What Do Women Really Want?

As Maslow opened his classic work Motivation and Personality (1954), he asserted this:

“Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. Growth, self-actualization, the striving toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for excellence must now be accepted beyond question as a widespread and perhaps universal human tendency.” (p. xvi)

Now for a confession. I came up with the title of this Reflection just to get your attention, not to write about women, although I will be writing about what women want, I will also be writing about what human beings in general want. In this, our needs are not really all that different. Neither the needs of women versus men, the needs of whites versus blacks, the needs of Russians versus Americans, the needs of first world countries versus third world countries. All of these distinctions and the thousands of other distinctions that we create do not negate the similarity of our needs.

What do we want? What do we need? Maslow’s answer to this question created a unifying frame for all human beings, one which invites a trans-cultural approach. Because while we may differ in how and what counts for gratification, the driving needs are the same: air, water, food, shelter, sex (survival needs), safety and security needs, social needs (love, affection, friendship), self needs (respect, recognition, achievement), and self-actualization needs (knowledge, order, beauty, justice, etc.).

We may differ at the level of our motivational at various times in our lives. At what level are you now living? What do we want? We want according to the level of our need gratification. This describes the natural order of things. And it describes the fluid nature of our motivations. Our motivation changes moment by moment according to how well we are adjusted and gratified to the ever-changing environment. It also changes according to the meanings that we have created about the needs we are experiencing. What do women want? It all depends, does it not?

• — Where is the woman you’re thinking about in fulfilling her needs?
• — How does she think and what meanings does she give to those needs?
• — How resourceful is she in getting her needs met?

What do men want? Again, the same questions apply. At what level is he living? Has he basically gratified the lower needs and is he ready to move on to the self-actualization needs? Or has some meanings and/or set of actions and relationships led to the distorting, mis-directing, and confusing his basic need gratification? If so, to what extent has he developed neurotic needs?

Neurotic needs? Yes, overload any need with too much meaning, and that semantic overloading will create distortions which will undermine our ability to cope and adjust with reality. Give “safety and security” too much meaning and a person can become obsessive-compulsive, refusing to accept basic human fallibility and anxiety. Neurotic “needs” on this order can actually be felt inside us as “needs” through the meanings that we invent and attribute. Where does it come from? It comes from semantically loading. And it leads to semantic reactions. This term, from Korzybski, refers to an automatic, unthinking, knee-jerk type of reaction that occurs so quickly and so systematically that it operates like a physiological reaction—like blinking when someone shines a light into our eye or a muscle jerking when someone taps a rubber hammer on our knee.

The difference is that we react to the meanings that have become embodied within our mind- body-emotion system. Do you have any semantic reactions? Do you bristle when certain words are used, ideas are expressed, tones of voice used, eyes roll in a certain way, someone raises their middle-finger, etc.? If so, that’s a semantic reaction.

In our semantic reactions, meanings are moving and motivating us in defensive and reactive ways because at some level, we feel threatened. By the threat is entirely psychological, not physiological. The threat is a threat regarding what something means. Consider that. Isn’t it amazing? Our whole mind-body-emotion system can react because of what something unconsciously means to us. We can become afraid of what something means, or would mean, if something occurs!

So at that moment, what do we want? Obviously we want to eliminate or reduce the threat. We want the threat to go away. But here’s the rub. If the threat is a threat to our meanings, and our meanings are outside-of-our-awareness (unconscious) and embodied so deeply in our muscle memory that it is psycho-somatic, how do we then make the threat go away? How do we satisfy the want or need then?

While Maslow did not have the answer to this, Neuro-Semantics following Korzybski and the modeling of meta-levels with Meta-States does. The answer? We tease out the meta-levels of meaning frames, identify where the semantic threat lies, and correct the epistemological error.

“Epistemological error?” What’s that? Epistemology refers to how we know what we know. It’s the cognitive reasoning that makes up our conclusions, decisions, and beliefs. And when we have self-sabotaging and limiting semantic reactions there is always a cognitive or epistemological error involved. Here’s what Maslow wrote about this:

“The neurotic person is inefficient; he does not perceive the real world so accurately or so efficiently as does the healthy person. The neurotic is not emotionally sick, he is cognitively wrong.” (1954, p. 153)

Lacking instincts, knowledge content in our inward knowings, we have to learn what things are and how to cope with them. Because of this we can make epistemological errors. We can be cognitively wrong. All it takes is a false map, a limiting belief, a mistaken decision, a cognitive distorted way of thinking, a toxic thought-virus. It is precisely because our mental maps are not the territory that we have to work with them to make them as accurate and useful as possible. Otherwise we will not have a map to navigate the territory of reality.

What do women want? What does anyone want? We want the satisfaction of our basic and higher needs. Yet because we have so much freedom to influence our experience of our needs, we can and usually don’t know what we want. That’s why we have to discover our needs, accept them, learn first to cope with gratifying them and later to master their gratification as we adjust within our environment. That’s why we have to explore our matrix of meaning frames and be able to step back from ourselves to just observe our demanding needs and make good healthy decisions about how to gratify them.

What do women want? It all depends. And it depends on many, many things. If all of this was simple, a simple model would work. Yet because we are not simple, but complex beings who have multiple variables driving our experience simultaneously, we need a systemic model that can work with this multiplicity. And that’s why in Neuro-Semantics we have several models: the NLP communication model, Meta-States, Matrix, Axes of Change, Self-Actualization Quadrants. And with these models we can now develop the competency to know what to do when, with whom, and why.