"Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment"

A friend sent me a link to this on-line version of part of the book "Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment", which is now out-of-print. I read some of the parts available for reading and found the author's direct candor about men and where they are at very refreshing, though a number of his comments seemed clouded by "normative expectations" and the kind of judgmentality seemingly reserved more for men than women. Food for thought and debate for sure; doubtless you will read it and agree to some stuff, disagree with others. Excerpts:

From the chapter The Male Lesbian, read:

'Specifically, a "male lesbian" is a heterosexual man who wishes that he had been born a woman, but who (even if he had been a woman) could only make love to another woman and never to a man. Unlike the transsexual, the "male lesbian" does not feel himself to be "a woman trapped inside the body of a man". Moreover, none of the love-shy men studied for this research entertained any wishes or fantasies of any kind pertinent to the idea of obtaining a sex change operation. All wanted to keep their male genitalia; all wanted to remain as males. However, all deeply envied the perogatives of the female gender and truly believed that these perogatives fitted their own inborn temperaments far more harmoniously than the pattern of behavioral expectations to which males are required to adhere.'

From the chapter Envy of Female Privilege read:

'Another major area wherein females were often bitterly envied had to do with the draft and the military. This subject will be dealt with in a later chapter. At this juncture suffice it to say that the love-shy feel that they are human beings too, just as females are; and that males have emotions and feelings just as females do. Hence, the love-shy deeply resent the United States military treating males, but not females, as "dispensable pawns", and forcing them to suffer severe physical pain and injury, and exposure to enormously anxiety-provoking situations. They also resent the way military organizations endeavor to standardize male personalities, and the way they put males, but not females, through a host of degradation ceremonies--such as hair cutting.'