Dr. Helen Fisher: Understanding Men

Transcript: Helen: Hello, I’m Helen Fisher and I’m here to talk about men, but first, just a little bit about me. I’m a biological anthropologist and I’m probably best known for the fact that I and my colleagues have now put 50 people who are madly in love into a brain scanner to study the brain circuitry of romantic love. Seventeen were people who had just fallen madly in love and they were happily in love, 15 were people who had just been rejected in love and the most recent 17 people were people in their 50s, men and women in their 50s, who reported they were still in love, not just loving but in love with their partner, after an average of 21 years of marriage. So, I’m really pleased to report that you really can remain in love with somebody long-term. But I also study gender differences in the brain and I’ve come to believe that the more we can come to understand women, the more we’re going to also come to understand men. So this video blog is really about understanding men. There’s a great many myths about men that I would really like to bust, but one of them is that, um, men and women tend to believe that, uh, men are less romantic than women are, and it’s just not true. Uh, men, in fact, tend to fall in love faster than women do because they’re so visual. They also feel just as strongly as women do. I know this because I’ve studied it myself in the brain. And in fact, men tend to have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands because women have more intimate conversations with their girlfriends instead. But most important, I think, is the fact that ever since the year 2000, 10 years now, the last 10 years, men in America have been more interested in marrying than women have. Men are interested in commitment. And indeed they’re marrying women who are closer to their same age, uh, women of the same educational level and indeed women with similar earning power. So, there’s a great deal to know about men, but today I really want to work on busting two basic myths. One of them is that both men and women seem to think that men are more adulterous than women are. I’ve actually wondered who all these adulterous men are sleeping with, but never mind, I’ve just done a new study of adultery and as it turns out, um, among people under the age 40, men and women are equally adulterous. Women are just as adulterous as men are. Another myth I’d like to bust is that men don’t help around the house. This I think depends on really what you’re measuring. There’s no question about it that women do more of the housework and more of the baby care in America and in every culture in the world, but men do the vast majority of the dangerous jobs, uh, driving late at night, driving during a blizzard or a thunderstorm. In fact, when a family hears a burglar coming up the stairs, it’s a man that greets that individual, not a woman. In fact, it’s men that take all of the dangerous jobs, uh, and 90 percent of people who die at work are men, not women. There’s more men at the top of the business hierarchy and there’s more men at the bottom. You are a varied, varied lot, but sex roles have changed more in the last hundred years than they have in the last ten thousand and I think that as women’s roles expand dramatically, men’s roles are expanding, too. So, I really look forward to answering some of your questions about men and about women and busting some of the myths that we’ve been carrying around for probably ten thousand years. So, I’m going to close with this: I think men and women are like two feet. They need each other to get ahead and the time to understand men is now.