Girls are still being reared to believe that men are alien beings who are only after our friendship for one reason - but this attitude justs belittles the opposite sex, writes Kate Holmquist

WHEN YOU'RE IN a tight spot in your relationship, career or finances and need sensible, realistic advice, ask a man. A woman may let you cry on her shoulder, but at the end of a warm and fuzzy session of emotion-letting you still won't know what to do about your problem.

You'll have got plenty of empathy and emotional cheerleading, but by the time she pours you into a taxi, you'll be no closer to finding your way through the maze of difficulties than you were in the beginning.

Ask a man and he'll give you practical advice. Pick a wise man to confide in, and he'll come back a few days later with even more and better advice, having rationally considered your situation. He's likely to offer practical assistance rather than a box of tissues. And he'll tell it to you straight and focus on what to do next, rather than analysing how your personality got you into the situation.

Men tend to solve problems through action, while women tend to dwell on feelings. Men blame the world when they're in a pickle, women tend to blame themselves. The most evolved men and women have a bit of both in their personalities.

To be a successful woman, you shouldn't have to think like a man, but it is worthwhile to know how men think and to borrow some of their coping mechanisms. Men are a lot more considerate and caring than many of the women you know. And a lot more vulnerable too, even though they hide it better.

I was having some communication difficulties recently with a man, so I asked a platonic male friend how I should approach the situation. A female friend would have said "stand up for yourself", "don't let him treat you like that", and so on. She would have encouraged my innate sense of victimhood. I have a terrible habit of projecting the bad experiences I've had with men on every man I meet, which is not only unfair, it's self-defeating.

My male friend didn't see me as a victim in the slightest. His advice was for me to make further efforts at keeping communication open. "Give him what you would like him to give you." (The situation had nothing to do with sex, by the way.) The advice worked. Our communication is a lot better now. I learned that rather than seeing myself as a doormat, I needed to recognise that I had strengths to offer that this man would respond to. When I was candid with him, he was candid with me.

I love the friendship of men. It's taken me a while to come round to appreciating their friendship, since I was raised during the sex wars of the 1970s when girls were told that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Women were meant to be self-sufficient and to use men for sex, money and procreation.

How sexist was that? An entire generation of us reared to believe that men were only for one thing. And we're still rearing girls to believe that men are alien beings who are after our friendship for one reason. This belittles men and it must be having an effect on our sons, if we give them the message - consciously or not - that their relationships with girls can only be sexual.

I've heard many teenage boys' mothers say that they're tired of seeing their sons' hearts broken by girls who toy with their affections.

The perception is that girls are tougher and more manipulative these days and that boys are fodder for their emotional games. Boys, who are more likely to wear their hearts on their sleeves, are being held to ransom emotionally by wily girls. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

The stereotype of the typical teenage boy is that he wants friendship with girls only as a prelude to sex, and that boys who like girls but don't express it physically are "gay". The logic is that boys want sex with girls to prove to their friends that they are heterosexual.

So I was reassured to read in last month's Journal of Adolescence that physical attraction isn't teenage boys' main reason for asking girls out. Eight out of 10 boys said they asked a girl for a date because they really liked her "personality". They wanted a relationship first, and would have sex only if they fell in love. A minority - less than 10 per cent - wanted sex to lose their virginity or because of peer pressure.

So, assuming that Irish boys are of a similar view, our belief that teenage boys have sex on the brain is false and we're harming them by persisting with it. It means that we're more likely to talk to our girls about the emotional complexities of relationships than we are to talk to our boys, yet our boys need these conversations just as much.

As for us adults, to persist in the belief that all male-female relationships must be sexual prevents us seeing the world from different points of view. I'm writing this column from a female perspective, which means that if you're a man in need of advice on your relationship, career or finances, you should ask a woman. She may give you completely different advice than a man would, but if she says "give her what you would like her to give you", then you're getting close to that magic balance where men and women can communicate without seeing each other as stereotypes.