The Last Psychiatrist

Are You Mom Enough? The Question Is For What

2012-05-13T12:41:55Z

at what age does it become incest?

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I'll leave the discussion of the merits of attachment parenting to people who actually have parents and attachments, but it's kind of a moot point, I've seen more Taliban snipers than I've seen boob sucking kindergarteners.

So forget what Time is showing you, ask instead: what does the magazine want to be true?

Postulate: Time doesn't like breast feeding. If you disagree at least grant me that no one at Time thinks four years of it is admirable. Right? So you are supposed to hate her. Ok, how?

"Umm, 'how?' Well... there's a kid sucking on a boob..." Come on, man, that's weird but it's not hatable, hating her doesn't somehow reinforce who you are-- unless you're a woman who didn't breast feed. What if you're a guy? "Well, she's hot..." Right. The secret fear of marriage is that the kid wins the Oedipal drama.

At some point someone needs to notice that the intensity of the emotions about this issue are way out of proportion to the... prevalence of the issue. I'm pretty confident breast feeding on the way home from Webelos is a terrible idea but is it worse on your kid than getting divorced? Or staying together, depending? Extra year of boob or lifetime without a father. Hmm. Is this open book?

Other than the volume of your voice, do you have any reason to be sure of what you think?

So since Time has created a controversy out of thin air, we should consider that the controversy is a proxy for something else.

She's a billion, so either Time was writing a story on Attachment Parenting and found the hottest subject they could find to make it be ok, or they chose the hottest subject they could find to make it NOT be okay. So hot= shallow egomaniac using her boobs and then her kid to get noticed.

That's what Time wants you to think, anyway. But there are things you don't see that I can't unsee, which is why I've been at the bottle stashed behind the big rock at the creek's bend since I was a pre-teen. She's 26 and the kid is 3, subtraction =23, so you have a super hot well manicured blonde having kids way the hell too early for a super hot well manicured blonde.................... and there are only two reasons why such a person would be pictured in American media: she's from Utah or Jesus is her co-pilot. Amen. The fastest way to get Time's Hatable Person Of The Week cover is to a) work for Goldman Sachs or b) praise the Lord. I guess it's possible she works on a trading desk but my money says this is a story about why religious people are insane.

So while the rest of you bah bah black sheep are led to complain that she's hatable because she breast feeds, when the Time comes-- and praise be to Jesus, it is coming-- for you to learn she's nipples deep in the Lord Is My Shepherd maybe you'll then remember which candidate you're supposed to hate.

There's hate in them there pictures, the worst kind of hate, the kind that makes you hate without knowing why, without knowing that you hate. The kind of hate that ends up defining you as a person in opposition to something else. And then you disappear.

Once you've made this prediction everything else is downhill. She'll homeschool kid, which is hatable. She'll be wealthy for no identifiable reason: hatable. She'll be carrying around that kid 24/7 with no nanny yet still weirdly find time for mani/pedis and barre class. So hatable. And co-sleeping doesn't mess up her sex life or her sex interest because her husband plows her on the deck, in the car, in the pool, in elevators. Sigh hatable. You can't make a right on red but this woman is forcing the world to accommodate her, bend to her way, her life, and she appears to be succeeding and happy. Bitch.

Look at the comments as people struggle to explain why breast feeding a 3 year old is bad: they sense it's bad, but can't come up with a concrete reason to explain it. Well, Time is the magazine for you. They offer you an blonde cypher trusting that you'll solve it: she co-sleeps because she's a religious nut. Phew.

"When you think of breast-feeding, you think of mothers holding their children, which was impossible with some of these older kids," Schoeller says. "I liked the idea of having the kids standing up to underline the point that this was an uncommon situation."

That's Time's photographer explaining that simply having her breast feed wasn't good enough to make his point, he needed to stage the scene to "underline the point." This is why the sentence before that one is this:

Using religious images of the Madonna and Child as reference, Schoeller captured each mother breast-feeding her child or children.

If you have the urge to email me complaining that I'm defending religion or attachment parenting, please don't, your brain is broken. The point is to show you how the media e.g. Time manipulates you to hate some things by linking them to other things: it polarizes you, which means it makes you irrelevant. E.g. when an election "is determined by" one particular group of "swing" voters-- whom you deride for being too stupid to have made up their minds yet-- it doesn't mean your vote has been factored in but that you are so predictable that you don't count. Power never thinks of you as an individual. Power never thinks of you at all.

Maybe attachment parenting is good? Bad? Time doesn't care to find out. It could easily have PubMeded the story and found a hundred scientific articles to discuss. Nope. It needed space to tell me that Dr. Bill Sears was a Catholic, converted to evangelicalism, and back to Catholicism, and his wife goes to Mass every day. Oh, I get it, they're crazy people. This is a typical media trick, rather than exploring an issue it explores a person, describes him, his background and his faults, this is the kind of person who believes this complicated issue that is too difficult to solve on its own. You're free to choose.

Do you think Time cares about breast feeding? Do you think Time cares about you? Time hates you. It hates everyone, especially its readers, it thinks of them as credit card numbers, as registered voters, as organ donors. It wants what it wants and if we have to throw a kid under a boob, so be it. Like the late Marshall McLuhan once said, there's a war going on out there, and it isn't between liberals and conservatives or atheists and believers or attachment parents and detachment parents, it's between us and them, where them is defined as everyone who is not us and us is defined as me. You lose.

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http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

Thank God The 'Heart Attack Grill' Is A Great Name; Also, How To Learn French

2012-05-11T14:29:26Z

The Son Of Man will watch over you

]]> Did you hear about the restaurant called "The Heart Attack Grill?"

For the second time in two months, a customer at Las Vegas' Heart Attack Grill collapsed mid-meal and was carted off to a hospital.

Yummy. Here's another:

The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, Nev., has come under scrutiny since one of its patrons suffered an actual heart attack while eating a Triple Bypass Burger there earlier this week.

Or:

(CBS News) Another patron of the Heart Attack Grill has reportedly fallen ill during a meal at the hospital-themed Las Vegas restaurant.

Seems like such a frivolous story couldn't possibly be of any value to anyone. And yet, I'm about to make a mountain out of a molehill. Who wants to see something ugly about themselves?

You might guess that this news story is itself a kind of advertising for the Grill. This cynical view places not just two heart attack victims but all of CBS News at the service of a company's self-promotion. And you'd be right, another branding piece pretending to be a news story.

But we know what the author wants to be true, the question is what you want to be true: how does this story, like all pop-culture and pop-news, represent a wish fulfillment? The story does not exist as information, in fact its deliberately misleading-- the patron didn't have a heart attack. There is no information there. It is there in order for you to talk about it-- so you have something to talk to others about, through a screen darkly or face to face, because if it weren't for these meaningless media stories which includes all partisan politics people would have nothing to say to each other, and society's collapse into hikikomori narcissism would be total. Which is why it is correct to say that pop culture isn't a symptom of our dying society, it is its heroic measures. So take your medicine: what do you want to say about some dummy who had a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill?

First interesting observation: the reflex position is to defend the corporation, in the guise of pseudo-libertarianism: "no one forced her to eat there!" and, "no one takes responsibility for their own actions!" and "hey, dummy, how could you go to a place called the Heart Attack Grill and not know you'd have a heart attack, what did you expect?"

This position isn't necessarily wrong, but it is very much a mark of our time that the reflexive emotional position isn't, "those corporate scum shouldn't be allowed to serve that poison, do they feel no responsibility for this?"

Which leads to the second interesting observation: this position is delivered as if it were a minority opinion, full of wisdom, against an uneducated crowd-- as if everyone else blamed the Grill. And yet a glance at the comments reveals that no one blames the Grill, everyone blames the dummy. The only blame they get is for using the story as marketing.

If you consider how ready we are to blame corporate scum for everything else, giving them immunity to this obvious blame seems paradoxical.

So the question for the individual is, why is it so important to be allowed to eat at the Heart Attack Grill yet accepted that there's an good chance you're going to get exactly what you paid for? I'm going to hide under the bed and wait for your answer. "Is it freedom of choice?" Here's a hint: that's never the answer.

II.

You can run the list of "defense mechanisms" and try to link each one to specific personality disorders, which will help you understand the spouse who left you or the spouse you're never going to leave but the point for now is that what makes them defenses is not that they protect you from pain-- they don't, clearly. They suck at doing this, look around.

The purpose of defense mechanisms is to stop you from changing. So that after the trauma or the break-up or the loss you are still you. More sad/ashamed/impotent/enraged/depressed is fine as long as you're the same guy.

This is what makes treating narcissism particularly difficult: the pathology's Number 1 characteristic is identity preservation. "I want to change." Nope. You want to be happier, sure, more successful, feel love, drink less, but you want to remain you. But that won't work. The identity you've chosen blows, ask anyone. Change is only possible when you say, "I want to stop making everyone cry." The first step isn't admitting you have a problem but identifying precisely how you are a problem for other people. But I'll save you the trouble, you'll fail at this, too, because of the Number 2 characteristic of narcissism: inability to see things from the other's perspective. "This isn't really therapeutic, jerk. You call yourself a psychiatrist?" Mother's Day is Sunday, get her anything? I know, I know, she's a jerk, too.

III.

If you want to watch these invisible unconscious defenses play out right in front of you, in real time, in a real way, watch an adult American try to learn a second language.

Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adults, are they all using different science? An American describes another American who is fluent in French as "oh my God, he's so smart, he speaks French and everything" but this statement is easily unmasked as a defense by getting him to describe a Frenchman who speaks English: "well, they all speak English over there." The bilingualism is robbed of the "intelligence" signification because it's seen as customary.... who they are. America is a branded-identity nation, which means hearing yourself speak in not-your accent, with not-your vocabulary sounds very not-you, which is why when an American tries to speak French he feels self-conscious, but the Frenchman hearing it feels you aren't even trying. He'd be wrong, you are trying: trying not to become French.

"Ugh, I hate psychobabble, why can't you be more like Malcolm Gladwell and give me practical neuroscience based tips like 'get up before dawn' or 'play basketball annoyingly'?" Fine, here's your concrete advice that you won't take for shaving 6 months off your second language acquisition: master the accent first. Before even one word of vocabulary. The accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-- it will make it okay for you to learn the vocabulary. And you will think differently. American exceptiono-isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else. Which teaches us that a German is more similar to an Italian than a Texan to a New Yorker, and I can predict with 100% accuracy that if that made you pause you only speak English. Can't wait to hear your foreign policy ideas over drinks. You should work for NPR.

Once you have the accent down, pick a foreign language actor or actress you admire, and learn the language as if you were them. Talk like them. This trick works because you are thinking like someone else, acting like someone else, yet simultaneously distancing yourself from this change-- I'm doing this, but it's not me, I'm just pretending. The self-consciousness is removed because it's not "you" who is doing it. Yet it is; and after a time, you'll become it-- and the positive benefit for society is you'll hate the guy you used to be. C'est la vie.

Which brings us back to the Heart Attack Grill. All psychological defenses have a common structure: that two legitimate but contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously, one consciously, one unconsciously, alternating variously. That way all possibilities are covered. Change is neutralized.

IV.

"Hey dummy, what did you expect would happen if you ate at the Heart Attack Grill?"

Why did you expect it? Be careful. It isn't because you knew the food is unhealthy, and I know this because you don't actually know what the food is. You have no idea if a "Triple Bypass Burger" is in any way worse than a Big Mac except that it is branded as worse. If it said "Double Healthy Burger," would you believe that, or does your cynicism only run in one direction? (Let me check the calendar: it only runs in one direction.) "Well, there's a picture of the giant burger right there at the top." Run all you like, Gingerbread Man, I'm still going to catch you. The truth is you assumed the burger was extra-unhealthy as soon as you read the title, before you knew anything else. So why are you trying to pretend otherwise?

Take an alternative headline and meditate: "Man Has Heart Attack At Hooters." Hooters food is poison but there the implication is that the waitresses' boobs were to blame. But the Heart Attack Grill has equally sexy waitresses and no one blames their boobs.

So the expectation is exclusively the result of the names "Hooters" or "Heart Attack" and the connotations they carry. Not the reality-- the connotations of the words. But connotation is the purpose of branding. So "hey dummy, how could you go to the Heart Attack Grill and not know you'd have a heart attack?" reveals our secret hope about branding: that it is true, that it has power to affect reality.

I sense the resistance to this idea. The simple act of naming doesn't give it power, right? The restaurant has to live up to its name. Well, now it has. Still think you should be allowed to eat there?

Is the name 'Heart Attack Grill' meant ironically? The waitstaff are dressed like sexy nurses and doctors, which is meant ironically, i.e. what they provide (fatty food) runs counter to the sartorial expectations. But the name is... not ironic, it's literally correct-- right?

Wrong. The name Heart Attack Grill is ironic, because the expectation is that you won't get a heart attack there, and the reason you know you won't get a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill is -- and this is where you need to judge the strength of your soul-- exactly that it is called Heart Attack Grill. That's why it is safe to eat there.

This will sound confusing, because if you actually have a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill, inevitably someone who thinks Kristen Wiig is funny will say: "umm, hel-lo? Mayor McCheese? What did you expect would happen?" Well, not this.... I thought the name was ironic.

God may be dead, but we're not yet ready to shine a flashlight into the abyss to see just how abyssy it is; so we put a distance between ourselves and the dark abyssiness of reality, and by "distance" I mean literally "some other omnipotent entity." And we make that entity exert its power-- prove it has power-- through language. If something is called the Heart Attack Grill, then it could not possibly actually cause heart attacks because no one would ever allow such a thing, any more than they would allow a Vegas brothel called "Syphilis House"-- unless it was actually free of syphilis. The final step is the trickiest to understand but the most natural to execute-- it is the atemporal logic of narcissism, aka magical thinking: the naming of it prevents it from being true. Saying it is ironic is protective.

This is why blaming the dummy is pseudo-libertarianism. It seems that we don't want any restrictions on our freedom, we want to be free to do things even if they are harmful; but that freedom is always predicated on "some other omnipotent entity"'s supervision. We want our freedom to eat unhealthily as long as it is "USDA Grade A" meat from a "Board Of Health" restaurant, cooked not by Mexican illegals with no training in handwashing but by chefs-- sorry, not precise enough: "...cooked by Mexican illegals as long as they are called chefs." We want things to be as regulated as possible with two absolute conditions: 1. there must be symbols of the omnipotent entity's existence showing we are being cared for, like a Grade A seal or the absence of the 13th floor or the word "chefs"; 2. the implementation of the power must be invisible so we can disavow it. And at the very last step of a carefully managed outcome we can bask in the freedom of our pretend choice. In other words, the fact that we are allowed to choose something dangerous must mean that it isn't really that dangerous, which is more accurately but confusingly translated: the fact that we are allowed to choose something dangerous causes it to be safe. And thank God. "There is no God." Oh, that explains all the passive voice.

-----

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

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Notes:

Two simple examples of this process.

1. In normal people who did not grow up on a farm, drinking milk from a cow will seem more disgusting than drinking it from a milk carton. The explanation will be that it isn't "pasteurized and homogenized," which is both true and simultaneously a lie, because you know milk is dispensed after pasteurization from an industrial vat into a carton

but if you had to pick between drinking from that carton at the supermarket vs. from that industrial vat, you'd still pick the carton. The carton clearly displays symbols of regulation and control, but the vat is too real to drink from.

2. Even if we agree that "taxes are too high" the psychological importance of lowering them is that the regulations that we know to exist will still continue to exist but we are distanced from them; to the point that the person who pays no taxes, or the man who pulls off the grid feels he is no longer affected by those controls; but of course everything he touches is still the result of those forces-- his Cabela's hat and camo jacket are flammability regulated, certain dyes prohibited, factories free of glass shards; all things that he knows are true, but blocks from his consciousness. "I'm totally self-sufficient." Ok. So on the one hand he knows (unconsciously) he enjoys the protection of the regulations, on the other hand knows (consciously) he is entirely free of their influence. This will alternate on the day he e.g. catches fire. This is not a criticism but an explanation: since this disavowal/magical thinking is a narcissistic defense, it's easy to predict that he will have other narcissistic problems, e.g. alcohol, rage, misogyny, etc.

To be clear: what makes this a defense is not that he is wrong, but that he is right, he has a legitimate point-- taxes may indeed be too high, the government too large, too many regulations, etc. If he believed something that was not true he'd be delusional. The defense is effective only if two incompatible truths are held simultaneously, alternating variously depending on what's going on, so that change is neutralized.

Why We Love Sociopaths

2012-04-24T14:07:54Z

according to this, it's sociopaths that we love

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"My greatest regret is I'm not a sociopath," starts an article written by....... well, I reserve judgment. "Are you suggesting...?" No, not at all. That's where the truth lies. "Wait-- 'lies' as in----"

This article is important for a specific reason. If you follow the thesis that The Atlantic and The New Yorker set the default ways which we understand social issues, e.g. sex, money and politics-- and they do this even if you don't read those magazines-- then Kotsko and others like him set the default understanding for academic types. This doesn't mean everyone agrees with him, no no no-- it means that he sets the frame. The trick is you will argue his conclusions but it will be impossible for it to occur to you to argue the form of the question. So "why do we love sociopaths?" is literally understood: "since it is a fact that we love sociopaths, why?"

II.

Kotsko's thesis is that we love sociopaths because sociopathy is opposed to social awkwardness. Say you're in line at the store and some jerk cuts in front of you, on purpose, and for the sake of clarification let me observe he has a Celtic cross tattooed to his shoulder and he just had sex with your girlfriend. He's a different kind of person than you. He can do things you can't, do women you can't, he sees the world's rules differently, which specifically means he understands that there are no "world's rules," that rules are decided by those with power for their own benefit. After he cuts in line, he pockets a Milky Way bar because, well, because he got away with it. My grammar is correct: he can do it since he got away with it.

Ultimately, the only thing you have over him, as you seethe expressionlessly with your 15 items or less, is sleeves and the feeling that you're not a jerk.

The media offers us our wish fulfillment by creating characters who are "good" sociopaths that we can safely envy, and "good" is defined by The Atlantic as "has an internal code of ethics" and which is defined by anyone else as "makes it up as he goes along." TV sociopaths-- Don Draper, Tony Soprano-- seem to be like that guy. They do what they want and aren't bothered that you, a loser, think they're a jerk. The difference between you and them, according to Kotsko, is that they manipulate the social connections whereas you are mired in them. They can detach, you can't. Your only compensation is that you have moral superiority.

But at some point in the breakdown of capitalist society-- it says it right on the cover of his book-- that moral superiority isn't enough. Are you not a person who works hard and plays by the rules? You still want to have nice things, you still want to get nice women, you still want to feel some power, which in a normally functioning society you would be able to get in your own natural way. But when there's unemployment and debt and your wife leaves you, and it looks like these are happening because the social contract has failed, because jerks are taking from you, those real losses aren't sufficiently compensated by "at least I'm not a jerk." Extend that to Wall Street stealing your savings and feeling no shame, having no punishment, and all we can do is pretend that our moral superiority is enough compensation, and of course it isn't.

Hence the aspirational images of TV sociopaths. How great would it be to just...

If only I didn't give a fuck about anyone or anything, we think--then I would be powerful and free. Then I would be the one with millions of dollars, with the powerful and prestigious job, with more sexual opportunities than I know what to do with.

III.

"If only....." Look deep. There is no if only. They already don't "give a fuck." No one who wishes they could be like Tony Soprano or Don Draper actually cares about anyone. "I care about my mom." No you don't. You'd be sad if she died, of course, but you do not care about her, and I don't need to provide any examples for you to know this is true.

The "social contract has failed" argument is a rationalization. What's troubling them is that they already don't care at all, but they still aren't able to manipulate people the way Tony does. This is reinforced by the sentences that immediately precede "If only...":

If we feel very acutely the force of social pressure, they feel nothing. If we are bound by guilt and obligation, they are completely amoral.

Point to the guy who is both "bound by guilt"-- not shame, but guilt-- and also wants to be Tony Soprano and I'll show you a person who doesn't exist.

To be correct, Kotsko's sentences should be revised: "what the hell is wrong with me that I am exactly like Tony Soprano in every single way, except on execution?" Amoral and impotent is different than amoral and potent, but you're a jerk both ways.

This is how I know that anyone who says "if only I could live in Mad Men time where you could pinch a girl's ass and not get in trouble for it" is going to be way disappointed if a TARDIS shows up, because they wouldn't pinch them back then, either, not because they are afraid of trouble but because they are afraid of girls. Exhibit A: you know what a TARDIS is.

In a sentence, the problem with his Kotsko's analysis is that it is exactly backwards. Not: because Wall Street steals and we have no justice, we begin to admire sociopaths. But: because we admire sociopaths, therefore Wall Street is able to steal. Not: because the social contract has unraveled, therefore we wish to be sociopaths. But: because we are sociopaths, therefore the social contract has unraveled. I know this is a very unpopular thing to say, but if you find yourself wanting to be bad because everyone else gets away with it, then the problem isn't everyone else, the problem is you.

No, yelling at me won't make this less true.

IV.

I should point out that Kotsko uses the word "sociopath" incorrectly.

The contemporary fantasy of sociopathy picks and chooses from those characteristics, emphasizing the lack of moral intuition, human empathy, and emotional connection. Far from being the obstacles they would be in real life, these characteristics are what enable the fantasy sociopath to be so amazingly successful.

Everywhere Kotsko uses the word "sociopath" he is more accurately describing "narcissist." He calls them sociopaths because of the way they relate to society, but that would mean that the ebola virus is also a sociopath. Society is the collateral damage of me me me.

Kotsko focuses on this a la carte sociopathy because he admits no one envies actual real life sociopaths. We only envy TV sociopaths-- so he infers that it must be a special selection of sociopathic characteristics we actually admire.

But this the wrong inference to make. The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story.

Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?

The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't feel the same. I know.

What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one. Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.

Kotsko makes another mistake in thinking that our admiration of TV sociopaths like Don Draper and Tony Soprano reflects a universal psychology. It doesn't. It only reflects the psychology of the people who like those shows, which isn't a lot of people but is a very specific and vocal group of people: Aspirational 14%. Those people have the unique problem of too much freedom, too much money (which is to say they are still living paycheck to paycheck, but only because they are spending it all on keeping up the identity), too many options and, most importantly, nothing to define them.

The admiration of TV sociopaths is related to this desire of self-identification, and not to a lack of power or a failure of the social contract. The social contract is working just fine for the AMC/Netflix demographic. It does not explain a desire for more power; envy explains it. Not knowing who I am, not knowing what I am supposed to do next and what I am not supposed to bother doing next-- makes us long for characters who know precisely what to do next even if it is the wrong things. They may be flawed, but they are definite. They exist.

Telling a modern American that what they really want is less freedom seems like some dangerous talk, but it is true nonetheless. Cynicism, irony has failed you, but you know no other way to be. Don Draper is an ad man, so going to a "partners' meeting" run formally, by a secretary, doesn't seem bad at all. Neither does wearing a suit and tie, every day, and a hat. But your job doesn't define you, so going to a meeting seems stupid, a farce, play acting, so you affect an cynical detachment form it. And you're not wearing a tie for anybody. You know it's stupid, you're not buying this corporate bullshit. This cynical posture is a front, a wall, it protects you from being defined by your actions; but what you don't see is that the very job you think you're undermining still receives the full power of your productivity. That you're unhappy, or cynical, is irrelevant to it. It doesn't care about you. Why should it? You don't even care about yourself.

That's what we envy in Don Draper. That he can exist as himself without ironic detachment, they can be defined as something. And what they do and what they are matches perfectly, even if it's "bad." The truth you must face, now, immediately, is that if you were put in Draper's clothes, in his relationships, in his job, you yourself would immediately affect that cynical detachment: "A partners' meeting? What for? Come on, I see you guys in the hallways all the time" and you'd be as miserable as you are now. But until you accept this truth about yourself, you'll think changing other things could save you. Tell the truth: did you consider a career in advertising after you watched Mad Men? Then you are lost.

VI.

It's impossible to deconstruct TV shows without considering their complement: advertising. Ads, especially TV commercials, offer the exact opposite of cynical detachment: pure aspiration. So while you resist allowing your career or relationship to define you-- "I'm more than a software engineer!" you beg objects-- cars, clothes, women-- to define you, and of course not actual cars, clothes, or women, but whatever other people have said those things represent. Worse, cynicism and aspirational branding aren't two opposite ends of a pole, they form a cycle: the chasm between your cynical view of real life and the perfect definition of the aspirational images in ads makes you even more cynical towards real life; which drives you further into the safety of branding. Which is why you drink.

The only salvation to this existential crisis is less freedom, not more. The only question is whether you will impose these restrictions on yourself, or you will wait like cattle for someone else to impose them on you. But they will be imposed. It is inevitable.

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http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

Aspirational 14%, defined

Don Draper Voted "Most Influential Man"

The Hunger Games Is A Sexist Fairy Tale. Sorry.

2012-04-10T04:03:57Z

this isn't going to have a happy ending

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You should probably read this first.

I.

Housekeeping: it's legitimate to accuse me of being drunk or a terrible writer, both are true. But you can't say I didn't read the book and didn't see the movie. I know I did, I was there.

When I say Katniss was continuously robbed of agency, that's a simple fact. Let's examine the commonly cited counterexample that she killed two people by dropping a hornet's nest on them. Didn't that require her to plan and act, to know the consequences? Isn't that agency?

Chekov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" but the flip of that is that if you don't put a pistol on the wall in the first act, you can't suddenly have the main character find a pistol on the wall. Unless you're writing a fairy tale.

So when Katniss is desperate, trapped in a tree, and has no recourse-- and suddenly someone points out that there is this immensely lethal object right next to her, maybe it's a hornet's nest and maybe it's a thermal detonator-- so the story then has to take a three minute pause so an omniscient narrator can explain to the audience what it is because we had no knowledge of this before, "oh, it's magic bees," then there are only two possibilities: 1. Deus ex machina. 2. It's a terribly written story. I favor 1, but I'm open to 2. Oh, and it kills everyone but Peeta, that's lucky.

II.

The standard adulation for The Hunger Games is that it has a strong female protagonist who is, and I quote, "a badass." Is she more of a badass than Alice from Resident Evil? Come the zombie apocalypse, do you go Team Katniss or Team Alice? Not who it's cooler to say you'd pick; assume you have a 5 year old daughter with one hit point left whose life depends on your selection. Because I'm arguing that it does.

actual badass

Obviously you go with Alice, which is also why she isn't popular among women: There's no aspiration, no wish fulfillment, it's too fantastic, too impossible because Alice is, in fact, a superhero. It's not real.

But Katniss isn't a superhero, and "women can identify with her." Ok, which part? She isn't better than her competitors. Thresh is still tougher, Cato faster, Foxface more ninjalike, etc. And to reiterate, Katniss is carried through the movie by deus ex machina or continuously saved by other people. So why is she a badass and not, say, Peeta, who spends the entire movie sacrificing himself for her?

I want you to pick one single scene that you think best epitomizes her badassness. Got it? You sure? Take a moment. The one scene you'd show your friends. "Check this out: badass."

Is it any of the scenes displaying her spectacular inability to hit moving targets at close range? No? But it has something to do with the bow, right? Otherwise these wouldn't exist:

I'm not a hater, follow the logic. Nothing she does makes her a badass. What makes her a badass is that men underestimate her. If you don't believe me, what scene did you pick? The same one the audience did, the one that made them cheer the loudest, wwoooooooohhhh!!!!!!"

There's a banquet and the contestants have to show off their skills, but the overlords are eating a roast pig and bored with Katniss (because she misses a target) so Katniss turns her arrow towards them and shoots an apple. Katniss says, "you better recognize, mothafuckas!", flashes a gang sign, and the audience swoons. That's when she's a badass. Yes, she was wonderful in the Games, I'm sure, but what got your adrenaline going, what made her a badass, is showing off her abilities-- to men. That's why more than half of this movie takes place before the Games-- it's all about showing what you can do, showing your capabilities. Badass = showing she can compete on a male level. (1)

In the actual Games, Katniss is continuously saved by men-- Haymitch, Peeta, Peeta again, Thresh-- but you don't notice that she saves no one, including herself, you think she saves herself all the time. You think this because of the first half of the movie told you she's a badass, so you don't realize that during the second half she shows less agency than Princess Jasmine.

And the reason why showing off-- or, as the movie ever so subtly puts it, "showing them up"-- is so important is that women still secretly believe they are inferior to men. I know most of you aren't going to want to hear that, and, indeed, the vast majority of you will woefully willfully misquote me as having said, "women are inferior to men," but that's because your brain is broken. I read the book. You need to read with a highlighter.

Haymitch, played by a man, says this to a woman, played by Katniss:

You know you stay alive? You get people to like you. Oh, not what you were expecting?

No, unfortunately it's exactly what I was expecting. Thanks Dad.

II.

If you are angry at me you are not reading your own words. This is bigger than Katniss, this is the state of human progress. If it helps, imagine you have a five year old daughter you have to raise in the midst of aspirational images with long legs and no power of agency, and your worry is no longer "will she grow up and find a job?" or even "will she grow up and get married?" but "will she be so conflicted about herself that she is unable to choose a career or pick a nice man from the hundreds of options that present themselves to her because she is ever anxious that any choice is the wrong choice because she only gets conflicting messages from everyone on earth?" That's the world I'm stuck in, and though I haven't burned a bra in years I do somewhat rely on feminists to nudge the bar consistently higher so my theoretical daughters don't have to rely on penis or Prozac to live happily ever after. So where my girls at? I found about a million fawning feminist reviews of The Hunger Games which all contain some version of this paragraph:

Katniss, in this season of woman-hating, is a stunning example of feminism at its finest hour. She is compassionate, yet strong. She cares deeply about her family. While she is tempted to run away with Gale, instead of leaving her sister and mother to fend for themselves, she stays to support them.

Lord have mercy on all our souls, I'll take my chances with Alice and a zombie attack. None of those things are feminism, those aren't even praiseworthy. Those are basic, ordinary, unremarkable characteristics of every reasonable human being for 6000 years, and all animals. But that's the bar the reviewer has set for Katniss, for feminism. That's the fantasy world she'd like to see women eventually get to. So either a) she has an unconsciously cynical view of women in general; or b) she has been tricked by the system about what it is to advance as a woman, i.e she's in The Matrix. Here's the problem: she's a woman. She represents women. She is a feminist, but she does not see that Katniss is allowed to exist precisely because she isn't a threat to men but women can think she is. If I was a 15 year old girl, and I'm not saying I'm not, then what is being communicated to me by the feminist praise of this book is that my future expectations are low. Maybe-- MAYBE-- if I work real hard I might someday surprise a boy, "wow, I never would have guessed!" Can't wait till I grow up.

III.

The feminists missed this, all of this, and it is their job not to miss this. What they yelled about is the racism of a small audience, to avoid facing the sexism in themselves. And, by the way, the racism in themselves: Jezebel jumped on the racism against black actors because they are stupid. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. Do you know why Thresh doesn't kill Katniss but instead lets her go? Because Thresh is black.

The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He's one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.

Black guy= strength, so his letting her go is a signal of her value as a temporary equal. This is a repeat of the 1980s trope that a (white) weakling being bullied winds up being saved by black gang members: "Eugene is a friend o' ours, so we best not hear no mo' trouble." Thresh doesn't happen to be black, Thresh is intentionally black, a stereotype, for that scene to occur, because to a white woman, no one knows the value of person's life better than a slightly retarded giant homicidal black guy. "He's bad, but he has a internal code of honor." Oh. You know you're stupid, right? In other words, the racists in Central Time are less racist than Suzanne Collins. Bet you didn't see that coming. Which is my whole point: no one saw any of this coming, they saw a woman with a bow and flipped the hell out. Katniss is a role model for girls like Thresh is a role model for blacks. I look forward to your deranged responses. (2)

Katniss lives in a patriarchy, sure there are some women but they look completely insane, which trivializes them. Odd that no feminists noticed that. They are all wicked stepmothers-- a problem, but not the problem. The problem is all the men with all the power, and any women who have power have it only because they are hooked up with more powerful men. Katniss seems like a lone hero, outside all this, but she she always defers to that patriarchy, and relies on it, operates within the rules of the society but, and this is what makes her a badass-- she tests limits. Postures for the cameras. Says the right things, but says them with a slightly rebellious inflection. Feels like 15 again.

Deconstuctionists like to ask easy questions like, "why is a story for 15 year old girls so popular among middle aged women?" They asked this about Twilight, too, but it's not at all surprising that these books are popular among middle aged women who still secretly believe women are second behind men. Not in terms of theoretical potential, perhaps, but they've grown up in a world with enough experiences that they can't shake it. It's still a man's world.

The real question is why it's popular among 15 year old girls? 15 year old girls should, in theory, have grown up without 1970s sexism. Schools are hypervigilant about fostering girls development, and there are enough female everythings that it's not remarkable that there are female anythings.

And yet here we are, teen girls are reading fairy tales. This book should not resonate with 15 year olds, not this much. Which means that these girls are still getting sexist signals from somewhere, and, follow the trail, those signals came from the 40 year old women who like the story, i.e. "feminists." This is what I mean when I say the system no longer needs men to maintain the status quo: it has feminists doing the job for it.

Please, please, don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against The Hunger Games, it's an entertaining story, I am not criticizing the book, I am criticizing you. If it won an Oscar or the world declared this the next Star Wars and made action figures and lunchboxes I wouldn't say a bad word about it, what's it to me if it makes people happy? Enjoy what you like, it doesn't have to have deep meaning to be worthwhile.

But what makes me reach for the now empty bottle is how women have convinced themselves and each other that this is a pro-feminist story. Do you not see what is happening? You are being lied to, by yourselves.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

1. See also Katy Perry's empowerment represented by training with the Marines.

2. Oh boy. Yes, Thresh is retarded. In the movie this is not revealed at all-- probably because the poor director couldn't take it anymore, but in the book he has stilted speech, limited vocabulary, one word answers. The alternative interpretation is that English isn't his native tongue-- i.e., he is a giant, black, cotton picking, immigrant. I'll let you decide which interpretaiton is worse. None of this occurred to anyone? Outstanding.

What's Wrong With The Hunger Games Is What No One Noticed

2012-04-03T01:42:12Z

guess what happens next

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When a media universally misses the point, it's on purpose.

I.

Rue is a little girl in The Hunger Games, and in the movie she's played by a black girl. According to Jezebel, Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Disappointed.

Well, six people are, anyway.

There's an underlying rage, coming out as overt prejudice and plain old racism. Sternberg is called a "black bitch," a "nigger" and one person writes that though he pictured Rue with "darker skin," he "didn't really take it all the way to black." It's as if that is the worst possible thing a person could be.

So there are some racist fans, so what? In itself, why would this be surprising? There are racists everywhere. I once asked a black guy where I could find some racists and he punched me in the mouth, turns out I'm a racist. Who knew? Actually, I did, because every time I see a black guy do anything odd I say to myself for no reason at all, "oh, hell no, oh no you didn't." This is going on in my head, silently, no audience. Apparently not only do I see race, I hear it. And god forbid it's a black woman, my neck and skull actually start moving from side to side as I think, "mmmm hhhmmmmm!" Why do I do this? I don't talk like that. So much for individuality, so much for free thought, I am so polluted by the world that my reflex thoughts are someone else's. You don't even want to know whose thoughts I think when I see boobs.

Of course, if this racism was attached to a Transformers movie you can be sure that Jezebel would pronounce all of the Transformers audience racist. But in this case, it's only some of the audience who are racist, because progressive Jezebel likes The Hunger Games, and they're not racist. How can they be? They're post-feminists, i.e. the racism for Jezebel is merely an opportunity to criticize the bridge trolls who live in Central Time, just in time for the elections.

Most of the "racist" comments I've seen about this complain about the race from a anti-Hollywood, anti-left perspective, i.e. "there goes liberal Hollywood, pushing the liberal agenda." The complaint appears to be not that they don't like black characters in general, but that this was some underhanded move to use the story to promote a political agenda, like making Sherlock Holmes a gay action hero. Now that's just wrong.

If that's the case I don't completely fault them, the story is important to these girls/women, and they feel betrayed that someone alters it to suit their interests rather than give a faithful telling of the story, which, as happens to stories, become partly owned by the audience.

The point here is not whether Rue should be black or not. What's interesting is how Jezebel seized on the racial controversy, but completely avoided the one bludgeoning them in the face for two hours: this is a book for females, written by a female, with femalist themes, gigantically popular among females, yet is more sexist than a rap video.

II.

Everything that's terrible about THG is in this sentence:

Hunger Games was written by a woman and stars a woman (much as we love JK Rowling, her series isn't named after Hermione) -- making it a true lady-centric blockbuster franchise.

Here's your first point of irony: this true lady-centric blockbuster franchise isn't named after Katniss, it's named after what happens to Katniss, which is why it is truly a lady-centric franchise.

How would you classify this book/movie's genre? Is it an action movie with a female twist? Is it a love story? A drama? Sci-fi?

No. It is a fairy tale.

III.

We can start with the obvious. The book is about 24 kids thrown into an arena to fight to the death, only the toughest, the most resourceful, the strongest will survive, and it better be you because your whole village depends on it. It is such a scary premise that there was some concern it was too violent for kids to watch. Well, big surprise: Katniss wins.

Hmmm, here is a surprise: Katniss never kills anyone. That's weird, what does she do to win? Take as much time as you want on this, it's an open book test. The answer is nothing.

This is not a criticism about the entertainment value of the story, but about its popularity and the pretense that it has a strong female character. I like the story of Cinderella, but I doubt that anyone would consider Cinderella a strong female character, yet Katniss and Cinderella are identical.

The traditional progressive complaint about fairy tales like Cinderella is that they supposedly teach girls to want to be princesses and want to live happily ever after. But is that so bad? The real problem with fairy tales is that the protagonist never actually does anything to become a princess. Forget about gerrymandering or slaying a dragon or poisoning her rivals: does she even get a pretty dress, go to the ball and seduce the prince? Those may be anti-feminist actions, but at least they are actions. No. She is given two dresses, carried to the ball, and the Prince comes and finds her. Twice. Her only direct and volitional action is to leave the ball at midnight, and even that isn't so much a choice as because of a threat. (1) The clear problem with this isn't that girls will want to hold out for a Prince, but that it might foster the illusion their value is so innately high that even without pretty clothes or a sense of agency a Prince will come find them. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are worse: they don't even have to bother to stay alive to get their Prince.

The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem. Other than the initial volunteering to replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with consequence-- but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions. She has free will, of course, like any five year old with terrible parents, but at every turn is prevented from acting on the world. She is protected by men-- enemies and allies alike; directed by others, blessed with lucky accidents and when things get impossible there are packages from the sky. In philosophical terms, she is continuously robbed of agency. She is deus ex machinaed all the way to the end. (2)

For example, though this is a story about kids killing kids, somehow Katniss never actually plans and executes any kids, she's never guilty of murder one. She does kill Rue's murderer, but it was reflexive, a defensive act. Importantly, she does not choose NOT to kill, she does not choose a pacifist position, she explicitly states twice in the book how much she wants to kill. But she never does it. She tries to kill big bad Cato at the end, twice, and fails. Only after he is torn to shreds by mutants does she perform a mercy killing on him, at his request. In other words, she doesn't choose to kill or not kill-- it doesn't come up. (3)

The story goes out of its way to prevent her from having to make choices and especially from bearing their consequences. Events unfold in such a way that it appears she made a choice, but decisions are actually made for her. At the end she and Peeta, her kinda-boyfriend, are the last two contestants left. Only one can live. What should happen next? Does she kill him? Or let him kill her? Think about it, what does she choose? Remember, this is about a strong female character forced to play a killing game. Wait-- never mind, they change the rules at the end: everyone's a winner!

"But she chooses to commit suicide at the end!" That would have been a choice, but the book robs her of that as well, this is the point. The book does not allow her to make irreversible choices, it lets her believe she is making free choices and then negates them, again, just like a five year old girl with terrible parents.

She does commit one consciously deliberate act, and it's quite revealing. At the end of the book, she's ambivalent about whether she loves contestant Peeta. But the Games allowed two winners only because they appeared to be in love; so all she has to do, for the cameras, is pretend to be in love with a boy she already likes a lot. But after all she's been through in the arena, this-- what is coincidentally called ACTING-- is what is described, in the shocking last sentence of the chapter, as "the most dangerous part of The Hunger Games."

This is not hyperbole. This is literally correct: for someone who has not ever done it, acting with agency would indeed be dangerous. But those stories aren't fairy tales, those stories are legends.

III.

That the book is successful or exciting is not the point here. What's fascinating/horrifying is that this fairy tale has managed to convince everyone, especially people who consider themselves feminists, that it represents a form of female empowerment when it is exactly the opposite. What you should not underestimate is how deliberate this magic trick is. This is society successfully pretending to change so that nothing changes. The goal is making the other team contribute to their own oblivion. The goal is status quo.

The classic feminist example of "robbed of agency" is the woman who "chooses" to wear makeup, do her hair, display/hide the right amount of cleavage. Is she choosing this, or is society imposing this false choice on her? Because if she feels she has to do it in order to land the account, then it's not really her choice. Hence a controversy about agency.

What makes this such an impossible, lose-lose situation for a woman is that this choice isn't about "what to do" but about who she is, what society wants a woman to be: while she must make herself look pretty, if she is observed doing this she is immediately and simultaneously critiqued for being vain. The decision about whether to be or not to doll herself up is thus somewhat up to her, but the judgment about whether she is vain is entirely out of her hands-- it is a judgment imposed on her for doing exactly what is expected of her. Her only hope is that she is can make herself look pretty enough that it looks like it was not on purpose, i.e reveal the results but hide the process. (4) This manipulation of her is all deliberate design-- what society actually wants is that it gets her to be pretty, demarcates her as an object to be gazed upon-- but not bear any of the guilt/responsibility for forcing her into this. If it works and you are pretty I guess that's some consolation, but imagine if you're not pretty but still have to go through all this, suspecting but never admitting that everyone is going to think, "why'd she even bother?"   Being pretty is in many ways worse, because you're not only competing with other pretty women but with yourself ("you look tired today") and, as the old saying goes, a beautiful woman dies two deaths. But before you go try some of our Nivea skin care products. That's the system, it wants you to participate in your own marginalization so you don't dare unplug. It's exhausting being a chick. I mean girl-- woman. Jesus. (5)

Though this is an example of the feminist agency problem, you should note carefully that the "society" that forces this false choice on women is actually other women, not men, and it starts with the overly invested way mothers reproach their daughters to "dress like a lady."   Certainly the original energy for this madness comes from men, from "the patriarchy", but if every man was executed tonight nothing would change tomorrow. It's on autopilot. Case in point: this story of a girl robbed of agency was written by a woman.

So this is why we have a book about a post-apocalyptic killing game that spends zero pages describing how Katniss kills anyone but spends countless pages on how she is dressed, how everyone is dressed. What will she wear? What kind of jewelry? Hair up? Will the "sponsors" like her better this way or that? Her chief weapon isn't a bow, it's her appearance.

This is also a good place to observe that the real life, pre-and post movie release controversies about The Hunger Games have also been about physical appearances-- not just race, but is Jennifer Lawrence too tall? Hair too blonde?

That's why The Hunger Games is such a diabolical head fake. Forget about it being entertaining, which I concede it is. It has managed to convince everyone that a passive character whose main strength is that she thinks a lot of thoughts and feels a lot of feelings, but who ultimately lets every decision be made by someone else-- that is a female hero, a winner. You wouldn't allow yourself to like a story where the woman lacks agency, so it's clothed in a vampire story or a female Running Man so it sounds like she's making things happen. Or, if you prefer, in order to allow you to like an anti-feminist story, it is necessary to brand it as a vampire story or a female Running Man. Regardless of how you phrase it, the purpose is to get you to like this kind of a story. It wants you to think this is the next step in female protagonists. But it's a trick: nothing has changed since the royal ball.

That these "adolescent girl" stories-- Twilight and THG-- have women who are essentially lead by men, circumstance, and fate-- whose main executive decision is "do I love this guy or that guy"-- is a window on our culture worth discussing. When you have a daughter, your first question should be, "how is the system going to try to crush her?" and plan accordingly. This story's answer is, "no matter what happens, just talk a lot and it'll sort itself out." That Jezebel is distracted by the racial angle here strikes me as an unconsciously deliberate avoidance of the larger issue. Oh, the audience is racist, that's the problem.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

-----------------

I.   The threat is not that her coach will become a pumpkin. It is "the longer you stay, the more likely you will be detected to be a fraud." This is a critical childhood anxiety (which is why it is in a fairy tale), a narcissistic anxiety, and a feminist anxiety. The only thing she has to offer are her looks, and those are artificial (makeup and clothes) and transient. Eventually, the botox wears off. Tellingly, it cannot occur to Cinderella to even anti-feministly use her boobs to seduce the Prince and then win him over with her charm/grace/personality. Ultimate decision and action is always someone else's (godmother, Prince, etc.)

2. To reinforce this point, consider that "deus ex machina" is translated, "god from the machine" where machine= people who made the story. So not an act of god, but rather the author putting a god into the story to affect things; the important implication is that it is not random but deliberate. So when Katniss's potential victim happens to be wearing body armor, it is not an accident that Katniss couldn't kill him, or dumb luck, it was the deliberate intention of the author not allow Katniss to kill him.

The purpose of deus ex machina in ancient stories was to place the final reconciliation at the spiritual level: God saved you, time to commune. But since Nietzsche said there is no god, "deus ex machina"= man, for the purpose of delivering earthly prizes. This is the essence of the fairy tale-- as magical as they may be, the end result is always an earthly reward (marriage, riches, survival) and never a spiritual one. Hence, fairy tales are vital to the religious and non-religious children alike because they act as a bridge away from spiritual to earthly ("time to grow up")-- the child's imaginary world directed away from more imagination and towards the practical; or, in other terms, away form the Imaginary towards the Symbolic.

3. So if Katniss tries to kill someone, and fails, she has agency; but if I, the reader, can predict that at no point will she actually kill anyone because I can tell the author doesn't want to put her into such a position-- and then she tries to kill someone and "fails", then Katniss lacks agency. Note that the person who is aware that he has free will feels as though he lacks agency ("it doesn't matter what I do") becomes either depressed or paranoid, or both.

4. An interesting exception is hair coloring. The brunette who dyes her hair blonde isn't trying to look Swedish, the point is to make sure everyone knows it's artificial because it's a signal: I don't want blonde hair, I want to be a <>.

5. An example of this and Lacan's partial object is the 40 something woman who looks in the mirror and decides that her entire sexuality is in a single special part of her, say, her butt-- so she diets to make the butt look good at the expense of bony shoulders and a gaunt face. Men sometimes do the same to their spouses, empowering a single body part of hers with all of the sexuality, e.g. looking at the calf or the hip bone doesn't simply remind him of the 20 year old version of his wife, but becomes the fetish that replaces the long gone 20 year old version. But this isn't illusion or delusion, he is not imagining what his wife looked like, the single body part is enough to generate arousal, in the same way that any fetish (specific kind of shoe, or a foot, or a piece of lace) is entirely sufficient. The problem is that this doesn't make the woman look hotter, it replaces the woman, so now neither the 20 year old version nor the 40 year old version are necessary.

The extreme of this logic is in anorexia, where the whole body is sacrificed in order to get "thin"- but because the thinness isn't directed in a body part but in an idea, a feeling, they still wear baggy clothes not to hide their fat but to hide the collateral damage of emaciation to their body which they are completely aware of. They know other people think they're too thin, they know "87 lbs" is a small number, but the anorexic is trying to control an idea. "I can see that my shoulders are sticking out, I know everyone can see my ribs, but yet I know I am horrifically fat." The control, the act of not eating, is the special body part; it is the obsessed-over fetish that exists for its own sake.

Addendum: if you don't know how to read, you should probably click this.

Shame Is The Desired Outcome

2012-03-19T14:24:05Z

do you see?

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Part 1 is here.   If you're from Metafilter, you should probably stop reading now. There are a few articles at McSweeney's I'm sure you'd enjoy.

VIII.

If the movie was a straightforward Hollywood docudrama, you'd never hear about it unless you watch the Lifetime Channel . But-- you heard about it. What did you learn from what you heard?

IX.

One of the big deals of this movie is the NC-17 rating, which you might expect for a movie about sex addiction. Except that there is nothing in this movie that would deserve an NC-17. There is way more nudity and sex in The Hangovers and Brandon's date was never shown with jizz in her hair like Cameron Diaz.

Maybe it was the penis. In an early scene, Brandon walks naked to the toilet. We see him from the living room, bathroom door wide open and back/butt to us, and you can see his penis hanging past his testicles as he is peeing. When he is finished peeing, he then closes the door to take a shower. This scene isn't an accident: it took three takes.

First question: why didn't he pee in the shower like everyone else in NY? Maybe because he's not a pig. Ok, second question: why close the door at all? Or, why not close it for both peeing and showering? In my freshman year of college I lived in a house with both XX and XY and everyone urinated with the door closed; but everyone then opened the door during a shower. Freshmen. The exhibitionism was a deliberate boldness, a dare, wrapped in the hope of sexual maturity that pretended to have forgotten to close the door.   By senior year, however, everyone was showering and urinating with the door open because whatever.

So the answer to why Brandon does it that way is: I don't know. But I know why the movie did this: it wanted to show Brandon's penis in a way that doesn't make the censors go bananas. In a movie about sex, even a showering penis would be too sexual. To unsexualize a penis you have to show it peeing, which is why none of my freshman roommates ever let that happen.

So the movie wants us to see the penis (voyeurism=tickets) as a source of envy-- this is a perfect male specimen-- but they want to make sure you don't get too turned on. But there was a big penis showering itself back in Sex And The City II-- Dante, played by that guy on Dancing With The Stars, and that was five years ago, and only rated R. So now the question is, why is Brandon's penis, even peeing, so much worse than Dante's SATC2 rated R penis?

The answer is: you're supposed to want actor Michael Fassbender's penis, but not character Brandon's penis. "This penis is very bad."

X.

Take a look at Brandon. When media wants to depict a sex addict they depict the wealthy, the good looking, the powerful, the well hung. There are plenty of slimy basement dwelling janitor sex addicts out there, but they are represented as sex offenders. There are also plenty of gay sex addicts out there, but they are represented as gay. Both of you are dismissed, the world has no time for your nonsense. The sex addicts we see in movies and on the news are: rock stars, politicians, sports guys, CEOs. If you think about the demo primed to receive this depiction of lothario as sex addict-- women over 35, i.e. the demo for Shame-- sex addiction needs to be seen as terrible because it is terrible for them. It may also be terrible for the sex addict, but fuck you, we have a society to run.

When you see the word "society" look ahead and to the right, psychiatry is in a window with its scope on you. Sex addiction rarely breaks laws so it can't be punished, and there's no God so the immorality of it is debatable, i.e. inconsequential. It must be a disease, that way other people don't want to catch it. All psychiatric treatment of constructed syndromes isn't about cure but about regression to the mean, where mean= cubicle drone. In other words, the point of offering Priapos treatment isn't that the patient gets better-- no one cares about him-- but that everyone else watching understands what he did is deeply whacked, so don't get any ideas.

When a politician is exposed for enjoying the kind of penetration that society's media arm has always promised is available to all-- self-fulfillment, be yourself, she's an adult and can make her own decisions, as long as it doesn't hurt people it's your choice!-- what other prohibition does society have against him? Shame, aka psychiatric illness, that's it. You can't tell him it's "wrong" to do what you've encouraged him and everyone else to do for three decades, which is why stupid people quickly turn to the default: "well, he lied about it under oath!"   Oh, so that's what makes him a sociopath.

And maybe you're a boring non-sex addicted male with a wife, two kids and a longing for a Chevy F10 Blazer so you don't buy this sex addiction gimmick, "come on, that's just an excuse!" and in that complaint you've met them halfway-- the debate is about that guy, is he or isn't he, and not about the existence of sex addiction.   The system is perfectly happy to give Tiger Woods a doctor's note if he's willing to appear on TV saying he has a doctor's note. Saying Tiger isn't a sex addict means that there are sex addicts, and so you should start wondering whether your woman is wondering if you are one. Better erase your cache.

the condom is there to remind you that it's not about poor judgment

When you make behaviors a disease, individuals lose and systems win, this is always true, they benefit in still being able to call something "shameful" without needing to take any responsibility for its creation. You'll see this in surprising places, for example organized religion. You would think the church has a ready condemnation for too much casual sex yet it still calls it an addiction, not because millennia old religions are progressive but because if sex addiction is a disease then it can strike anyone, and that it seems to be particularly prevalent among deeply religious people from bin Laden to all of Utah, well, that's just the bad luck of DNA, there's nothing about religious institutions that both draw, and create, that pathology. And so you are free to speculate if the vow of celibacy has anything to do attracting the kinds of genetically predisposed sexual ~~deviants~~ disorder patients who would never be able to plug into the system normally on their own, but don't you dare wonder if it is significant that so many Catholic priest molestations occurred not in a hotel or a van or a Dunkin Donuts but inside the church itself, no one is to ask whether the setting and the costumes were not incidental but integral to the satisfaction. And even as I write this I shudder at the possible significance of it. No. Biology and Jesus have no time for Freud's lies. See you in church.

The point here is not to be anti-religion, nor to claim that people who feel shame (not guilt) and disgust after their sexual experiences are not suffering. The point is to reveal that any individual's suffering is secretly nurtured to maintain the integrity of the larger system. You're expendable. Eat it.

XI.

The point of treatments of "shameful" behaviors isn't to help you (though it might), but to give the system the right to decide what's pathology and what isn't. "It's based on internal suffering." No. No it isn't. When they screen you for alcoholism they ask you about guilt, when they screen you for sex addiction they ask about shame. Do you know why? Because it's not based on internal suffering.

Here's a backwards example: Tucker Max. His most recent book has more sex in one chapter than all of Shame. The problem is he seems to enjoy it. Is he a sex addict? Not yet, but he damn well better be.

the other Radiation King

Right off, Tucker Max, and Brandon, represents a problem for society: Tucker is a reasonably attractive male with a law degree and money who has not only not plugged into the system as required, he's circumvented it for his own purposes-- and then publicizes it. If he was an overweight cart fetcher at the A&P with a cleft palate and a strabismus his sexual exploits would conceivably be even more amazing, but no one would care because the threat to society (as distinct from his entertainment value) would be nil. This is also why no one's made a movie about TyJeezey and the 500 baby mommas he's slept with. TyJeezey and Cart Fetcher aren't relevant to society-- people like them passing on matrimony and Rocking The Vote would be a miniscule problem easily handled by giving them SSI. Ta da, now you're invisible. But Tucker Max can't be fired, and unless people stop buying his books he won't become invisible. If more people like Tucker-- e.g. educated, attractive, wealthy, and public-- opt out, the whole thing falls apart.

The typical way sex addiction is packaged by the media is to show all the harm that comes from it, i.e. self-loathing, i.e. AIDS, i.e. divorces, i.e. suicide, i.e. murder, i.e. heroin, i.e Shame. Unfortunately for the system, the Tucker Max Trilogy doesn't involve any of these, but the narrative desperately awaits them, wants them, which is why you can be certain that if his fall ever comes, no matter how it comes, it will make it to the front page of Gawker. Then he could be a sex addict (or bipolar, or etc); but without the fall, he cannot be a sex addict or bipolar or etc. So while America waits for the rape charges or the racist voice mails to his Russian girlfriend, on to plan B.

Plan B is: instead of shaming him, shame you.

If his only audience was college men no one would have a problem with him because then he could be dismissed as wishful thinking, i.e. what keeps the college boys from following his lead is the implicit criticism that if you like Tucker Max, you must be a loser who can't get girls, or a rapist (reinforced by e.g. a story that is entirely about Tucker Max yet has nothing to do with him at all.) Unless your identity is already well established, known, you can't risk someone "misinterpreting" your liking him, so people try to put some distance between them, which is why every time someone writes anything positive about Tucker Max there's a disclaimer: "love him or hate him..." "he's a rude, disgusting misogynist, but..."

That's the trick of Shame. "He's an attractive, wealthy, guy with a big penis (did you see it, ladies?) but he's not using it properly..." Brandon's sex addiction makes him very un-desirable, no one watches Shame and says, "wow, I want to be Brandon" and no woman says, "wow, I want to be with Brandon." The opposite is true for Tucker Max, who is popular with women, especially the very women that he "degrades." Now what does the system do?

There's only one thing it can do: say that these women don't know better, that they're broken women from broken homes... that they're not real women. Note that if this were true you'd think someone would want to help them, educate them, elevate them, but it doesn't want to "treat" them, it only wants to "diagnose" them as a warning for everyone else. In other words, the system sacrifices them. They're expendable. Eat it.

The sad paradox of this system is that on the one hand it hates Tucker Max et al for how they degrade women, but on the other hand hates those very women even more for liking him. He's a human you hate, but you hate them as a group. Surprise: your misogyny > his misogyny. You should hang that above your bed, especially if you are a woman.

I will delicately avoid all jargon: this is understood as a) defining yourself based on who you hate ("I'm not like those sluts"); and b) secretly believing that only you have-- deserve-- free will, other people (Tucker Max, the women who like Tucker Max) are just too dumb to handle it. I could say that that a) and b) are causes of totalitarianism or characteristics of narcissism, but it's more useful to say that a) and b) are why you are not happy, and it's more useful because that's the only thing you really care about anyway.

X.

Back to Brandon. What Brandon doesn't realize is that his movie is inseparable from the commentary that comes with it, it relies on it. In fact, the movie itself is less relevant than the commentary, the movie is an excuse for the commentary. You lose or gain nothing by knowing that Tree Of Life's brother committed suicide when he was 19, but it is absolutely vital that you-- you who saw it and especially you who didn't-- know that Brandon is a "sex addict", i.e. bad, i.e. not the system's fault for demanding you consume but only the right amount, i.e. don't get any ideas.

If you weren't told he was a sex addict, what would you have thought Brandon's problem was? That he was mean; that he may have had sex with his sister; that he was cold, distant, and infinitely narcissistic; that he watches cartoons; that he had a crazy sister. You would have looked at the sex as a convenient way of escaping those things, as a consequence of those things, and maybe you would have lingered long enough on his furtive attempt at a normal relationship to ask whether the pathology wasn't there and not 15 minutes later with the hooker. But you were told you were seeing a movie about sex addiction, of how sex addiction destroys your life, so the Marianne debacle and the cartoon watching was to be understood as a consequence of that addiction. But "sex addiction" wasn't what wrecked his life at all. Do you believe if he refrains from porn he will be happy?

To make sure you never consider this, they tell you upfront the context in which you are to understand this movie, even and especially if you never actually watch it. Fortunately for Brandon he's just a fictional character and doesn't care about being used as means of social control. He's expendable, but, let's not forget, so are you. Eat it.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

Shame

2012-03-12T15:45:52Z

abre los ojos

]]> Shame is a movie that if you haven't seen by now, you won't, but for damn sure don't attempt to watch it on a flight to Chicago. What you've probably heard is that it is a bleak but honest movie about sex addiction and maybe about incest, full of nudity and uncircumcised penis dangling deliciously between some toned Irish Catholic's legs as he urinates. Sound like something you want to see? Hold that thought.

How do you feel after three hours on the Pornotron? You're able to focus on the math homework afterwards, ok, but at the very instant a blast of semen hits you in the neck your first thought is, "Jesus, I need to kill myself."

That thought-- that instant-- is what the sex addict feels all the time. The question is not why does he feel that-- shame is what you're supposed to feel after anything that involves Craigslist. The question is why it doesn't make him stop.

II.

If you want to understand a behavioral disorder, watch the behavior.

One common explanation sex addicts offer is that it is the novelty that they crave, and when enough people with pathology agree on something you can pretty much guarantee that that agreement is part of the pathology, i.e. an unconscious defense. Sorry artists, broken people aren't given greater insight as a consolation prize. The novelty is in fact trivial: yes, different partners, but the same kinds of sex, with the same kinds of people, in the same places, in the same ways, bolstered by the same kinds of porn.   Repetition compulsion masquerading as novelty seeking. "You don't understand," says the analogous alcoholic, "I'm always looking for new drinks."

The important point is that in sex addiction the addict is not satisfied by the sex he just had because he is self-consciously aware that something unidentified is missing, and that lack leaves the orgasmer with an abundance of disgust and shame. Just went from being a made up disease to a typical Friday night. Right ladies?

This is something the movie does depict very accurately: after Brandon has some sex, he then immediately has some other kind of sex. This isn't an overactive sex drive, it is trying to get the sex right.   That's the dialectic. After he has a quickie with a hottie, he goes home and masturbates. He climaxed with her, he was done, but it didn't take. It is easier to get it right with masturbation, not because the hand knows better than the vagina/mouth/butt/breast but because there are always micro-corrections to the fantasy happening in real time-- so the movie you're shooting in your head has a woman fellating a guy, but then she gives a certain look, and then you make her repeat a half-second of that scene using a different look, then you reverse time by two seconds and make her phone her husband; then that disappears and they're outside on the deck, and it's not her but another woman, now it's a whole other scenario with a different cast, and an instant later back to her again; and impossibly seeing the scene from all possible sides, distances, perspectives-- nudging it this way and that to suit that instant's arousal. In effect, you are not watching a movie but improvising from a melody, or, in more psychoanalytic terms, playing with yourself.

III.

There's a possible incest subtext between Brandon and his sister Sissy.

If you can't see it, it's in the back: they're watching cartoons.

But if you are looking for a hard link between incest and his sex addiction you are wasting your time, there's no answer because it isn't the point of the movie.

Take the unexplained backstory as a placeholder: X happened to these characters in the past, and now they're here; where X= incest, child abuse, murder, cannibalism, school shooting, war...

So the movie inadvertently makes an important point about your life: yes, that does sound terrible, but now what?

IV.

I'm going to offer an interpretation. It won't matter whether this interpretation is correct-- none of this actually happened, after all. The point is to ask why no one else thought of this interpretation that, once you read it, will seem to you an obvious one. Here we go.

The key to understanding Brandon's problem is not just to look at the sex he pursues, but also his attempt at having a normal relationship. That's behavior, too, right?

For the first half of the movie he's rubbing his penis against anything sufficiently (com)pliant, and then he's disgusted with his life and decides he needs to become a normal person. This is your American Psycho/Matrix moment: he knows he's whacked, and he knows what normal looks like-- he can fake it-- but he can't feel it inside. What to do? Patrick Bateman created an alternate universe and then gets confused which one is real-- he becomes psychotic. Brandon tries to create a fake world where he acts like a normal person and substitute it for the real one where he is not: This would be The Baudrillard Matrix. This is why he walks around as one who is in a dream.

See that guy? What he's looking at isn't an elevator door or a floor or a wall, he may as well be seeing cascading green characters. Everything he sees is sex. In the staggered brick pattern of the wall he sees a 69; the rounded elevator button reminds him of a clitoris; a footstep behind him is a woman sneaking out of her husband's bed. These are instantaneous and millisecond association flashes that happen all the time.

So with that seeing of a world within a world, Brandon decides to try a normal relationship-- go on a date, connect, love. Of course he runs the date like it's a movie scene, does things he assumes normal people do in normal relationships: he asks out a nice girl named Marianne, takes her out to a nice dinner, orders wine, talk about where she's from, etc.

However-- and this is of such importance that no one else has even dared to mention it-- the woman he chose to go on a date with is black. From his job.

Slow down, multicultural lemmings, this isn't some dumb TV commercial with a blacks/asians/whites all inexplicably smiling about a shared taste in fast food. This guy is a porn addict: all day, every day, constantly, he micro-scrutinizes every aspect of sexuality to find just the thing that will get him off, and he chose to find love with a black woman.

"Well, she seemed nice, so he asked her out."   So run it the other way: Brandon picks up one night stands in bars, ok, but it's not Mos Eisley, those are nice bars, which means the women he meets there are probably nice, ordinary people. People he could fall in love with if he chose to. So Brandon could have attempted a relationship with the hot blonde he picked up in Act I that he instead used for a quickie-- that was a decision he made.

Right?   She looks nice enough. The law does not require <> to only be used as sex objects, in most states you are still permitted to love them into their old age. And she was already attracted to him and he to her-- 80% of the way there. So?

Nope, he chose a black woman from Brooklyn. Don't you want to know why? Was this someone he's had his eye on for a while? Someone whose personality he knows fits with his? Shared values, common goals, etc, etc? Again, no, he knew nothing about her. He does a cold approach in the break room.

What's interesting for our culture is that in all the discussion about this film and the nuances of sex addiction, no film critic has wondered about the significance of Marianne's race, maybe because they think its normal and probably because they don't want to be thought of as someone who notices race.

So while everyone pats themselves on the back for their non-judgmental acceptance of the nature of Brandon's addiction-- "it's not immorality, it's a disease"-- they overlook what might be of pivotal significance. "You're a racist!" protests the horrifically bad therapist you should throw your shoe at. "There's nothing wrong with interracial dating!"   I happen to agree, but how do you know Brandon does? Why don't you put down your Mont Blanc and yellow legal pad and ask him?

What drives Brandon is his sexual addiction. So why would we assume Matrix Brandon's pursuit of a girlfriend comes from a different power source than his pursuit of other women? Everything he sees is porn: what is the pornographic significance of black women to white men? Did he pick her because he's MORE sexually attracted to black women, or because he was NOT attracted to black women? Because he thought they were "better" than white chicks? Or because he considered them inferior?

Without understanding that-- without understanding what he sees as a "normal" relationship-- without believing that there is critical information in everything other than his sex addiction-- you inevitably make the wrong interpretation about his sex addiction. For example, the date is awkward but she still goes home with him-- and, surprise, he's impotent. Here's where you're supposed to think, "oh, sex addicts have difficulty with intimacy." WRONG. Maybe he didn't try intimacy and fail. Maybe he did everything he could, upfront, to sabotage his chance for a real relationship. He chose her because he "knew" it would fail, and when it wasn't failing he hit the failsafe: impotence.

I don't mean interracial relationships fail in general, I mean that there is a good chance this character would have diminished expectations for the relationship he was attempting relative to other women, which is why he attempted it. Just to be sure, he tells her on the first date he doesn't think there's a point to marriage. Glad we got that out of the way, gives a gal a sense of possibilities.   That's him trying to be normal? No. That's him trying to fail.

Of course this is a movie and of course Brandon didn't pick her, the director picked her. But if you follow this interpretation, then it may be that he picks women he won't get along with to reinforce his belief that he isn't normal-- so that he can just throw himself into his sex addiction. He doesn't want to change.

If this is true, it brings us to a very important conclusion: he was using her.   No, he wasn't going to use her for sex, but he wasn't going to really love her either. He was using her for his identity. Read this again and understand: when he uses the whores and the quickies to get off he feels SHAME, but when he uses a very nice girl with a legitimate interest in him for his pathetic charade at normality, he feels NOTHING for her.   "We're not bad people," his sister Sissy says to him at one point, "we just come from a bad place." God would disagree, but fortunately for you he is dead.

V.

I certainly don't begrudge anyone looking to lay some pipe or a woman looking for a pipelayer, but again, I am neither a film critic nor a therapist, I do not assume normality for you, I let you decide that for yourself. I may secretly believe that harlots and gays go to H-E-double toothpicks, but I do not think harlots and gays can't be happy until then.

However, if you tell me you are unhappy, if you tell me you are all mixed up about the life you are leading, then expect a critique of the life you are leading, not just the pathology you are projecting it all onto. "I'm a sex addict!" says the guy who can't get it up with black chicks.    You picked your life. You may not think you picked it, you may think you were forced into it and inescapably tied to it, but I saw Badlands and I know that every moment is a choice, right up to and including blowing your brains out. So not sleeping with that hill giant is a choice you chose not to make. Saying, "I had no choice," is itself a choice. Your choices may be stupid, but they're still choices. And as all choices in life are ultimately binary, you really have no one else to blame for them but yourself. Flipping a coin should win you happiness 50% of the time. If you're running less than that.................. consider getting a coin. Unless you're one of those double-bind mofos, then the key advice here is to Costanza the situation and do the opposite of every natural impulse you have. NB: same goes for stock trading.

I get that sex addiction looks like fun taken to excess, but a real addict doesn't think any of it is fun, he thinks it's all terrible. So that's where we start: why are you doing terrible things?

"I can't help it, sex is an innate evolutionary drive that I just have set to turbo!" Funny, that. The popular lie nowadays is evolutionary biology, so that a pursuit of beauty is somehow hard wired, evolutionary, but curiously no one can explain why it's hard wired towards 36-24-32 and not the 36-37-38 lassies in the Yoruba tribe. (They like it from behind.) Oh, maybe natural selection is rendering American white humans more sexually perfect, a process accelerated by their below replacement level fertility. Or maybe not. Beauty is a social construction. I'm all in, but it is a construction nevertheless. The reason I think women are hot today is that they are today, not that they are hot. I watch pornos from the seventies and I think to myself, "well, it would be better than bestiality, I guess." Everyone from the cast of Shampoo to the special guest stars on The Love Boat make me want to be a promisekeeper, meanwhile Wilt Chamberlain had sex with 10000 of these gorgons. Get it? It's a calendar problem, not an aesthetics problem. So when you say you're addicted to "sex" or porn, you're actually addicted to the work product of a Madison Avenue brainstorm run by guys whose names are initials. "Quick, call J.T., the rubes'll eat this up!" Still feel ashamed? Yeah, you should. I do.

VI.

The problem with sex addiction, unlike the other addictions, it is always framed as harm to you. No one uses the actual consequences as a reason to stop. Be careful: yes, you get to feel "shame", but the real problem with sex addiction isn't that it destroys your life but that it destroys everyone else's life. No wife has ever questioned her self-worth, let alone killed herself, because she found a vodka bottle in the back of a toilet.   Try and "admit you have a problem"-- this problem-- to your daughter, and see how fast she gets a neck tattoo. And the risk of sex addiction isn't that you contract a disease, the risk is that you spread the disease. How can you stand there and pretend that any of your hundreds of partners are more likely to be infected than you?

Brandon is toxic death, he just cleans up well. Hookers have the savvy to resist him-- after sex, he asks a pro, "can I get you anything? A drink?" and she just smirks and dismisses him. But what defense does Marianne have? Imagine he married Marianne: why did he do this? He wants a normal life with a wife, super, but he's not willing to give up his reckless sexual pursuits. Is that fair? The analogy to Patrick Bateman is worse than you think: Bateman only imagined he was killing people. Brandon simply doesn't care if he's killing anyone.

The incomprehensible thing about Brandon's pathology is that there doesn't need to be anything wrong with him for him to be addicted. He might have a history of childhood abuse, of course, but he may just as well have not.

Brandon has a very specific problem, and it is not sex: freedom.

In order to get sexual satisfaction from anything, that thing has to be unattainable, or at the very least it must come with rules. You can get release and pleasure from the attainable, but not satisfaction. There has to be a limit, a line, which defines a transgression which then allows you to bump up against it-- and be satisfied. In America, almost anything you can imagine is sexually permitted even as limits to "appropriate sexuality" are everywhere. The awareness of the ubiquity of Photoshop on models serves this same frustrating purpose: this super hot woman that I take for granted that I get to see almost naked for no good reason isn't actually her-- the real her is hidden beneath Photoshop. She is still a mystery. So the Photoshop enhancement only temporarily heightens the sexual interest-- which is why it is paired with products to buy now; the real satisfaction has to be attained elsewhere-- the Photoshopped model triggers a desire to look for satisfaction elsewhere-- e.g. the products, alternatively other women, porn, etc. Similarly, while porn actresses are hotter than ever, three hours in all you want is amateurs. Nasty.

Brandon knows he can get any kind of sex any time he wants, so it always fails. Not sometimes. Always. Watch the movie. But he keeps trying, in the same ways, over and over.   He also tries to simulate the perfect sexual experience, copy what looks like works. He walks by a couple having sex in a hotel window, so he then rents a room in that same hotel and has sex with a prostitute in the window in the exact same manner. Does it take? Of course not-- it was too easy. When you sign a contract with narcissism there's a clause you should pay attention to: if it's easy, it doesn't count.

If you are a product of your behavior, start wearing a watch again to discover who you actually are. If the sex addict gets a watch, hell, gets a calendar, what he will discover is that he has practiced no other skill more diligently than pursuing empty sex that he knows is unsatisfying to him. That's what he's spent the most time on, that's what he knows how to do the best. Better than driving, better than speaking, better than Xbox-- he has that mindset down to a reflex. So why would you expect he'd use any other technique for any other life problems that come up? If all you are is an expert hammerer, everything gets hammered.

The solution to your problem-- and of course only 0.3% of you are true sex addicts, so I am now talking to those who feel a little ashamed at how much porn they use or about the ringwraiths they've bedded-- is not to refrain-- you can't resist your desires forever. You must practice a new skill, you must become the kind of person who wouldn't turn to porn when they are: lonely; horny; boredy. If you practice a new skill enough times, it will become ~~second~~ first nature, and you will be a different person. Please note that it is that last part, not the giving up of porn, that makes the change difficult. Giving up porn is easy squeezy. Becoming the kind of person who doesn't need to use porn on Thursdays at 11:30p because that's when you have a few hours free is hard.

I'm supposed to say porn is bad for you and you shouldn't start, but too late. And masturbating without porn is probably good practice for your brain, which is odd to say but in today's world anything that requires more than 15 minutes of focused concentration is technically Olympic training.

But the practical thing people do wrong with porn is put it in the Matrix: pretend to themselves it's bad, pretend it's not something they do, yet spend tons of time on it. So it drags on for hours. Accept it and lock it down to a specific length of time. You won't feel nearly as ashamed.

Wait, were we talking about Brandon not wanting intimacy?

VII.

There is a single remarkable insight in Shame, unfortunately buried in the midst of all the penis and vagina. The movie is called Shame, but there is a crucial instance of guilt: when his sister attempts suicide. (She survives.)

For a man who didn't notice he was dating a black woman, he is remarkably attentive in other ways; he walks onto a subway platform where police have blocked off a scene and magically he knows his sister has slit her wrists back in his apartment.

How did he know? Because he feels guilty, and guilt is omniscient. You know it's guilt because no one else would blame him for what she did, and yet he knows with total certainty that it was his fault, even though it wasn't. Yet he knows it was.

What he is actually feeling guilty about isn't that he wasn't there for his sister-- that's too easy to get out of-- but that his commitment to his own life made him not be there for his sister. Anyone who has ever lost someone to suicide knows this feeling, and everyone else does not. The guilt, re-framed relentlessly, over the rest of your life: if I hadn't been so into my work; if I hadn't been so wrapped up in tennis; if I hadn't been cheating on my wife; if I hadn't been so religious; if I hadn't watched TV every night and instead devoted that time to him; if I X, if I hadn't Y.

The truth is there is no real answer there, because when you hit the bottom of that devotional cycle you wind back up the other way: maybe if I had given him more space, if I had given him more time alone, if I hadn't forced him to spend so much time with the family, if I had worked longer hours to teach him that life is work, or X...

The only thing I've ever found that works, in the absence of a God who can forgive you, is to understand your guilt as not coming from the failing but generated by you as self-punishment, so that you can go on with the rest of your life. Have you suffered enough today? Then go have a Reuben, they're tasty. You've earned it.

The guilt always stays with you. Always. It never goes away. Never. I'm of course not saying you deserve it, but I know it is your inevitable tormentor. So either you reach some kind of stalemate with it or it beats you down. That stalemate is sublimation.

In Brandon's case it is that guilt which motivates him to try and change his life, so when he sees the married woman from Act I again on the subway he doesn't get up to flirt with her. He lets her go, he has decided to be the kind of person who sublimates his sex drive to devote more attention to his whacky sister,. To being a better person.

That's one interpretation, anyway, but I am telling you now, it is the only one that will save you.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

The Father That Shot His Daughter's Computer

2012-02-22T15:25:10Z

it succeeded

]]>

I. "I'd love for you to write about the dad who shot his daughter's computer because she posted something nasty on Facebook. "

This one's easy. He's insane. How do you work in IT but it takes you hours, let alone hundreds of dollars, to upgrade a laptop? Doesn't he know you just pick up an unattended one at Starbucks? I got a MacBook Pro with a OccupyMyPants bumber sticker on it. Sweet.

He's the Dad, he's held to a higher standard. What was his intention? To change her behavior? But there were a million ways he could have done this, including reading that letter and shooting that laptop in front of her and not in front of other people. Would he have dared? But the very point of the operation was the video.

The mistake is thinking that he was trying to shame her into improving. That never works, it simply reinforces that outward appearances matter more than what's true, which not coincidentally is the very purpose of facebook.

But never mind that, look carefully at what Cat-5 Tex revealed about her that was so shameful: nothing. She never appeared in the video. Her terrible facebook post that he read was already on facebook for all to see, we learned nothing new about her, all the information we learned was about him. He was repairing his own image as the kind of father who'd have the kind of daughter who'd do this-- this being not her goddam behavior (after all, he had lived with her and her goddam behavior a goodly number of years without incident) but her publicizing her behavior. He was shamed not by her behavior but Facebook revealing it, which is why Facebook had to die. If he was Muslim they'd have called it an honor killing.

Is she going to change? Not likely, and it's not evident what about her needs to change except her address. No, I don't mean she has to flee, I mean she has to grow up, so does he, both of the dummies involved violated one of the cardinal rules of family: don't disparage someone in the family to someone outside the family. If you need me to explain this you are a terrible person.

II. Uh oh, why is there a II?

Here is a thought experiment: how would you feel if you found out this video was a hoax?

Why were you so passionate about the video? Now that time's passed, it hardly seems like it was worth the energy. But at the time it was urgent that you expressed either one of the two approved opinions:

"Kids today are so goddam spoiled. When I was their age I had to work, now all they do is play video games..."

Who bought them the video game? What did you think they were going to do with it? Trade it for a calculus tutor?

Who spoils them? Maybe you're not to blame if they turn to meth, but who else could be to blame if they're spoiled?

"The problem with kids today..." Stop right there, I'll finish: is parents today. Parents today suck. I've checked. The Illuminati let me see the CCTV from every American household and in all of them everyone is in separate rooms staring at a glowing lie.

Do you have a child who is like that guy's daughter? Then you're an idiot, not for having such a child but for diverting energy to support of that guy, in the same way that the reason your wife left you is the porn. It's not the from-behind action, it's the neglect. I know you are not going to believe this, but the reason your child is trouble is that you support that man. "I don't understand kids today." Tell me if I'm close: "You need to study to go to college, major in business, get a job working for a salary and if something goes wrong let the government you hate so much cover your medical, disability, and retirement needs. Saturdays are for yard work. Sundays are for church and football." Sound right? Kinda surprising that they'd want a different future, and that's why your kid smokes weed but calls it pot.

"That father is a narcissistic jerk!"

Why so serious? Think about how little rage you feel for the 99% prevalence of incest in an inner city. Let me check your facebook, see if that sexual abuse didn't prompt an all caps comment. Hmm. No. "I'm not that angry about the dad..." Rage isn't about quantity, but about certainty.

"So I can't have an opinion about this?" Of course you can, there's value in that and you've discussed this video with lots of people, I'm sure. Did you discuss this with your parents or your kid? That should have been your first thought. Did you sit your Dad or your Mom or your 15 year old down and say, "I'm going to show you something and I want you to honestly tell me your thoughts, random, unfiltered, and I swear to you I will treat you like a human being and listen and not get defensive and angry like I always do every time we talk about something that reveals you to be something other than what I see in you." Because that would be an illuminating conversation.

This is the point: it didn't occur to you to do this. It occurred to you to voice your opinion publicly to anonymous strangers, but not directly to people that matter. That's what you've been trained to do, that's where your priorities have been taught to be. That's the Matrix. You're not thinking about your child's development, you're being tricked into thinking about your identity while the system uses you as a battery. No Red Pill for you. And no Red Pill for your kids, either.

III.

How do you think you came across this enraging video of a red state psychopath with a .45 and .NET certification? If you're watching it, it's for you.

How do you think you found this video of a decent Father resisting the AP Obama Studies his disrespectful daughter learned in those liberal public schools? If you're watching it, it's for you.

It's not completely your fault. The system is much bigger than you, it is a spirit; and you think you stand defensively because you were taught to think that the deep insight is that it's selling to you, telling you what to love or what to hate when it is actually telling you how to love and how to hate, not what to be but how to be. It nudges you towards the binary extremes so it is easier to control you. It wants you to have opinions, it wants you to "pick sides", "get involved", "take a stand." It doesn't want you to be indifferent, it wants you to love or to hate, rage or lust, so you feel alive-- but always your strongest passions focused on the irrelevant. "That Dad is awesome!" Then you'll vote Romney and the system has won, not because it wants Romney but because it wants to minimize your political involvement to voting. That shows you care; and if you really care you'd vote in local elections, too; and for the really active among you, why not donate your time to the campaigns? Grass roots! But the only thing that comes from grass roots is grass, and it doesn't really need your help. It just needs you not to have the time to consider planting something else.

-------------

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

"My fiancee is pushing me away and I've lost hope"

2012-02-10T15:20:35Z

my advice can't be worse than his

]]> Ask Metafilter question, and my reply. Maybe it will do someone else some good.

If you've already read it there, skip to IV, for what I could not include there.

My fiancee and I (both 23) have been together for just over 5 years and living together for the past 3. There have been ups and downs during that time, including a month-long break up about 2 years ago, but I love her and want to spend the rest of my life with her. She had a rough childhood (alcoholic father who left) and I think that this is negatively affecting our relationship and her self-image.

I had a female best friend from high school, who I knew before I met my fiancée, but I have largely given up this relationship because my then-girlfriend was jealous. It was a slow and ugly process and since then my fiancée has thought that I could and should find someone better suited to me than she herself is. I have tried my best to quell her insecurities, but they have been around for most of our relationship.

I proposed about a year ago and she said yes. Things seemed to be going well, but a few months later there was a conflict between my fiancée and sister at a wedding planning convention. I wasn't there, but my sister was apparently late and then didn't stay for very long, which my fiancée and her mother took offence to. Since then there has been tension between my fiancée and sister. This is even more concerning for me, since both of my parents are deceased and my sister is the only immediate family that I have left.

This past September was a terrible month for my fiancée, as her father died and she was laid off from her job. I tried to be as emotionally supportive as I could, but she didn't lean on me as much as I would have expected.

Roughly 2 months ago she started saying that she didn't feel right wearing the ring that I gave her because the diamond that I used is from my mother's wedding ring, and my fiancée thinks that the diamond should stay in the family (sister). I talked to my sister about using the diamond before I got the ring made and she was ok with the plan and the way I see it, once we get married my fiancée will be in the family anyway.

About the same time she told me that she had started taking anti-depressants. She said that she had thought about suicide, but had no immediate plans to do it in the future. I encouraged her to see a therapist, but she only took the pills which were prescribed to her. My fiancée stopped wearing the ring two weeks ago and a few days later she said that she really doesn't want to live anymore and that she has been pushing me away intentionally. I found her a therapist myself this time, and made sure that she went. She said that the therapist was insightful, but it hasn't made her change her mind. She said that she doesn't really want to go again.

We've tried talking about this, but she is emotionally distant and insists that I find another girlfriend so that she can leave me and not be missed. Feeling confused and unsure about what to do, I asked her best friend if she knew what was going on with my fiancée. She told me that she didn't know that my fiancée was thinking about suicide but that she did know that she was having second thoughts about the wedding and that she was stressed out about money.

So here I am. I'm scare and confused. I've tried my best to show my fiancée that I love her and that she deserves to be loved, but she is pushing me away. I'm tired of struggling to keep this relationship going, but now I'm worried that she will hurt herself if we break up. She seems to want to continue our normal day-to-day routine and act like nothing is wrong, but I just can't play this charade.

Any thoughts about this situation are welcome. I'm looking for some outside perspective to help me figure out what to do next. Let me know if I've left out any important details. Thanks.

II.

Here's my reply:

No. Please take this in the spirit it is intended.

You make it sound like your fiancee is suicidal; that you may be the only thing keeping her alive. Most of the Mefites' responses are about her depression. Yet your subtitle is: "My fiancée is pushing me away and after years trying to make things work, I've lost most of my hope."

"This past September was a terrible month for my fiancée, as her father died and she was laid off from her job. I tried to be as emotionally supportive as I could, but she didn't lean on me as much as I would have expected."

Her father dies, and what your radar detects that is amiss is how she treats you.

Do you think you know her better than anyone? I think you believe other people have more facts about her, but that you can interpret them better than anyone. That's unlikely, but even if it's true then this--

I asked her best friend if she knew what was going on with my fiancée. She told me that she didn't know that my fiancée was thinking about suicide but that she did know that she was having second thoughts about the wedding and that she was stressed out about money.

-- indicates that her best friend's view of the "facts" is that the problem is you/marriage, not suicide. But instead of considering what that might suggest, you move to:

So here I am. I'm scared and confused.

You wrote that you proposed "about a year ago." I wanted to get a sense of where your head was at around that time. Fair guess you got engaged in Feb 2011? At that time, you Asked Metafilter: "The Liberal Education ideal is ruining my life. Please help disabuse me of it."

It started with Mortimer J Adler and his 'How to Read a Book'. I bought it about two years ago, and shortly after that time I became fixated on the idea of getting a liberal education and reading the Great Books.

I also have a tendency to avoid my university studies to look for "something else", some other activity or field of knowledge which will bring satisfaction to my life. I'm not sure if this is strictly procrastination, or if its something more. I started with reading books from Adler's list and other similar lists on the internet... Then I rekindled my learning of French. I've given up on the idea of learning to play an instrument, but I feel like I ought to, and I occasionally browse the web for pianos and piano lessons.

This much I could handle reasonably well, but then I found the The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar. ...I've downloaded most of the courses that I could find through torrents, and have since been listening to the lectures for an average of 20 hours each week for the past 7 months.

I also need to find a job as my savings have nearly run dry.

I'm guessing I have a combination of an inferiority complex, a habit of procrastination, and a tad of neuroticism thrown in for good measure.

Somewhere around this point you asked a woman, "honey, will you marry me?"

And this is worth asking: what does it mean when a college student turns to the Teaching Company for a liberal education? College has failed you. Demand your money back. But you didn't really want a liberal education, you wanted to be... smarter.

A month later you Asked: "How can I feel good about finding a job and starting a career?" Not how can you get a career-- how can you feel good about it?

I'm an economics major who doesn't know what the hell he is going to do for a career after graduating, and frankly doesn't feel qualified to do very much. I went into university thinking that I would try for medical school, but I was one of those kids in high school who got good grades without trying very hard, and my nearly non-existent study habits have left me with a C average, although even that has been slipping lately. Now that I'm nearing the end of my academic career, I'm starting to freak out about my career potential, and the related anxiety has me neglecting school work even further.

Last year in a labour economics class, my prof stated that first jobs after college correlate with lifetime earnings. This has also added to my worrying, and I have been putting off getting a much needed part time job (partly) because of it.

The future is indeed terrifyingly unknowable when you can't even focus on the present.

III.

I go through all this not to embarrass you or criticize you but to show you two things: your life around this time is marked by ambivalence, anxiety, uncertainty, yet you decide to get married. But of course it makes sense that you would try to lock down at least one aspect of your life. You chose marriage-- which is typically what girls do when they're looking to be taken care of, to be defined by someone else. Right?

But what if she's as ambivalent as you about the future, but she wants something else (other than marriage) to lock down? Now a marriage is one more burden of uncertainty she has to carry around with her.

The second thing all this shows you is what your words reveal: that you are intelligent, interested, eclectic, hungry-- AND you are very conflicted, ambivalent, and uncertain. These aren't psychoanlayses, these are explicitly your words. This is the message you want people to hear. If I can see all this just from Metafilter posts alone, it is absolutely certain that your fiancee knows it. Maybe she senses that you're grasping on to her because she's an anchor, and she doesn't want to be an anchor, she needs an anchor. Most women don't want to be responsible for their man's stability, and she sounds like she wants some attention all for herself, of her own. Maybe she doesn't want to be married, maybe she's depressed, maybe she...

...regardless of the reason, she needs to get help, a therapist, and you need to get focused and NOT a therapist. Your problem is not unique: too much freedom. If you were stupid you could plug into the system easy, one talent= one job. But for you there are too many possibilities.

Your parents being deceased, being in college, being smart... that's the ether in which a naturally worried, "is this good enough?" young man finds himself. The mistake many with that problem make is thinking that the problem is "themselves" and they need more introspection, or more insight, or more "brain hacks." You need less of those things. What you need are goals with concrete steps that you force yourself to boringly take.

So I think your relationship will end, hopefully you'll both be strong enough and mature enough to do it without drama and the stickiness that accompanies furtive attempts at breaking up (this is your third time?) I'm sorry for you, these things are inconsolably painful for a while. But whatever happens, your future happiness is entirely related to your ability to impose your own limits on your freedom. The time has come to not be everything you want to be, but to be one thing you've wanted to be.

I may as well tell you that once you've chosen a specific goal, and begin to legitimately work towards it, you may then find a different path suits you better; but that kind of insight is only possible after activity, after doing. Less thinking, more doing.

Good luck. I hope it works out well for you.

IV.

That was what I posted at that time.

But what I did not put in that post, the thing that I deliberately withheld because I didn't want it to get lost in all the other words; because it is the most important thing, and the thing most likely to be denied-- is that this guy chose that girl on purpose, for the purpose of maintaining his ambivalent world so no concrete decisions need to be made. Concrete=loss of potentialities= no thanks. Math and graduating is very forward looking; it's much easier to say, "can't study now, my girlfriend needs me, she's in pain." I'd bet it makes him feel like a good person, too, all that sacrifice, just for her.

I doubt very much if he truly believed she was going to say yes. Her friends didn't think she'd say yes, apparently. The point was not really to get married, the point was to create a dramatic event upon which to focus energy and thus delay any kind of physical forward motion. By engaging in conflict that is impossible to resolve.

This is why I say he chose her to get rejected; to get jealous; to get sad over; to obsess over. And then to recruit the rest of his world into this problem. Nothing matters more than ego integrity; nothing matters more than the status quo. Do you see?

All of that is unconscious, and as soon as I say that word a specific group of people goes bananas. No one likes to think they're not in control of their own lives, that they're saddled with an Abusive Boyfriend that wants nothing to change; but if they are in control, why are they anxious all the time? Why so little progress despite resources, opportunities, and freedom? If they're in control of their own lives, why do they all dress alike?

If you're in control, why do these relationships happen to you? Isn't it more likely you chose them?

Others/the same people will take issue with my derision of introspection, because they believe it to be a Socratic ideal. I'm not against introspection, I am against masturbation. I'm against edging. The critic wants to be able to contemplate, to go to therapy and discuss and introspect and what he will do there is talk about himself, think about himself, identify patterns in his life, things that have held him back-- and nothing will change. So then he will tell me that he has "a really good therapist, she really pushes me!"

The therapy becomes an elaborate narcissistic defense, the promise and appearance of progress while protecting an at best artificial and at worst non-existent identity. "I want to learn why I am this way." Then what? Will learning why you made those choices be what changes your choices? You're still eating junk food, aren't you? You're eating it while you're learning how bad it is.

"But... why am I this way?" That question is a narcissistic defense. It doesn't want an answer, it wants you to keep asking the question.

"I'm a good person, I just am making bad choices." Wrong. You're not a good person until you make good choices. Until then you are chaos.

And you know it.

----

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

Pedophilia Is Normal, Because Otherwise It's Abnormal

2012-02-07T15:55:29Z

i ain't going out like that

]]>
Hebephilia-- the sexual attraction to post-pubescent children, is currently being proposed for inclusion into the DSM-V. Should it be considered a mental disorder? (This is different than asking if it should be a crime.)

Allen Frances writes that hebephilia shouldn't be in the DSM because hebephilia is normal.

The basic issue is that sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters is not the slightest bit abnormal or unusual. Until recently, the age of consent was age 13 years in most parts of the world (including the United States) and it remains 14 in many places. Evolution has programmed humans to lust for pubescent youngsters--our ancestors did not get to live long enough to have the luxury of delaying reproduction. For hundreds of thousands of years, sex followed closely behind puberty. Only recently has society chosen to protect the moratorium of adolescence and to declare as inappropriate and illegal a sexual interest in the pubescent.

He agrees it should still be a crime:

It is natural and no sign of mental illness to feel sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters. But to act on such impulses is, in our society, a reprehensible crime that deserves severe punishment.

II.

If you're surrounded by carpenters, everything becomes about hammers.

Frances and the debate teams are mostly forensic guys, which means their reading of the true purpose of hebephilia's inclusion in the DSM is for involuntary commitment. If hebephilia is in the DSM, it earns the status of a scientifically accepted diagnosis even if it isn't, and can then be used to justify indefinite commitment.

He's probably right about that.

He's wrong about everything else.

III.

The problem with media is that it tricks you into debating the conclusions while accepting the form of the argument. So you get to ask, "is hebephilia a pathological disorder or is it normal?" so that no one asks the question, why do we now, today, want to have this debate?

Pedophilia and hebephilia have always been considered maybe pathological and maybe not; Psychopathia Sexualis makes clear the distinction of the pedophile who has grown weak of moral character vs. those whose urge towards children is a "pathological perversion" that to him is "quite natural" and is thus "not a criminal, but an irresponsible insane person." The distinction between criminality and pathology has to this point been decided on a case by case basis: "To examine not merely the deed, but the mental condition of the perpetrator."

So why now? The answer is there in Frances's article, the mistake that is in his article: "sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters is not the slightest bit abnormal or unusual." Boy oh boy did you walk into that one.

If you look closely at your calendar, right after the year you will see, in tiny font, that interest in pubescent girls may be normal; but interest in pubescent boys is always and seriously whacked.

Once you "normalize" sexual interest in 14 year old girls, you either normalize the interest in boys or you quietly suggest homosexuality in general is slightly pathological. You can only pick one, and the rest of us have to live with the consequences.

If hebephilia-- all of it-- is pathology, however, you avoid having to make that dicey distinction. Phew. America is safe.

I am not here making a case for what is normal or not; I'm pointing out the very specific societal approval that allows me to keep drooling as long as I say out loud, "son of a gun, Ali Lohan's only 14? She looks so much older!" but forbids me from even putting up a picture of a boy and making any comment-- even if I am gay; even if I am a woman. Go ahead and try it. And what does it mean that society permits a 14 year old boy to choose to be a girl who is [her]self attracted to males, but in theory lacks the maturity/intellect/right to seduce a grown man? It means put a sock in it, wiseguy. We have a society to run.

As evidence for this, Ray Blanchard, the Chair of the Paraphilias Workgroup at the DSM, wrote a 2800 word justification for hebephilia's inclusion in the DSM in which the words "boy" and "girl" appear only once:

In the third place, a distinction between pedophilia and hebephilia on the grounds of reproduction makes no sense when applied to homosexual pedophilia and hebephilia, since neither pubescent nor prepubescent boys can become pregnant. Lastly, there is no evidence that the arrival of menarche abruptly demarcates girls' attractiveness to heterosexual pedophiles vs. hebephiles

How can you have a debate about what is normal and what is pathology and never discuss the gender? He pulls it off. The point here is not science; neither is the point involuntary commitment. The point is to limit the scope of the debate to manageable, politically expedient constructs. Allow the belief that there is something biological behind all this (what the term "pathology" should be understood to connote); while at the same time preserving an illusion of free choice.

In this way, Frances and the DSM workgroup he opposes are actually on the same side: using psychiatry as the battleground for difficult social questions.

IV.

There's a third level to understanding this debate. (But you'll have to wait.)

Another Honor Killing That Isn't About Honor, And Even Less About Nietzsche

2012-02-03T15:07:44Z

what a shame

]]>

KINGSTON, Ontario -- A jury on Sunday found three members of an Afghan family guilty of killing three teenage sisters and another woman in what the judge described as "cold-blooded, shameful murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honor," ending a case that shocked and riveted Canadians.

Another killing that involves the words, "Muslim", "family", "daughters", "honor." And "Canada." Yikes. Do you really need the details? You do if you want to get it right. Otherwise, feel free to call it an honor killing and get booked on the Glenn Beck Show and Al-Jazeera on the same day.

[Canadian] Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father's first wife. [The son] Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.

The trouble is that Hamed watched the accident from inside a Lexus SUV that happened to be pushing the Nissan into the canal. Don't worry, the four women were dead long before they got in the Nissan for their joy ride. The prosecution contends the dad and the son conspired to do this, but of course prosecutors hate men of color.

In order for this to be an honor killing in the traditional sense-- note the words honor and traditional-- the purpose of the killing has to be to remove shame from the family. In this logic, an honor killing is not simply punitive but a selfless act, because it puts the murderer at risk of punishment (and grief) so that his descendants may live with honor. It is for the sons so that they can grow up and marry without carrying the shame of their mother or sister's actions; for the surviving daughters so they won't be thought of as whores like their sister.

So this would make perfect sense:

Prosecutors said the defendants killed the three teenage sisters because they felt they had dishonoured the family by defying its strict rules on dress, dating, socialising and using the internet.

The problem is that this isn't why the women were killed, it is the post-hoc rationalization for why they were killed.

II.

The prosecution said her parents found condoms in [younger daughter] Sahar's room as well as photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. [Youngest daughter] Geeti was skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while declaring to authority figures that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.

The daughters had been dressing western, dating, using the internet and disrespecting their old man [and brother] for a very long time-- across three Western countries-- without ever being murdered, not even once. The father didn't like these things, thought them abhorrent, beat the girls, but did not kill them. During all this, this honorable dad had no problem resigning his son to the fate of "brother of sluts", he wasn't worried his other daughters would be the "sisters of whores"-- or become corrupted themselves; nor did he appear mortally wounded by being the father of harlots.

In other words, this had nothing to do with honor. Why did this murder happen when it did?

III.

First, let's dispense with the religion: "He was not religious as some have said. I never saw him do prayer." You will observe a ubiquitous lack of religiosity in North American "honor killings" up until they are actually committed. Suddenly everyone finds God. That's the history of America: come here for the freedom; stay for the cash; and if things get hairy say only God can judge you.

What's necessary for this kind of a murder isn't a surrounding community that supports honor killings-- where in Canada are they going to live before some Molsen swilling hockey enforcer runs them down?-- but a group of people who validate that some behaviors are shameful; again, even if they abhor honor killings themselves. In other words, someone to crowdsource the superego. "I don't condone what he did, but I understand."

The family had first moved to Australia, where he would not have been able to commit this crime because:

[The father]Shafia did not appreciate the local Afghan women's support group reaching out to his wives.

These Australian Afghan women were supporting the women, not him. His wives were being "seen" by enough people as individuals, more than a reflection on him. So he left. When he got to Canada, he found this:

Despite the overwhelming evidence presented at trial, some in Montreal's Afghan community have trouble accepting that the deaths were murder. "The parents were building a house for the sake of their children. How could they go and kill them?" asked Victoria Jahesh, who works with an Afghan women's group in Montreal.

The key difference is that even while the Canadian group would never condone honor killings, the family is still viewed as his family, the women as his wives, etc. He (to them) remains the main character, it's his movie, everyone else supporting cast. I'm sure the group thought they were supporting the women in various ways, but the manner in which they understood the world-- for brevity let's just call it in this case patriarchal-- reinforced the very problems they thought they were alleviating. "A father loves his daughters," they would say. Yes, that's obvious.

IV.

"There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this," Shafia said on one recording. "Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows ... nothing is more dear to me than my honour."

What could possibly have been so terrible? Such a betrayal? She had already had sex, lots of sex, condoms in her drawer in her parents house sex. Isn't that dishonorable enough?

No. What got her killed was this: she got married.

In the spring of 2009, Mr. Hyderi learned that [oldest daughter] Zainab was to marry her boyfriend [a Pakastani-Canadian]... The marriage to the boyfriend was annulled after one day, and another plan was hatched for Zainab to marry Mr. Hyderi's younger brother. But before that could happen, the Shafias set off on a summer road trip....

You know what happens next.

Marriage is freedom (weird, I know.) Marriage means she belongs to another man, he has no power over her-- unless she marries an approved castmember. And if she gets married to an outsider, then the next thing you know all the daughters get married, and he is left.......

V.

I can understand (read: smell it from a mile away) the motivation of the father for killing his family, but in order for the son to have cooperated with this madness his father must have convinced him that what he was doing was right even though he himself knew it was wrong. From a theological perspective, that sin is worse than murdering his daughters, because he did the "devil's work" and corrupted his son's soul, pretending it was God's will.

When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he meant that God is not necessary for our morality anymore. When he says we killed God, he means that our science, skepticism, education, have pushed us past the point where believing in miracles is possible; but as a consequence of this loss we are lost, have no goals, no aspirations, no values. God was made up, but he gave us a reason to progress.

The resulting nihilism requires us to either despair, return back to medieval religion, or look deeper within us and find a new source of human values.

Yet... none of those things happened.

The post-modern twist is that we didn't kill God after all: we enslaved him. Instead of completely abandoning God or taking a leap of faith back to the "mystery" of God; instead of those opposite choices, God has been kept around as a manservant to the Id. We accept a "morality" exists but secretly retain the right of exception: "yes, but in this case..."

Atheists do this just as much but pretend they also don't believe in "God". "Murder is wrong, but in this case...." But of course they're not referring to the penal code, but to an abstract wrongness that they rationalize as coming from shared collective values or humanist principles or economics or energy or whatever. It's still god, it's a God behind the "God", something bigger, something that preserves the individual's ability to appeal to the symbolic.

"...but in this case..." Those words presuppose an even higher law than the one that says, "thou shalt not." That God-- which isn't a spiritual God at all but a voice in your head-- the one that examines things on a case by case basis, always rules in favor of the individual, which is why he was kept around.

But the crucial mistake is to assume that the retention of this enslaved God is for the purpose of justifying one's behavior, to assuage the superego. That same absolution could have been obtained from a traditional Christianity, "God, I'm sorry I committed adultery, I really enjoyed it and can't undo that, but I am sorry and I'll try not to do it again." Clearly, Christianity hasn't prevented people from acting on their impulses; nor have atheists emptied the Viagra supplies.

The absence of guilt is not the result of the justification, it precedes the justification. Like a dream that incorporates a real life ringing telephone into it seemingly before the phone actually rings, the absence of guilt hastily creates an explanation for its absence that preserves the symbolic morality: I don't feel any guilt...............................

.......because in this case...

VI.

But no one likes to see the consequences of abstract philosophy played out in a submerged Nissan, so I'll just offer you some advice. Rageful narcissists are the most violent not when they are insulted or attacked or hated but when they are abandoned to objective reality, the one that doesn't comply with their mirroring demands. Such a person invariably is backed by an enslaved God, which means all things are possible.

If you do manage to leave, don't look back.

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

What Would You Do If Your Fiance Gave You a Ring That Wasn't Good Enough?

2012-02-01T15:15:04Z

lawyers are standing by

]]>

(Part 1 here)

Oh my God, what's he doing...

"Will you marry me?"

You cover your mouth with your hands. In a microsecond you saw the ring wasn't...

But in this moment you have to follow the script. Action.

INT. RESTAURANT - DINNERTIME.

GUY on one knee. GIRL looks shocked.

GIRL:
Oh my God. I can't believe you did this.

[The silence goes on a bit too long. He widens his eyes as a prompt, subtly motioning to the people watching them.]

GIRL:
Yes!

Around them people in the restaurant clap, say congratulations. Some men smirk knowingly.

GUY gets up off his knee, they kiss. He sits back down.

GIRL:
It's so beautiful. It's so clear. [She holds it towards the light.] How many karats is it? Is it 4?

GUY (off screen):
No, it's only 3.

GIRL:
Wow, it looks so much bigger. How much did this cost you? How did you afford it?

END SCENE

Like any woman wracked by self-doubt, when it feels like a scene you feel compelled to follow the script. No means no, but yes is what it says on the page. Hence yes to the boss's extra work; yes to letting your friend vent on the phone even though you're late; yes to being in a threesome because your boyfriend wanted to.

But later, when you're done shooting for the day and you have a chance to be yourself, you finally say, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way... I really love it... but.... I was kind of hoping for something a little... bigger...."

I.

Cue penis jokes. "She looks down and says, 'I was hoping for something bigger.'" But you wouldn't have said anything if he wasn't walking around like God's gift to women. "Come on, baby, let's get out of here..." Arrogant prick, if this is what's supporting your bragging then your BMW probably means you're living with your parents. Wait-- whose house is this?

III.

I was listening to Cosmo Radio-- research-- and the host, Lea, was of the mindset that a ring is a symbol of what a guy thinks of you, and it's okay for the woman to tell him she wanted something bigger. Patrick disagreed: "it means she's a vapid bitch." I'm paraphrasing. So Lea compromised: "maybe he could get her a pair of earrings, too. Would that be acceptable?" I'm quoting. And Patrick, the co-host, said absolutely, great.

Of course she didn't mean that. If she thinks that the ring is a symbol of what a guy thinks of her, then the small ring is what he thinks of you. Upgrading the ring after the fact won't upgrade his feelings towards you. Which is the problem. Which means Lea took a hypothetical boyfriend who doesn't yet exist and was already covering for him, already making excuses for not getting what she wants. For settling. For him not loving her. Rather than committing to her own maxim-- it's a symbol of love-- she downplays it, letting him off the hook to maintain the appearance that all is well.

Lea was right, he should get her a pair of earrings as well. But not because he doesn't love you, but because you don't.

IV.

Her co-host, Patrick, was vocal about just how much of a bitch such a hypothetical woman is, and linked it to the story of Jessica Biel rejecting Justin Timberlake's ring. His insight was that because Justin had been a voracious cheater in the past, Jessica has him by the balls. The ring isn't a just a symbol of love, but restitution. He didn't say it, but I will: Kobe.

I get that there are cheap and jerky guys out there, the point here is not a critique of the man's logic, the point here is the woman's.

Jessica sounds like she's has Justin whipped-- snap!-- and he has to do whatever she wants to get her back, using his guilt to dominate him. As if anyone ever feels guilt anymore. Boy oh boy could that not be more wrong. Prove to me you love me, says HypoJethica. Prove to me you think I'm worth it. If it sounds bitchy you aren't listening: you prove to me I'm worth it. Give me something you don't give the other girls, can't give the other girls. You, who can get any girl he wants, make me know how valuable I am. Because I don't have any idea, otherwise I wouldn't be shaking you down for a bigger ring and I certainly wouldn't be trying to get you back.

"Jessica Biel? Doubts her worth? Are you insane? She can get any guy she wants!" No she can't, she wants Justin. And he's like, "meh. See you Wednesdays." Oh, HELL NO, you did not just call Jessica Biel weekday pussy. I didn't, but that's the text she got, "not good enough." Where's she heard that before? Oh yeah, everywhere. Sure she was on VH1's "100 Hottest Hotties" but she was number 98 and it was VH1. "But she was #1 in Stuff's '100 Sexiest Women'?" Come on. Hair, makeup, Photoshop, a publicist, it isn't real, it doesn't count. It never counts. Which is why even though her biggest movies are Valentine's Day, The A-Team, and New Year's Eve, none of those films appear in her Wikipedia "Career" blurb. You know what is there? Plays.

New Year's Eve was a vehicle for glamorous actresses to play alongside other starlets, but she sees a cast meeting where all the hotties are sitting around like, "I play the blossoming girl" or "I make out with Ashton Kutcher" or "I wear this Herve Leger dress" and Jessica gets to say, "I play a pregnant girl." Damn, yo. Truth bombs. Sort of puts you in your place. The only thing worse than that for a hot actress is to be cast as the mom of a hot actress.

You wish that you had Jesse's life? Why can't you be a woman like that? Maybe because then your Dad would have to call up this unfaithful and disrespecting boy-man to beg his trifling ass to marry his daughter. "Please! I'll pay for your wedding!" You think any of the other "Sexiest Women In Magazine's" fathers would do this? They'd hire a coupe of Russian guys to disappear him. "But he makes her happy!" I can tell.

Happiness is not the goal, what she's hoping for is affirmation. She wants the kind of guy who is a symbol of the value she thinks she wishes she had. She doesn't really want Justin to get her a bigger ring to show off to her friends: Justin is the ring.

make sure Scarlett sees me

"Is any of this true?" How the hell would I know, Jessica never calls me back. I only know that when you break down the media story of Jessica Biel, this is the narrative that comes out, and it comes out because it's typical of so many women: anything that tells me I'm worth it cannot tell me who I am. Next.

And so happiness is out, the only objective scale you have to measure value is energy and emotion. Is there passion? Is there drama-- of any kind? Can you start a recollection of events with "oh my God!"? If you took all of the world's philosophies and lined them up end to end, you'd stab stoicism in the neck, stay the hell away from me old man. The only time you'll go to a secluded beach is if it's with an inappropriate guy like your boss or your friend's husband or a photographer. "It's complicated." That's a sentence you'll never hear a guy say because no guy would say it, and any guy who would say it could never get close enough to you to hear him. Get thee behind me, wuss boy.

Here's a prediction: they won't last. Hmmm. Maybe the ring wasn't good enough.

V.

I don't know if Lea would reject such a ring or not. Her hypothetical position is that a ring is a symbol and blah blah blah.

She-- you-- aren't asking for a boulder, but it tells you his priorities. Why is it that he can save all year to rent a beach house in the summer? Or for clothes? He spends almost as much on hair products as you do, and half of them are for his back. And now his single fling with frugality is with the lifetime symbol of your love? "You know, diamonds are just a worthless commodity the media has told us are valuable." So are breast implants. Shut it.

It's not about the ring, Alone; but about his willingness to sacrifice his own interests for you. If he drank two fewer beers each night out... is that too much to ask?

You know what else is crazy? He puts it on the card, going into debt. Then you get married and suddenly you're going dutch on your own ring. That's the kind thing that kind of guy would do.

Some girls are going to call you shallow, "it's the man that matters!" But you know that every one of those women's profile pics are of their kids or cats or both.

I hear you telling me that it's not even a symbol as much as a test: does he have the ability to put you first? Can he physically take from his plate and put into yours? Any guy who gives you a small ring is going to get a gentle push back to Tiffany's or a boot to the ass.

The thing is... hypotheticals like this can only be answered because you're controlling for the most important and limitless variable, the other person. When you have a real fiance, who knows what you'd do? Or what he'd do? So the point of these hypotheticals isn't to determine a code of behavior but to broadcast to others something about yourself. "I'm the kind of girl that wouldn't tolerate a guy who can't put me first." But in your own hypothetical, hadn't you already tolerated him for a year?

The kind of man whom you're going to have to nudge towards a bigger ring, to cajole into being more selfless, to whip into settling for you-- is the kind of guy you are hypothetically attracted to. And you know who that kind of guy finds attractive? You. And Jessica Biel.

These hypotheticals are dreams. The lesson isn't what you would do; but how did you construct the fantasy? That tells you who you are, and it's telling you to you think you should leave your Wednesdays free. He might come over.

VI.

"Are you saying I have to settle for a smaller ring?" No girl watching award shows to see what they're wearing but hasn't seen any of the movies and who doesn't read the post before yelling. I'm saying if you refuse a ring from a guy which is less than what you wanted, thinking it's a symbol of his love but hoping it is not a symbol of his love, then the problem isn't the ring, the problem is you.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

What Would You Do If Your Fiancee Rejected The Ring As Not Good Enough?

2012-01-29T05:07:40Z

now let's see what kind of man you are

]]>
She covers her mouth with her hands and looks shocked. Tears. Oh my God. She can't believe you did this. (Yes she can.)   She says yes. (Not like there was any doubt.) The other men in the restaurant join their wives in polite fake applause, albeit less enthusiastically. Congratulations, they say. They don't mean it.

Through dinner she turns her hand every which way. It's so beautiful. It's so clear. How many karats is it, is it ____? and the number she guesses will be off by one. Of course.

How much did this cost you? she eventually asks. Wow. How did you afford it?

Until finally.... It may happen at dinner, or at home, or... She says:

I don't want you to take this the wrong way

I really love it

But

I was kind of hoping for something a little

.... bigger.....

I.

Cue penis jokes: "She looks down and says, 'I was hoping for something bigger.'" Hack. If she cancels the sex because it's not to her standards then she's not just a bitch but a slut, and not just a slut but a psychopath, because she's reduced your existence to a heated dildo, nothing else matters to her because nothing else can matter to her. Sex is mutual masturbation.

II.

Assume this is a hypothetical scenario; i.e. imagine it happening.

The most important question for you, the reader, the one that will tell you the truth about what is happening in the story, is this: what does the hypothetical woman in this story look like?

III.

I was listening to Cosmo Radio-- what? I'm allowed-- and Patrick, the host, is discussing this hypothetical story. He had a strong reaction to it: "you dump that vapid bitch." I'm paraphrasing.

The thing is, this isn't the first time you two have been around each other. You have a prior history, you have had other insights into her character, you already know what kind of a woman she is. Which makes you the type of man that is attracted to the kind of woman who would say that. Uh oh. And guess what type of man that kind of woman is attracted to. You.

Patrick was right, you should dump her. But not because she's shallow, but because you are.

IV.

His co-host, Lea, didn't say much, and I got the strong feeling that she felt, hypothetically, it was totally ok to turn down a ring she didn't think was big enough.

Some women will say the ring is an expression of love, it reveals how much her man thinks she's worth. It shows to what extent he'd be willing to take care of her. What they mean is that the ring is a kind of test of his love: does he love me so much that he's willing to "waste" money, abandon practicality, when it comes to me?

I get that there are more sensible women out there, the point here is not a critique of the woman's logic, the point here is the man's.

The truth is that you knew when you bought it whether the ring was what she wanted. What you were banking on is that she'd accept it anyway. It was a kind of test of her love.

That's why this offer of the less than "perfect" ring that she rejects can be understood to be a defensive maneuver: you don't want to marry her. "You know what, you're absolutely right." Not so fast. I mean you'd be much happier just dating her, living with her, status quo. And you know, if she just waited, someday, someday, someday, you'll be rich; and then you'll buy her a really nice ring.

Yummy. Nothing the kind of woman looking for a perfect ring now wants more than a wait-and-see guy. You're with her (partly) for her looks, yet you expect she'll gamble those looks on a single horse race that starts sometime in 2025. "Don't sweat it, baby, I got a system." Can't wait.

But if your patent/stock/novel/horse comes through and you later do indeed get her that bigger ring, are you going to spend a greater proportion of your wealth on it, or just more money? If not, then you haven't properly understood what that ring represents to her-- crazy or not-- which means that you don't understand her, which means, importantly, that you do not care to try. The point here isn't that she's right, the point is you two are not connected.

Save your money. You'll lose it in the divorce anyway.

V.

I don't know if Lea would reject such a ring or not. Her hypothetical position is that a ring is a symbol and blah blah blah. In real life, she might reject such a ring, or circumstances with her fiance might be that she is perfectly happy with that ring, or any ring, or waiting for a ring, or who knows what, because the difference between what you would do hypothetically and what you would do in real life is the other person.

Hypotheticals like this can only be answered because you're controlling for the most important and limitless variable, the other person. When you have a real fiancee, who knows what you'd do? If you really knew her, the story wouldn't happen. So the point of these hypotheticals isn't to determine a code of behavior but to broadcast to others something about yourself. "I'm the kind of guy that wouldn't tolerate such a gold digging bitch." Oh, you're a Capricorn. But in your own hypothetical, hadn't you already tolerated her for a year? 40% of the time from behind?

In the example above, what did she look like? You imagined her to be hot.....ter than you. You did this because only a really hot chick, a kind of woman, would reject a ring because it wasn't big enough. And in this way you have justified not being with this woman, "a bitch!"-- a woman who doesn't exist but serves a a proxy for a type of woman who also does not exist-- so that you don't have to face rejection. In other words: blame it on the ring.

When the woman in the joke rejected you because of your penis, do you really believe she liked you except for the penis?

These hypotheticals are dreams. The lesson isn't what you would do; but how did you construct the fantasy to allow you to do it? That tells you who you are.

VI.

"Are you saying I have to buy her an expensive ring?" No guy wearing Axe who doesn't read the post before yelling. I'm saying that if you spring a ring on a woman which you already know is less than what she wanted, hoping that she'll be satisfied but not sure if she'll be satisfied, then the problem isn't the ring, the problem is you.

---

Now go here: What Would You Do If Your Fiance Gave You A Ring That Wasn't Good Enough?

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

Is The Cult Of Self-Esteem Ruining Our Kids?

The Effects Of Too Much Porn

------

Notes:

1.

If you want the history of engagement diamonds, Epstein writes the classic. It reveals the extent to which our social constructions are.... constructions. Highlights:

"To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them."

So began engagement rings for the masses. It all started in September of 1938.

The ad agency of N.W. Ayer started "a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign [to] have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries."

...the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love....

Did it work?

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. "Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age," it said. "To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone." The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would "defer the purchase" rather than forgo it.

2.

Off topic, but there's a masturbation competition in the US and Europe, and the world record holder went 9 hours. Yes in fact, he was Japanese.

But the interesting thing about such a competition is that it exists. No shame in masturbating, I guess. "Why should there be? We all do it." My mom doesn't. I'll kill you.

But the lack of shame isn't what's really interesting. What's really interesting is that the purpose of it is to masturbate together. A previously shameful, previously solitary activity now done with other people proximate to you, but no connection is needed or even desired; the only goal is the self-pleasure, with the pretense of the camaraderie if the other skin jobs next to you.

I could say that it's a metaphor for social media, or narcissism, but it isn't a metaphor, it is the inevitable conclusion.

Superman's A Baby, But He's Still Superman

2012-01-26T15:06:33Z

it's so pretty

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The boy is at a kid's birthday party and the kids are 7, and they're bowling because nothing suits 7 year olds better than perfect spheres made of depleted uranium and 45 minutes of waiting your turn.

A girl wearing a tiara bowls a 71. Superman shirt bowls a 76. A future parole violator quits after two gutter balls because this game sucks, an odd assessment since it's his party. His mom is showing another mom texts from a man who is not his dad. The boy bowls a 101. Granted, he double underhanded it the whole time, but so what.

Princess says to the boy, "You won!" The boy tries to suppress a hesitant, humble smile beaming with incredulous pride. Princess gives him a hug and he almost cries.

Superman says, "No you didn't."

"Yes he did," says Princess.

"Yes I did," says the boy.

"No you didn't. You got the highest score, but you didn't win."

I'm not familiar with sports, let alone bowling, so I don't really understand the scoring. Is bowling scored like blackjack, where you can have more points but still lose? Or is bowling pretty much like football, where more points= the other team's cheerleaders? Which would mean either Superman is running a short con or he got into his parents psilocybin.

The boy says some words, but what he says is irrelevant because the boy's parents are less like parents and more like Idiots and Idiocy can overwhelm everything but death, and death can overwhelm everything else but denial. The boy's parents are proud of the boy, they want him to feel good, so they jump in-- you did win! you are the winner! They are patting him on the back for his win, sure, they may suspect it was a fluke (so he crossed the line a little) but self-esteem is what's important here, right, at this age, right? This is a big deal for the boy, he won, f-i-s, come on, let him have his moment. Have some more cake! Have another juice box! Hey, everyone, come give the boy a high-five! Don't pay any attention to Superman, he's just a Greenie Meaneenie Jealous Butt Crybeanie, he doesn't like it when anyone's satisfied.

Yeah, but Superman is telling the Idiots something important. He is telling them that based on his prior history with the boy, based on what he knows of the boy, telling him he didn't win might actually work. He wouldn't have tried this on the Princess, or his parents, or some stranger with a beer gut and an ankle monitor-- no, he tried this on the boy because he had a feeling he would fall for it.

Which means that the correct lesson the boy's parents could have taught him was what it is the boy does to make Superman think he can manipulate him, or even what it is about Superman that makes him act that way; but the one they went with, the one that will make him neurotic for the rest of his life, is that he's a winner.

But he might not be. Not if Superman has anything to say about it.

Couple Reveals Child's Gender Five Years Too Late

2012-01-23T06:31:53Z

oh boy

]]>

A story that defies understanding until you realize... how old the parents are.

It's a boy! And he's five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said.

I'm confused. Is being stereotyped as a boy worse than being stereotyped as a court jester with an extra chromosome? "Wha--! That is so offensive!" Agreed. So why did she do it?

"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?"

On a hunch I checked out her blog to see how opposed she was to slotting people into boxes:

I may be wrong, but this appears to be a woman whose whole life is boxes.

The premise for this unstory is that the parents wanted to prevent any gender stereotyping, so hid the child's gender from everyone to let him [sic] grow unstereotyped.

The problem is that the parents already know the sex. They can't unknow it. They aren't acting from no information, they are acting in reaction to the information. They are saying they are raising him gender neutral, but what they are actually doing, precisely, is choosing not to raise him as a boy.

Sasha's gender was almost revealed when he took to running around their garden naked, but Beck was resolute and encouraged him to play with dolls to hide his masculinity.

Hide it from whom? The kid knows he's a boy. If he wants to play with dolls that's one thing, but evidently the dolls aren't for him, for his benefit, but as a signal to other people.

Not wanting other people to affect his development is fine, but as parents they are the most important influence in his early years, and their chief lesson is that who he is is less relevant than the appearance of who he is. They are telling him reality doesn't exist. Not "boys can do whatever they want" but "pretend you are not a boy."

As a "radical feminist", would she have encouraged the same denial from a daughter?

II.

Here's where things stop being hilarious:

When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son's sex public...

This is an extremely revealing sentence, because it shows the hierarchy of power in this woman's mind: she doesn't believe in God, she can overrule biology; but the school system is inviolable. The school system! What next, a pet store? A pumpkin?

She could have home schooled him; she could have refused to tell the school. But instead, she acquiesced to their demand. There's a very specific reason she did this: she is afraid to break society's rules. That's why she got someone else to be transgressive for her.

She wants to be (thought of as) a progressive, to (appear to) challenge society's rules, but being a coward she instead forces her kid to bear all of the negative consequences of this challenge. Is she wearing a man's suit to work? Has she stopped shaving her legs "to hide her femininity"? Is she willing to risk that someone will punch her in the face at the bus stop? Is she willing to sacrifice her own carefully managed identity "to make people think a bit"?

At the risk of me being the kind of sexist she has parenthetically announced she is against, let me say the father in this story is even worse than she is, because he should know better. If you need me to explain why this is, I can't. Amazon suggests you'd enjoy The Descendants.

III.

This story seems like it is about gender roles but it is actually about the deeper generational pathology that comes out in a million different ways, which are all the same way. This isn't about a progressive way of raising children, this is about the consequences of narcissism.

What drove her to using her child as a you-go-first skydiving partner is the desire to be something coupled with the terror of doing anything-- which results in ambivalence and inertia camouflaged in a consumerist lifestyle full of meaningless choices. This leaves a lot of unused emotional energy left over for me me me. She's had 46 years to obsess over her identity, and this is what she came up with, a hail mary pass in the second half of a mid-life crisis.

According to the astronomical guide Being And Nothingness, infinite freedom is proportional to infinite terror, which is why the infinite universe is filled not with nothing or even magic pixie dust but with dark matter. Boo. You may think you want freedom, but the Cenobites can imagine a whole lot more freedom than you can and are just waiting for you to go first. That existential terror is itself frustrating, it is the point of the terror. That's why if you really want a bonerific sex scene you turn off the internet and put on a horror movie. Good luck trying to masturbate to it, though. Which is why it's so memorably hot.

And so a person who knows not what to do with freedom, a person afraid of power, has a choice: either the transgressions are filtered through a proxy that has proven it can stand it-- modeling your bad ass self after someone already bad ass, or projecting your impulses onto someone else; or you pretend that something else, entirely artificial, is what frustrates you. Knowing where the boundaries are lets you safely pretend to test them. "I'm terrified of sex" becomes "I'm terrified of getting pregnant" becomes "my Dad would kill me if I got pregnant." That's a girl you're guaranteed to get naked every time; but she's given way more blowjobs than she's had orgasms.

This is why I know that while Beck seems like a hippie-atheist-feminist-freethinker, she is undoubtedly a completely ordinary middle class housewife, no different than the Kansas PTA members she would hatefully roll her eyes at for voting Tory instead of Labour. Her life has been marked by nothing eventful, nothing challenging, nothing unusual, nothing difficult, so she will have created drama out of ordinary events in order to self-identify. "Oh, God," she'd say as she parks her Subaru at the Gymboree. "These mums are all so desperately conformist. Marry the father of my child? How utterly bourgeois. Did I mention my child is a court jester?"

IV.

Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl's blouse with his pants.

Everyone slow down. This is no longer a gender-neutral child potentially making his own choices, but a boy dressed like a girl, overtly and on purpose. Beck is raising a transvestite.

If you had asked her if she wanted to raise a transvestite she'd have said no-- she wants a child free of stereotypes-- because there are stereotypes of boys and girls but not of boys who dress like girls. That mixed logic reveals the true intent of her "gender-neutral" project. It isn't for the kid, it is for her. If it wasn't for her, you wouldn't have heard about it. Wasn't the whole point not to call attention to the gender? Oh, I had it backwards, the whole point was entirely to focus on the gender. Sigh. The main character in this story is herself. The kid is supporting cast. He is not a person, he is a blog topic.

Of course she wants the best for him, of course she loves him, I'm not saying she doesn't. Neo loved Trinity, too, but I hope it is not necessary to explain which way the force vectors pointed. The purpose of this game show was to be the parent of such a kid, not to benefit the kid. Amy Chua went on the same game show, but at least in her case the kids won some prizes for coming in second.

Let me repeat an important quote:

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on purpose - played an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter's lover, so that the daughter could drop her, without guilt. The daughter could be furious with her and marry the rich guy. That's a more difficult sacrifice. It's not "I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart." No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

The true temptation of education is how to raise your child by sacrificing your reputation. It's not my son who should admire me as a role model and so on. I'm not saying you should, to be vulgar, masturbate in front of your son in order to appear as an idiot. But, to avoid this trap - the typical pedagogical trap, which is, apparently you want to help your son, but the real goal is to remain the ideal figure for your son - you must sacrifice that.

She is doing the exact opposite: sacrificing her child's reputation, subjecting him to potential ridicule and god knows what else, not for his benefit but in order to promote her own identity. It's not the gender neutrality that's going to mess this kid up, though it might; but being raised by parents who are using their kid as something other than an end in himself. As was said in a movie I hope has no parallel here: this isn't going to have a happy ending.