Holly:

I think your remarks are right on target. I agree that we communicate on more than one level and that simple fact is at the root of many of the problems we are talking about.

As an adolescent (and I was still an adolescent well into my twenties) I was both fascinated and terrified by women who were skillful at communicating on a sexual level. One reason for this was simply that I was NOT skillful at that level; the art of flirtation was entirely foreign to me. I am still not at all fluent in this other language, but at least I have learned not to fear it, and indeed to see its value. I suspect many men, however confident they may appear, share the same struggles.

It is a problem that cuts both ways. There are some women who seem as unskilled as I was with sexual language and remain tense and arid in their dealings with men. More often, the women I meet are at ease when flirting but insecure about interacting on an intellectual level (I wish we could find a better word than 'intellectual'). These are the women who are annoyed and frustrated by "all that culture shit." Man or woman, it can very painful to be forever relegated to one level or the other.

So I guess what I'm saying is that we are all out of balance; our culture tends to emphasize one level for men and another for women. If both sexes could learn to analyze and abstract and still enjoy things sensual, we would all be better off. Or so says I.