I came from 100 Mile House BC.  I came from the top of the stairs, down into my office where the computer is.  I came from that place where the Zen masters always say we come from, but I don't quite remember but I dreamt I was being given shit for not having sorted it out yet....I came from the dreams I had last night into this waking life...I came from the womb of my mother, now dead, and the seed of my father....I came from....

Women Wield the Power in Marriage
Posted from: Psych Central Senior News Editor
on Friday, Jul, 6, 2007

Reviewed by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
on Friday, Jul, 6, 2007

The old adage of women being “the boss” around the home is true say researchers from Iowa State University. While men may still have more power in the workplace, wives are taking responsibilities and leadership in the home environment.

The study of 72 married couples from Iowa found that wives, on average, exhibit greater situational power — in the form of domineering and dominant behaviors — than their husbands during problem-solving discussions, regardless of who raised the topic.

All of the couples in the sample were relatively happy in their marriages, with none in counseling at the time of the study.

The paper titled “Sex Differences in the Use of Demand and Withdraw Behavior in Marriage: Examining the Social Structure Hypothesis,” appears in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Associate Professor of Psychology David Vogel and Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies Megan Murphy led the research.

“The study at least suggests that the marriage is a place where women can exert some power,” said Vogel.

“Whether or not it’s because of changing societal roles, we don’t know. But they are, at least, taking responsibility and power in these relationships. So at least for relatively satisfied couples, women are able to take some responsibility and are able to exert some power — but it’s hard for us to say why that’s so.”

“Women are responsible for overseeing the relationship — making sure the relationship runs, that everything gets done, and that everybody’s happy,” said Murphy, “And so, maybe some of that came out in our findings in terms of women domineering and dominating — that they were taking more responsibility for the relationship, regardless of whose topic was being discussed.”

As part of the study, each spouse was asked to independently complete a questionnaire on relationship satisfaction and an assessment of overall decision-making ability in the relationship. Each spouse also was asked to identify a problem in their relationship — an issue in which he or she desired the most change and which could not be resolved without the spouse’s cooperation.

Spouses were then asked to answer some questions about their chosen topics, including the type of problem-solving behaviors that generally take place when this topic arises, and the importance of the topic. Couples were then brought together and asked to discuss each of the problem topics for 10 minutes apiece — discussions that were videotaped. The researchers did not participate in the discussion.

“We actually just asked them to start talking about the issue, and then we left the room,” said Vogel. “And so they were all by themselves in the room talking. We were as non-obtrusive as possible. We just came back at the end of the period of time, and asked them to talk about the other topic.”

At the end of the discussions, couples were separated again. Each spouse was then debriefed and discussed his or her feelings and reactions to the study.

Vogel said that wives weren’t simply talking more than their husbands in discussions, but actually were drawing favorable responses from their husbands to what they said.

“That’s what I think was particularly interesting,” he said. “It wasn’t just that the women were bringing up issues that weren’t being responded to, but that the men were actually going along with what they said. They (women) were communicating more powerful messages and men were responding to those messages by agreeing or giving in.”

“There’s been research that suggests that’s a marker of a healthy marriage — that men accept influence from their wives,” said Murphy.

The study was funded, in part, by the National Institute of Mental Health, along with ISU.

Helpful article, but the tone of surprise annoys me: "men were actually going along with what they said"...sheesh: can see the "myth of male power" at play in the background here...also accepting influence (which comes from Gottman's pioneering research) is hopefully different from giving in to "domineering" and "dominating" behavior...I'd like to be able to accept influence, but I am not much interested in being dominated...

Hurrah!  Whenever a stereotype falls to science, both sexes are better off!!! 

Study: Women Don't Talk More Than Guys
Associated Press - July 05, 2007
WASHINGTON - Another stereotype - chatty gals and taciturn guys - bites the dust.

Turns out, when you actually count the words, there isn't much difference between the sexes when it comes to talking.

A team led by Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, came up with the finding, which is published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day.

The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

The difference: 546 words: "Not statistically significant," say the researchers.

"What's a 500-word difference, compared with the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative persons" in the study, said Mehl. He said the least talkative person in the study - a male - used just over 500 words a day, while another male topped that by more than 45,000.

Co-author James W. Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas, said the researchers collected the recordings as part of a larger project to understand how people are affected when they talk about emotional experiences.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting them.

"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time," Pennebaker said.

Indeed, Mehl said, one study they found, done in workplaces, showed men talking more.

Still, the idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an "urban legend," he said.

"We realized we had the data," Mehl said in a telephone interview, so they went back to their recordings and calculated the actual numbers.

Their research began with one group of students in 1998, two groups sampled in 2001, two in 2003 and a final group in 2004. One of the 2003 groups involved 51 students in Mexico, the rest were all in the United States.

The students were fitted with unobtrusive recorders that sampled their conversations - the students didn't know when the recorders were on. From the samples, a total number of words for the day could be calculated.

Of the six groups sampled, women used more words than men in three and men used more words than women in the other three, including the one in Mexico.

The research was limited to college students, but Pennebaker said he believes it would probably apply to others in the same age range.

"The question is, how it applies to people as we get older," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Mehl said he thinks it should apply across age groups, but he wondered how it would be affected by different cultures.

I don't know exactly what to say about this topic...I just know it is an important one and is one that I don't think I have ever read much about anywhere...the "old boy's club", btw, was not about this --  the old boys club was about particular groups of men bonding together to achieve protection and provision for "their" particular group of women and children --  and against other "old boys clubs" belonging to different companies, religions, countries.

I am not stressing heterosexuality to exclude homosexual men.  I am stressing heterosexuality to include heterosexual men.  For me it is a given that I, as a heterosexual man, ought to be compassionate towards homosexual men, as well as towards sexuals of any other kind.   

I just think that the idea of worldcentric compassion extended by heterosexual men to all other heterosexual men would be something of an evolutionary breakthrough...but what do you think?

Is this a discourse and/or praxis that anyone else knows about or has engaged in?  It would need to be at integral altitude to work, because at green altitude, men's compassion for other men is often blunted by their uncritical support for the shadow aspects of feminism (e.g. victim feminism, competitive feminism -- see Warren Farrell and Hoff-Summers for critiques of the shadow aspects of postmodern feminism).  Compassion at green is also compromised by being too wimpy...too much idiot compassion -- too much support, not enough challenge: e.g. idiot compassion won't work with terrorists and/or those with highly narcissistic and/or anti-social personalities in general...

It strikes me that we don't really have an integral men's discourse...we have bits and pieces...its scary territory because we certainly don't want to regress to "old boys club" mentality...but i think it is good to remember that the old boys club wasn't really about this....this would be something emergent...