Charles Orlando: Women Stepping Up

I recently had the privilege to speak with Charles Orlando, the author of the book The Problem With Women… is Men. A reformed ladies’ man, Charles now writes about the immaturity of men and how women need to take back their power. In the first segment of our interview, Charles discussed the path of the Evolved Man, and how women are responding to his book. You can read the first part of the interview here.

In this second part of three, I spoke to Charles about the changing dynamics in gender relations, and how there have been changed expectations on women, who entered the workplace en masse. What are the implications of changed expectations on women – and do men have some catching up to do? Charles spoke about how the phenomenon of the “stay-at home mom,” and marriage expectations, are changing:

“Stay at home moms are often single parents at this point… it’s not as simple as a double income society, where inflation and the monetary system has forced people to eliminate the stay at home mother role and go to work on both sides. When you take a look at data from the U.S. census or data from the Americans for Divorce Reform, you can find that 82% of all people who are divorced reference irreconcilable differences, which means they just don’t get along anymore. And there’s a common statistic that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. What that statistic doesn’t show you is that 50% of all those marriages end before year five. Of the marriages that make it to year five, 50% of those marriages end before year ten. So that’s a 75% divorce rate before the tenth anniversary. And 82% of them, again, are citing that they just don’t get along anymore. So even if you make it to ten years, you could end up like Al and Tipper Gore. So that’s our foundation… given those divorce rates (and we can talk about how many men – not all, but many – are dropping out of relationships like it’s not a big deal, including marriages, and they’re leaving an emotional weight, including leaving children behind them). So if you put all that in one pot, you end up with women who want equal status, but not to become men, and you put that together with the state of the economy, where so many men are out of work now, and so many women are probably gaining jobs, these are all the dynamics in the pot when it comes to gender roles changing. It changed for women, but men haven’t ‘zagged’ with women’s ‘zig.’ We haven’t caught up, and we aren’t willing to. And I say ‘we’ as a general statement. There are many men who don’t embody these thoughts.”

What would a world in which men have caught up look like?

“[One] where women don’t have their proverbial ‘place’… To write the book I spoke with 1,200 women about their challenges in long-term relationships and marriage. When you take a look at these women, they come from all ethnicities across the United States. When I say that men haven’t caught up, they haven’t caught up with cultural differences, gender, economic lines – it’s the same problems that women are facing across the board. I spoke with the stereotypic housewife who has five children and who has been cooking dinner for her husband and kids for the last 30 years, all the way up to the 45 year old stereotypic ‘cougar’ advertising executive that clears 2.5 million a year, and their problems are virtually identical.”

What are those problems?

“Basically, men suffer from four major flaws – and that includes me, by the way. They’re based on primal instincts, and how men have not altered them. They are, in order of importance, what I’ve called uber-dominance, which is really control of all things in their immediate vicinity; fidelity – I don’t know where it’s written that men have to spread their seed in as many fields as possible, but that’s definitely been a challenge (and the more pervasive media becomes, the more we’re going to hear about everybody cheating); etiquette, both in terms of modern-day chivalry and everyday manners; and emotional availability. And men haven’t had to step up to the plate to offer anything that’s nurturing or emotional. But if we are part of civilization, we need to evolve with the rest of the world.”

(Charles just graciously linked to our article “5 Things Men Need to Know” from his Facebook, to a greatly enthusiastic response from his audience!)