The Male Business Model

March 13, 2009

It often feels like we’re going at it alone. We dream of another life, or at least being able to opt out of the one we have temporarily.

My body cooks up funny problems to take me out of circulation for a few days. It knows when I need to sign out of my own life for a little while and it grounds me with some strange unimportant abnormality.

I bring it on myself by the Law of Attraction. I think “I wouldn’t mind having a minor ailment. How wonderful that I could have 2 or 3 sick days and no one would expect me go to work. I could just stay home, my favorite thing.”

And sure enough, just like you get everything if you think about it enough, I get this. This is why my problems are always gynecological. Men are not empathethic creatures where pain is concerned, but they will back off with this kind of pain. If I had a simple gash in my leg, the men around me would feel I should be at work because they would be. Lots to prove.

The male business model’s paradigm is always PUSH.

And if that works, what do you do next?

And if it doesn’t work, what do you do?

Same answer.

PUSH HARDER.

That mindset believes that if you haven’t put in a 60 hour work week, you haven’t been worthwhile, a “hard-worker” worthy of respect from your kind and yourself. Interesting that these guys still easily carve out time on the golf course.

This is the male version of abundance. It’s the thinking of a certain upbringing (small towns), a certain a generation (wartime), and the attitude about life that results (life is a competition because the amount of good stuff out there is limited; if you win, someone else loses so you better beat everyone else to the cash and prizes). The female mindset of abundance is the hamster-on-a-wheel life that women set up for themselves. In both cases, busy-ness and exertion can fool you into thinking that changes are taking place.

And then after they’re done pushing harder, they’re busy wanting MORE. There’s no line in the sand that says to them ‘enough’. They’ll risk what they already have. In fact, they’ll put it up on the auction block and sacrifice it altogether and allow it to be destroyed to get MORE. The financial meltdown was an example on a grander scale of the male business model needing to forever prove itself with MORE.

The male world sees it as a big deal to leave work at 2 to pick up a child. In the female version, where everything is available and possible, it’s very natural. The family is who we do it all for. There’s no way we’ll do anything that would jeopardize that. Men say they do everything for the family too. But it’s not true. They do it for themselves, for their sense of self-worth and to fulfill their idea of what a MAN does.

Men have taught us that one income at a time must be pivotal and protected. They put all these impediments on us to sustain that because it suits them very well. They find they get less interruptions and more eagerness to be accommodated. Women swallow the small seed of fear and resign themselves to “Whatever would we become without that income??”

Allowing that belief is how we’ve been kept down and kept each other down. We will never make that system work or play naturally within its boundaries. You look at your job for the things you really love and they’re not there. You feel scared and hassled with no control.

We can see the posturing and the bluffing, the bluster and the swagger, for nobody’s benefit but their own. We don’t belong. We know how artificial it all is. This is how they assure themselves that they’re doing something important. Some of them have figured it out – that busy doesn’t mean productive or successful.

They don’t mean badly. They’re just following a pattern that we’ve all been taught. Nobody wants to reinvent a system that, on the surface, seems to work for everyone. Or looked like it did for our parents. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we can want and have more than our mothers.

All we can do is to stop playing. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture that the only ones who can see it are those women who consciously decide to pull away and make up something new. Who realize that it can be whatever you see it as being.

The more I pull away, the more bizarre the thing looks. It becomes ever clearer that money can be soft-earned and not at the expense of what we already have, including family, a huge non-monetary asset, and health, which is the most valuable commodity that exists.

You don’t have to live in the male world. That net that restricts all your limbs can be gone. Let the wind move to your back. You don’t have to want people who don’t want you. Don’t think of it as being rejected. Better to see it as a wonderful stream of selection that brings you the people with whom you can thrive. The other kind can screen themselves out.

The male world, by the very way it’s set up, holds women away. They can’t see it and we can’t either, but the fit isn’t right. John Fowles said “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. It is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.” We’ve become too afraid to laugh.

There is no single right answer where all the outcomes will be joyful. There are more choices than we admit, fewer consequences, and even less risk.

PS – In searching for the Fowles quote, I looked first at Aldous Huxley because I was certain he said those words. I was wrong, but he did say these : “Maybe this planet is another planet’s hell.” Depressing but funny, and freakishly out-of-the-box, consistent with much of what he said and wrote.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Happiness, Money

Comments

4 Responses to “The Male Business Model”

MarySteele Lawler on March 14th, 2009 10:28 am

You said it All and I am digesting.
I believe it was Dr. Johnson who said that genius is, “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”
Thank you for giving shape and illustration to my feelings and my suspicions.
Christine Scaman on March 15th, 2009 12:21 pm

Hi, Mary,

Thanks for the comment.

Actually, I think I’m expressing what many of us suspect to be true. Perhaps, one day, enough women will have withdrawn from the artificial and self-imposed pressures of the male model to create a female business model. And let’s hope it works.
Shelley Rankin on March 20th, 2009 8:58 am

I appreciated reading this and completely agree. Believing that the women’s true nurturing nature is in contrast with the “male business model” and it is why we find ourselves often stressed and sick when we adopt this model for ourselves. We definitely need more of a balanced approach to our life and work as dictated by the female spirit.
Christine Scaman on March 21st, 2009 3:23 pm

Hi, Shelley,

I’ve been thinking lately about what the female business model looks like. I know what it doesn’t look like. Some aspects of the male model would remain because they do work without requiring pretense or display.
One thing there would be less of is numbers. Graphs, projections, they leave a lot unsaid and unknown. There needs to be more pictures, more stories, more context, more comfort. We’ll invent it as we go along.