculine and feminine. A masculine woman will relate to safety the same way men do — your safety is based on your ability to produce whereas a woman’s safety has to do with her physical safety and her ability to connect.
“For four years, you and I dated and every six months, you and I had another first date. I had to earn the next date every time. Then a year and a half ago, you asked me to go steady and to come on once a quarter. And it cracked me up because the next time I was on the air with you was the first time I disagreed with you on air. I even said something to [producer] Allen [Estrin] at the time.”
“You don’t understand women and you think you do. I knew it the first time I was on your show and I wouldn’t say it. You said you thought women didn’t want sex as much as men because they don’t focus on it. I knew then that you didn’t understand women because of your idea that women focus period. Women don’t focus.”
“I have feelings in my body and they aren’t even in the same place in your body. For example, where women feel happiness and men feel happiness is in a completely different part of her body.
“A woman feels happiness in her feelings in the center of her chest, in between her breasts. That’s where her feelings happen. Men accuse women, ‘Why do you always make your feelings the center of everything?’ To us that is crazy because they are right in the center of everything, right in the center of our bodies.
“As for men, you have feelings in all different parts of your body depending on the feelings. The feeling of happiness, you guys have in your upper chest and in your shoulders. If you have a moment of ecstasy, it shoots down your arms into your hands. That’s why you do high fives and jump up and hit the beam and the rim of the basket and you spike the ball. You have all this energy shoot out your hands when you’re really happy.
“It’s also why when you’re really happy you do something women call puff up. There’s this thing that happens in your shoulders when you get puffed up with energy and power. Unfortunately, when most women when they see that in a man, they castrate him because it scares her to see a man so full of himself. They react and they get scared and they emasculate him to cut that energy, that power down to a safe level.
“One of the best things we do in our programs is to change the way women see men so that they get happy when a man gets puffed up instead of getting afraid. They get to love it and celebrate it.”
Dennis: “As soon as Alison came in, Allen said, ‘Alison has a topic — safety.’ After I woke up, I said, who cares about safety?”
Alison: “The biggest challenge men have is to see how a woman is when it defies logic. How logical men are is one of the things that make it difficult to understand women.”
“I ask men, think about the last time you worried about your physical safety.”
Dennis: “It’s hard to imagine.”
Alison: “Most of them can’t remember.”
“For some, there was a moment in a street conflict or war. But even men who were in war, their fear was not of their physical safety but of failing their mission, their comrades, their country.
“Then we asked the women the last time you were afraid for your physical safety. For about 10%, it was today. For about 80%, it was in the last week and for 100% it was in the last month.
“There’s a movie where Jack Nicholson makes fun of his wife for getting her keys out before she leaves the store, but that’s what women do. We get our keys out for our car before we leave the safe place to go the unsafe place.
“There’s a thing that men do that drives women crazy because you are single-focused and committed to a result, which might mean 15 trips to a hardware store. My husband was going back to the hardware store again and again to fix the faucet. I was getting more and more tense. As a woman, every time you leave the cave and enter the cave, instinctively you are laying down scent that lets the tiger know where the cave is. As a woman, we have a list of everything we need to gather. We’ll leave our home and go to the farthest point as if we were going to have to carry everything back on our backs and gather everything on the way back to the cave.
“I’ve asked women and there are a number of times that it is OK to leave home per day before we get really tense and feel like we are jeopardizing our safety just by leaving the house again. It’s all subconscious. It’s all instinct. Part of that diffuse awareness we have that pays attention to our environment, part of us is always monitoring if we are safe. It will monitor our connections. That’s why women get so upset about not being liked. Men are like, what do you care if you are liked? Women feel that they will die if they’re not liked. It’s my connection. It’s how I get protected.
“How threatened women feel for their physical safety is the same kind of tension and bringing out the worst for him when a man is threatened or disrespected because that threatens a man’s ability to produce results. A man’s safety is in production. A woman’s safety is in connection.
“Men are like a stallion circling a herd looking for threats from the outside. That’s why we touch women to stop emasculating men because when you emasculate your husband, now he has threats from both sides of the fence.”
Dennis: “We don’t differ much.”
Alison: “Now that we’re going steady, it’s OK to differ.”
Dennis: “From your perspective. We never want it.”
“Alison warned me that now that she’s on every three months we’re going steady so now she feels much freer to tell me when I’m wrong. It’s not an argument for men to commit to women, let alone marry.”
“Do we raise women to take their keys out early? Do we raise men to pump their fists in the air when they are happy?”
Alison: “No.”
“We have a shocking number of herd behaviors.”
When asked if she’s religious, Alison describes herself as “very spiritual.”
Alison: “If I can give the men listening a good reason to be concerned with safety — safety equals romance equals sex.
“The things you do that make her feel safe — if you don’t know her well, take her elbow when you cross the street. If you know her romantically, escort her across the street with your hand in the small of her back.”
Alison says her “Understanding Women” workshop is about how to get more sex.
Kathleen calls. “I had to run home at lunch and get my security badge and the roofers there and they know I live by myself. I called my friend to ask if I could borrow her 125-pound shepherd for a couple of hours. I just want to walk in with him and then I’ll leave and bring him back.”
Alison: “It makes perfect sense.”
Dennis: “I don’t have a clue.”
Alison: “It was a show of force.”
Sharon in Detroit says she bought a handgun for protection.
Alison: “The more timid a woman looks, the more likely she is to be accosted.”
Bert calls: “What about us guys under the 5’10” club where women instinctively say, this is a little guy and I don’t feel protected.
Alison: “Invite her to arm wrestle you and watch how big her eyes get. Don’t put her down. Invite her to try to put you down. And watch her struggle and strain and figure out how strong you are and her eyes will get big and the chemistry will kick in and she’ll go, whoa, you’re powerful.
“Any time you stand up to a woman, particularly when she’s full of nonsense, that also has us go, wow, you can even protect me from myself, my biggest enemy.”
“Men should ask their woman what makes you feel safe. She has to feel safe, which is different from factual safety.
“Women, ask your men, is there anything I do that makes you feel disrespected? Is there anything I do that says I don’t trust you. Women do things all the time that say I don’t trust you and then they wonder why he behaves the way he does.”