#3-34
herchez la Femme
“Welcome to Self Reliance For Women Online.
•Take the next step on your personal road to self reliance.
•Energize confident responses to unexpected events.
•Learn alternative life skills.”—Heading of the homepage of Self Reliance For Women Online
“When a newcomer to Al-Anon tells his or her sponsor about the alcoholic conflict in the home, we must realize this is only one side of the story.
At first these reports of our grievances are highly-colored and dramatized by our confusions.... Growth in Al-Anon brings us to compassionate understanding of the alcoholic’s deep guilt and unhappiness. As we apply the program day by day, we become willing to acknowledge that we, too, must share the responsibility for the family troubles.”—One Day At A Time In Al-Anon
nce we stress that the victims of problems take “personal responsibility” for their own welfare, we’d have to tend to give personal responsibility to those who are the most powerless, including women. For centuries, women’s supposed weaknesses have seemed scary for exactly the same reasons that today, the supposed weaknesses of mollycoddles, untermenschen, seem scary. A subchapter in Susan Faludi’s feminist classic Backlash, “STAGE TWO: THERAPY FOR THE OVERLY FEMININE WOMAN,” is about the therapy for codependency. The ideas that she describes there, are typical for victim correction as a panacea, in general. In relationships where one person is clearly the problem, the zeitgeist of the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer is what would determine who is personally responsible for what: “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen.” The more powerless that one is, the more that the slings and arrows of life would have hit her, so the more that she must courageously change and serenely accept.
According to that, if you’re strong then naturally you’d courageously change reality, and if you’re weak then naturally you’d serenely accept reality. If a spouse subjects you to any hardship, sinfulness, etc., you’re to ask only how you could more wisely change what you can, and accept what you can’t. Men would tend to show the sorts of character flaws that could be called übermensch, strong, so we tend to defer to them along the lines of “Oh, well, that’s human nature,” and/or, “We mustn’t try to repress such feelings, or stand in the way of the sort of aggressive spirit that built America. Have a positive attitude, rather than a passive one!” Women would tend to show the sorts of character flaws that could be called untermensch, weak, passive rather than positive, so they’d simply be held in contempt, and simply must stop. Women would tend to be the ones who must change and accept, the problems that the übermenschen had brought about. (Someone has to.) While “cherchez la femme,” look for the woman, had meant to suspect her since she’s the one who traditional moralism would morally condemn, now “look for the woman” would mean that since she’s the powerless one, for her to solve her own problems by correcting herself would mean: self-help, self-efficacy, self-empowerment, self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-motivation, anti-moralism, etc.
A webpage on the Break the Silence website, about two patients who killed themselves in the same hospital, tells of their suicides. This says about the woman, “While at THE MEADOWS, Denise Dixon had been required to wear around her neck a ‘NO HELP’ sign that was affixed to her Meadows ID Badge. At the time, family believed this meant Denise was to receive no help from anyone while at The Meadows. Since then, they have learned this meant Denise was not to render any assistance to others. It has been reported to BTS that other signs such as ‘DO NOT TALK’ have also been used in treatment at The Meadows. BTS would like to know the therapeutic benefit/purpose of wearing such signs? Is it possible they may do more harm than good to an already at risk patient?” You could get a picture of the badge that Denise had to wear, here. Yet anyone familiar with codependency theory would know the reason for treating the prohibition of her rendering assistance to others, as so important. A tendency to help others could seem self-defeating, and it seems very important to stop that.
A webpage from Johns Hopkins’ school of public health, Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare, says, “The study looks at the factors in these women’s lives that contribute to depressive symptoms, and examines whether these symptoms may prevent the women from gaining employment and becoming independent from welfare.... ‘One challenge facing state welfare agencies is to identify barriers to employment. One such barrier — depression — is high among low-income single mothers,’ says Mary Jo Coiro, PhD, assistant scientist in the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.... Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, yet very few had received any mental health services.”
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? Though the stereotype of welfare mothers is that they’re manipulatively getting away with something, they clearly have an extraordinary rate of depression. Certainly they’ve experiences an extraordinary amount of helplessness, maybe from the fathers of their children, but certainly from their poverty. Yet this study looks at the fact that 40% of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, in terms of whether they’ve received any mental health services, which would proceed to fix only what’s inside these women. It simply is necessary for anyone, no matter what happened to them, to steer away from being untermensch, and toward being übermensch. It seems that the magnitude of this social problem could just be brushed aside, and would be by those who are gutsy enough. Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression.”
Women, especially, would be told that, if, to a degree and with a persistence that would be worthy of this social problem, they care that depressive disorders affect about 34,000,000 American adults, forty percent of the welfare mothers studied reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, etc., what these consciousness-raised women are supposed to do is NOT CARE. If they do, then they’d be far more likely to have untermensch attributes attributed to them, such as: weak, passive, whiny, bitter, resentful, manipulative, insidiously self-interested, counterproductive, troublemaking, controlling, restrictive, blaming, excuse-making, anti-freedom, intellectualist, self-righteous, self-pitying, subjective, unrealistic, immature, negativist, defeatist, melodramatic, emotionalist, and judgmental. Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.
(This is the heading of the section of Al-Anon’s workbook Blueprint for Progress, Al-Anon’s Fourth Step Inventory, for those who seem to be codependent to take a fearless moral inventory of behaviors, including helpful ones, that are labeled as “controlling.” Frankly, just about any helpful behavior in a relationship that’s considered codependent, would be considered “controlling,” as in, “Sure, you think that what you’re doing is trying to help, but supposedly trying to help someone is a great way to control him.” This morality-based “control” is in the same sense of what the Mississippi preacher mentioned by Bobby Kennedy’s administrative aide James Symington, meant by tyranny, “One preacher let me into his church, and told me, ‘You represent a tyranny.’ I said, ‘How do you think black people feel living in Mississippi with no rights?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s better to have a lot of little tyrannies than one big one.’” Control based on one person having power over another, is only a little tyranny. Of course, if those driven into depression, anxiety disorders, etc., by such behavior, instead fixed themselves by taking antidepressants, choosing to think positively, eating more omega-3 fatty acids, etc., that wouldn’t seem controlling, anti-freedom, manipulative, resentful, etc. If you object to sinfulness, that’s really your will-to-power. One could only ask: if control, resentment, etc., really were character defects so the person who had them got bad karma, what would be the learning experience that he’d get to teach him what’s wrong with them, that he be reincarnated as an SOB so he could see what it feels like to be on the receiving end of victim-posturing control tactics?)
And, naturally, all this means...
Certainly you could imagine what would happen if you responded to one of those who figured that naturally you’re simply supposed to adjust to the norms that cause our rampant depression, by saying, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Sure, for depressive disorders to affect about 34,000,000 American adults is a very serious social problem, but in order to fit in, you’ve got to minimize the problems around your somewhat. Therefore, I’ll treat this as if it were just a moderately severe social problem.” After all, if you could care somewhat, then that would make you somewhat discouraged, maladjusted, thinking like a victim, etc. When it comes to ethical responsibility,
The following says everything about victim correction as a panacea in general, and not just for women: A CNN webpage originally from Oprah.com, quotes marriage counselor M. Gary Neuman, who’d just written a book on why some husbands cheat on their wives, mostly that they don’t make their husbands feel appreciated enough:
Although Gary discusses how wives of cheaters can factor into affairs, he says he wrote the book to empower women.
“It’s not about blaming the wife. It can’t be. I mean, cheating is ridiculous. It’s wrong. And you can’t justify it,” Gary says. “My book is about one thing. It’s really about empowering women. If I can give you knowledge that says that I could have proof that if you do certain things, you can lead your relationship to a better place, that will be much better for you as well because it’s not just about stopping tragedy. It’s about building a much more mutually beneficial relationship.”
In other words, while explicitly blaming the cheated-on wives would obviously be offensive, to correct them would seem productive, self-empowering, self-improving, self-helping, etc. Of course, you could possibly interpret all victim-blaming that’s tenable, as self-empowering for the victims, since if they stopped doing what seems to be allowing their problems to happen, they’d have at least a good chance of stopping them. And most blaming of women victimized by men is more liberated than is blaming the women for not appreciating the men well enough. Most of the current generation of blaming the wives of adulterous men, would blame them for choosing to stay in marriages that are exploiting them. After all, if they got out, they’d benefit, just as, if they appreciated their husbands more, the women would probably benefit. In the case of all problems, the people who’d benefit from solving them, and from improving their own abilities to solve them, are the people who have the problems.
It seems that under this sort of self-responsibility, women have the opportunity to be as productive as men, and non-whites as productive as whites. Other webpages in this series include quotes from notable people on the financial crisis of 2008. After all, whatever would result from the crisis would be the realities that people must deal with, and the same rules would apply. Yet certainly, no notables would say explicitly that women have to pay a greater price for what Wall Street did, than men would. Yet everyone who had to deal with hardship caused by Wall Street’s sinfulness, would have to deal with it. Women would tend to be on the lower end of the economic food chain, so they’d tend to suffer more consequences. Not only that, the labels that the victim correctors would put on victims who aren’t obviously doing their best to take care of their own problems, would seem more plausible when applied to women. It’s more easy to figure that women suffering the consequences of what Wall Street did: don’t have the courage to change what they can, are playing the victim role, love to live melodramas, etc.
Let’s not forget that Enron was once a big role model, especially among those who believed in self-reliance. Though the basic-black-with-pearls background of this webpage might look too traditionally feminine for such an untraditional webpage, at least that’s more dignified than that concept of “personal responsibility,” which implies that to say that someone is a “responsible person,” is the ultimate complement.
Since those who treat women like this tend to praise them for acting strong,
this might not look like the untermensch treatment. Yet the assumption is that if those who are relatively powerless don’t resiliently, resourcefully, and independently deal with their own problems, they’d seem to have made a choice not to try hard enough. Just combine two of Schopenhauer’s proto-Hitlerian statements, from his book The World as Will and Representation, the book that most inspired Hitler, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being,” and, “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case.”
This sort of character defect involves mollycoddle ignominious cunning, which might be harder to defend oneself against than would be open and honest aggression, and is insidious rather than explicitly , so an untermensch-phobia could become popular. What you’d end up with is that even if you assertively stand up for your own legitimate rights, that could be called an expression of your , since you would have serenely accepted the other person’s imperfections if you were more red-blooded, mature, etc., and if you didn’t strive to get more than what you won. If your gets what it wants by saying that your own rights were violated, that could be called the ignominious way of getting what you strive for. If a relatively powerless person doesn’t try to muster up all the power that she could, then she’d seem to have ignominiously chosen to be weak for fun (playing the martyr or caretaking role, having a pity-party, passive-aggressive power trips, melodrama, etc.) and/or profit (to get what she wants through whiny manipulation). Only untermenschen would be uncompromisingly condemned for such sins of omission, but everyone knows that we all must deal with whatever our realities are. Another way of saying “The World as Will and Representation,” is, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” This was exactly the sort of philosophy that people cheered Enron for having, before the scandal. There’s always an out, since, sooner or later, if you don’t give destructive behavior an out, especially if you’re a woman, your objections would seem to be merely your wanting to believe that someone should have done better.
The above is a part of a vintage Al-Anon series, which includes the husband beating her up, and ends with her saying that she’d learned from Al-Anon, “Before I came to Al-Anon, I was doing a lot of things I thought would help my husband stop drinking. But I was just making things worse. Now I know he will stop when he’s ready. In the meantime, Al-Anon has taught me to be a better, happier person.” The above shows Jane, before Al-Anon reformed her thinking, with a deviously manipulative facial expression and body language, as she simply tries to get him to “hit bottom.” She looked like she might as well have been a cackling witch, eagerly rubbing her hands together, except that instead of saying, “I’ll get you, my pretty!”, she’s secretly thinking, “I’ll get you, my handsome!”
Sure, few if any women in that situation would actually have their eyebrows skewed, their hands clasped under their chins, looking out of the opposite corner of their eyes than the husbands are, and with slight smiles. Yet this comes from a school of thought that stresses that we face our own problems like übermenschen, honestly active, rather than as untermenschen, supposedly ignominiously cunning, or, at the very least, in their “playing the victim role.” If women are seen as manipulative “trappers” of men, whose “traps” consist of feelings of obligation, then self-help for women would try to give them more self-reliance, self-empowerment, and self-respect, by coaching them into courageously changing what they can (themselves) and serenely accepting what they can’t (everyone else). Of course, one doesn’t question expectations that she be well-adjusted, self-reliant, non-controlling, etc.
Of course, since this is all about making the women “independent,” it could seem feminist. Yet one could say that practically all victim-blaming aims to correct weaknesses in the victims that could be lowering their chances for success and independence. The big difference is that this focuses on fixing something inside of the victims, that isn’t their fault, so correcting it couldn’t be called “blaming.”
Obviously their single motherhood wasn’t based on any desires to be liberated, or plans to get free money from welfare. These women probably would have preferred to be married. You might remember that the name of Norman Lear’s situation comedy about a divorced mother raising her two kids alone, wasn’t Living the Decadent Life, but One Day at a Time, as in, “Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”
Yet “Boys will be boys” behavior seems so normal, even expected, even when it causes this much disruption and helplessness. As Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash, in her subchapter on codependency, “First published in 1985, Norwood’s book on female ‘relationship addiction’ became the guiding light to more than 20 million readers.” This is one heck of a lot of women who’d live in such a way that would keep them out of “the Feminization of Poverty,” but they didn’t really have a chance. But as Faludi also wrote, self-help simply can’t treat social problems as social problems, since to do so wouldn’t be self-reliant self-help: “Norwood’s ahistorical analysis doesn’t help to explain why the problem is so acute now—or why the violence directed at women is rising so dramatically. Nor does it ever turn the tables: her book asks why so many women ‘choose’ abusive men, but not why there are so many abusive men to choose from.” Though we tend to think of self-reliant independence for women as the liberated ideal, your natural common sense should tell you that this could mean merely a change from “Boys will be boys” to “Boys will be boys but women don’t have to be at their mercy, so if the women fail to avoid problem guys they’re responsible for their failure,” with the price of this protection being that each woman must make do with whatever resources she has. According to the Enron worldview, it wouldn’t matter why any of their customers couldn’t afford to buy as much, only that, objectively speaking, they couldn’t afford to buy as much.
This is done with an attitude of self-empowerment and self help. Since even the most secular moral responsibility usually doesn’t empower or help oneself, self-empowerment and self-help has to mean that the person who has the problem, has the responsibility. For women, “self-reliance” is very likely to mean, “Energize confident responses to unexpected events,” and “Learn alternative life skills.” “Unexpected events” means basically anything that happens, and “alternative life skills,” survival skills, could very likely be necessary to deal with them. And, of course, this is the realm of self-help, teaching whatever life skills are necessary to deal with whatever unexpected events come up, in an energized, not whiny or even verbally assertive, fashion. This is very likely to occur within the relationships that Robin Norwood would call “unrewarding” and “unhappy” relationships. Yet it still would seem that of course the women should simply respond energetically and confidently to these unexpected events, since that’s what mature people do.
As Dr. Keith Ablow said, on Larry King Live, about how easy it is for being abused as a child, to turn some men into violent criminals, “So, we also have to remember, however, how fragile is empathy, our capacity to bond with each other, to care about each other?” Another thing we’d have to remember is how easy it is to disrupt and destroy, even when the intent of the destructive behavior wasn’t so bad. Both the traditionals who’d hold that boys will be boys, and the moderns who’d figure that any bad feelings toward one’s own romantic relationship or marriage shouldn’t be ignored in the name of morality, would have to be pretty short on empathy. To a degree that’s even greater than usual, both of these say that it would be unrealistic, repressive, manipulative, judgmental, etc., to try to balance concern about restricting the übermenschen, with concern about devastating the untermenschen.
One example that shows a wide variety of manifestations of this, is Steven Carter’s self-help book Men Who Can’t Love. On the front cover, above the title is, “WHEN A MAN’S FEAR MAKES HIM RUN FROM COMMITMENT,” and below the title, “And What A Smart Woman Can Do About It.” This book teaches women effective survival skills about dealing with “commitment-phobic” men, those who at first court their lovers but then cut out, likely in ways that are “not only bizarre and unpredictable, but downright insensitive and cruel.” A heading of a subchapter is, “HE CAN’T COMMIT TO YES/HE CAN’T COMMIT TO NO,” so he keeps telling his lover that he wants the relationship, and then that he doesn’t, and then that he does, and then that he doesn’t. When you consider the consequences of a woman’s husband doing this, that bizarreness could be called Kafkaesque. Yet even a man’s bizarre behavior that would lead to The Feminization of Poverty for the woman, seems to be a matter for her self-help.
This book, as few self-help books do, talks about what the social problem looks like from both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic point of view. From a macro point of view, “Today, unlike any other period in our history, the fear of commitment is destroying the fabric of society,” and that “the very changes that helped to bring men and women closer together are simultaneously tearing them apart.” It used to be that women would avoid pre-marital sex since as the old saying said, “If a man could get his milk free then why would he pay for it?”, but now that women are giving it away, men feel they don’t have to pay for it. Of course, they didn’t have to take advantage of the new equality between men and women, like this.
Yet any self-help book would have to look at this from a microcosmic point of view. Any women victimized by any sort of man, would have to see the problem in terms of, “Irrespective of who is morally responsible for what, how could I take care of myself, my own problems, better?”
Some self-help books are written for women considered codependent. Their romantic partners would probably have mental diseases, such as addiction, that seem to have simply robbed them of any free will, rather than their being sinful. These women would seem to have intentionally “let themselves in for trouble,” by getting romantically involved with them.
On the other hand, Men Who Can’t Love was written for women who are partners of men considered to have chosen to do what they did. As this book put it, “These women are not doing the choosing. They are being chosen. And it’s not because they are giving off peculiar, neurotic-type signals. It’s because they are attractive, intelligent women who attract men.”
Yet women in both of these categories would still be absolutely incapable of correcting the men, absolutely capable of correcting themselves. For all of them, self-help would have to mean that no matter how guilty are the men or innocent the women, they are the ones who provide the help.
As long as a man wants to leave a relationship, even a marriage, who’s to say whether or not his partner’s insistence that he stay, constitutes her trying to trap him? If this is looked at on a microcosmic level, women seem to be the enemies of freedom. It would seem that we must understand such strong feelings, no matter how exploitative they really are. Women who’d try to repress them would seem repressive. At the very least, this could seem to be a profound battle to get the women to accept their personal responsibilities, for looking for ways in which they could prevent it from happening to themselves again in the future, accepting that that’s just the way that these men are, and living their own lives independently of these men.
A big influence on self-help has been the psychology of Twelve-Step groups, which means the psychology of addictive personalities. A book from Gamblers Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, The First Forty Years, includes an article from the May 26, 1962 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, which includes a quote from Dr. Harry Perlowitz, “The compulsive gambler wants to lose money to punish himself for using it to purchase love. He compounds his guilt by making his family suffer for his corrupt conduct, yet he will break his neck doing favors for total strangers to gain the approval he wants so desperately.” Or maybe this is because, to those with addictive personalities, their own families would feel like “traps,” whereas strangers wouldn’t.
Even if it could be proven that this panic results from pathological differences in these men’s brains, efforts to get them to act normal could still be seen as profound battles between freedom and manipulative repression. The guys described in Men Who Can’t Love sure tend to have creative or otherwise brainy jobs, so they could have Hyperthymic Personality Disorder, a.k.a. chronically manic personalities, and artistic temperaments. This webpage defines this as, “tend to be rash and show poor judgement,” though those who insist that you minimize others’ destructive behavior since then you’d be more well-adjusted, would also insist that rashness and poor judgment constitute mistakes, not a personality disorder. As Emil Kraepelin wrote in 1921, in Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, hyperthymic personalities function like a mania diluted to the degree that it’s within the “domain of the normal,” (just as chronically depressed personalities are) but still are a “link in the long chain of manic-depressive dispositions.”
As Men Who Can’t Love says in its first chapter:
At the beginning of the relationship, when you look at him you see a man who seems to need and want love. His blatant pursuit and touching displays of vulnerability convince you that it is “safe” for you to respond in kind. But as soon as you do, as soon as you are willing to give love a chance, as soon as it’s time for the relationship to move forward, something changes. Suddenly the man begins running away, either figuratively, by withdrawing and provoking arguments, or literally, by disappearing and never calling again....
I remember many of these women and their stories vividly. Several told me long, complicated tales of men who had pressured and pursued them into making some sort of emotional commitment. When the women finally said yes, the guys either backed away or began to employ destructive hurtful behavior to sabotage the relationship. Many told me of idyllic dates and weekends and long-range plans with ardent men who suddenly pulled away with no warning. Some of these men only moved away emotionally; others actually stopped calling and disappeared so totally that several women joked about having a mock wake for all the men who certainly must have died. They could find no other explanation for behavior that was not only bizarre and unpredictable, but downright insensitive and cruel....
All of these women basically spoke to the same issue: an abandonment and betrayal of trust that had taken place in a relationship in which they had been encouraged, by the man, to expect tender intimacy....
If you have heard as many stories as I have, you can’t help but notice that all commitmentphobic relationships have a common dynamic, and they end in ways that are eerily similar. Typically, the man exhibits readily identifiable behavior. His overall pattern falls into what I call the “pursuit/panic syndrome.” All that really means is that the guy does a one-thousand-degree pursuit until he feels that the woman’s love and response leaves him no way out of the relationship—ever. The moment that happens, he begins to perceive the relationship as a trap. That trap provokes anxiety, if not total panic. Before the woman knows what is happening, the man is running from the relationship, running from her, and running from love.
In these relationships, there are usually very distinct stages and very distinct patterns within each stage. The major variable is how long each stage lasts. Some men can go through all the stages of the pursuit/panic syndrome in the course of one night. Others take years.
And, of course, if the man “begins to perceive the relationship as a trap,” he begins to lash out at the woman as if she’s guilty of being his captor. As you could see in the above, this book talks about this pattern of behavior as if all of these men just happened to have chosen to do this same irrationally destructive thing.
This is exactly the sort of behavior that well-adjusted women would consider “just the way that some people are,” especially men since “Boys will be boys.” It would seem very natural to tell women driven into depression by these men, “Just take the right medication, and that would stop your problem,” very unnatural to tell these men, “Just take the right medication, and that would stop your pursuit-panic syndrome.” Sure, this book says that it doesn’t like how self-help books that tell women how they could protect themselves against problem men, hold the women responsible. Under the heading, “‘I’M PROBABLY TO BLAME HERE’—HOW WOMEN HELP MAINTAIN THE MYTH,” this same first chapter says, “It seems fair to mention current popular nonfiction and the degree of responsibility that is given to women for their role in the disturbed social scene.
“Think about it: Nice, smart, good-looking women are considering analysis because they ‘love too much.’ I have seen no similar suggestions that might induce men into therapy because they ‘love too little.’”
Yet like any self-help book, this one must tell women that they must serenely accept whatever the men do that the women can’t change, and courageously change their own survival skills, which they could change. This requires taking these men’s commitment-phobic behavior as a given. Therefore, it would be pretty much inevitable to end up seeing their choices as, “Just the way that some people, especially men, are,” that, “Sure, some men are that narcissistic, but expecting them to go into therapy would be an attempt to re-engineer non-idealistic human nature, while for the victims to go to therapy would strengthen them,” etc. Even when such a woman tries to get a commitment-phobic man who’s now lashing out at her as if she’s his captor, to get therapy that would get him to stop, then unless he realizes that becoming normal would benefit him, too, she’d be labeled as having codependent tendencies to manipulate and control her man.
Given how normal such behavior therefore sounds, take a good look at what Freud, who you might think would be more likely to see people’s choices as having more volition and less determination by such things as inherited brain chemistry, wrote in Mourning and Melancholia, in 1917: “Manic-depressives show simultaneously the tendency to too-strong fixations on their love-object and to a quick withdrawal of object cathexis. Object choice is on a narcissistic basis.”
Somehow that doesn’t sound so slightly excessively normal, anymore. It no longer sounds as if all of these people just happened to have chosen to do this same irrationally destructive thing. This is just another version of la vida maníaca, which can, in many cases, come across as very pro-freedom. Yet our culture would insist that we accept behavior that’s a within-the-normal-domain version of sociopathy, along the lines of, “Oh, well, that’s human nature, but in a pluralistic society I’m free to avoid it just as I’m free to avoid those who are innocently incompatible with me,” while our culture wouldn’t insist that we accept behavior that’s a within-the-normal-domain version of schizophrenia. Sure, if a woman was romantically involved with a walking-wounded schizophrenic, she’d be told that she’d better accept that she can’t change him, just as much as a woman involved with a guy with Hyperthymic Personality Disorder couldn’t change him. Yet that wouldn’t have the untermensch-bashing tone of, “Oo-o-o-o, you’re trying to control him!” Of course, if the women involved with men who plan to victimize them with their “tendency to too-strong fixations on their love-object and to a quick withdrawal of object cathexis,” called them pathologically narcissistic in a way that’s literally a dilution of a psychotically irrational impulsivity, these women would be condemned (maybe even strongly), as trying to “repress” the men’s feelings, but of course, Freud wasn’t trying to repress anyone’s feelings...
As a favorite book of the Reagan Revolution, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind says, the big difference between the original version of this Wagnerian excitement, and its American version, is that the German culture, before Hitler, was aware of the consequences. “The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit ‘Mack the Knife.’... The scenario for ‘Mack the Knife’ is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism!”
Yet the self-reliance that’s characteristic of Reaganomics would be just as supra-moral. One could most see this when women are expected to be independent, rather than depend on their husbands and boyfriends. This would then have to mean that whatever spews forth from their ids, even if this is pathological, would then shape what these women are supposed to adjust and adapt to, or else they’d seem maladjusted and maladaptive. This has to be supra-moral, since prioritizing morality would seem judgmental, manipulative, controlling, unrealistic, etc. At most, The Establishment would have an acceptance along the lines of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” condemning the behavior as sinful, but in the end figuring that well-adjusted realists would adjust to it.
One big danger of that sort of narcissism, whether or not it’s connected with romantic relationships, is that it doesn’t feel like narcissism. Rather than feeling proud, boastful, smug, etc., as if what it wants is a luxury, it feels as if anyone who tries to stop it, is some sort of untermensch trying to victimize the übermensch, as if what it needs is a necessity. The untermensch could seem to be trying to do one or more of the following to him: control, guilt-trip, insult, pass judgment on, blame, trap, etc., and the victims of that could very much need to stop it! And naturally, all would cheer for the freedoms and dynamism of the übermenschen, and dread the insidious of the untermenschen.
The introduction of Men Who Can’t Love says, “It is easy for women to blame themselves for attracting this kind of man and thus accept full responsibility for the problem. This is a terrible mistake. The reason so many women get involved with these men is not because they have some subconscious desire to punish themselves. Nor is it because there is some weakness in their character.”
In the old days, women could be blamed for being too willful, that they annoyed their husbands too much, and this is what caused them to leave. Nowadays, it seems only natural to blame the women, as long as they’re blamed for being too weak, for not protecting themselves well enough, maybe for being too manipulatively willful, since the goal would be to make them less stereotypically feminine. The fact that in order to do this they have to be labeled as stereotypically feminine because that’s the enemy to be vanquished, doesn’t seem to matter. When Ann Jones wrote, in Next Time She’ll Be Dead, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating,” (followed by “The reasoning is indeed so smooth it almost sounds rational,” a statement out of William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim), this was in reference to a study from 1964, which claimed both that, and that battered wives tend to provoke their husbands by being too strong-willed, “castrating,” “aggressive,” “masculine,” “frigid,” “indecisive,” “passive,” and “masochistic.” Nowadays few would blame the victims for being too strong-willed, yet it seems very productive to blame them for being too weak-willed, not preventing their own problems well enough. If the women battled such weaknesses inside themselves, that would be self-empowering.
As Blaming the Victim also says, “In this way, the new ideology is very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days. Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform.” Regarding women’s responsibility for how men mistreat them, labeling mistreated women as “castrating,” “aggressive,” “masculine,” and “frigid,” would use the logic of the old days, while labeling them as “indecisive,” “passive,” and “masochistic,” would seem to have its conscience in good working order, since the goal would be to coach these women into becoming less indecisive passive and masochistic.
The usual approach to blaming the female victims follows the pattern of the self-improvement described in Al-Anon’s handbook, How Al-Anon Works, for Families & Friends of Alcoholics, in the section on how Al-Anon members are to take moral inventories of themselves, as if this suits them as much as it would suit addicts. This section does give some differences between addicts’ moral inventories and the moral inventories of those who are intimately affected by them. “One of [family members’] alcoholism’s effects is to lower our self-esteem, creating the illusion that others are valuable and praiseworthy while we are deficient.” Intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser.
Addicts’ significant others need to include their positive attributes, and aren’t to take their own negative attributes personally. They’re only to look at their own negative attributes, as temporary problems that they’re to get rid of, so they’re not inherent parts of themselves. It’s as if the owner of a toy store is taking inventory of his merchandise, and, “It makes no more sense to berate ourselves for being short on patience than it does to berate ourselves because teddy bears are in short supply in our toy store.”
According to that logic, no matter how much the victims of heedless men are treated as indecisive, passive, masochistic, etc., that wouldn’t be berating the women, since these negative traits wouldn’t be inherent to them. As long as the goal is to make them more self-empowered, any negative labels that are put on their current personalities, wouldn’t really be insults. The whole idea is to treat the supposed personality traits of the women that are blamed, as if they’re just problems that the women would of course make temporary. This sort of logic might be able to express itself better in Spanish, which has two words for to be, one, ser, meaning to be permanently, as in “I am tall,” and one, estar, meaning to be temporarily, as in “I am bored.” For a woman to say, “Yo estoy pasiva,” would be therapeutic since she’d be recognizing that she’s passive in the temporary sense, while for her to say, “Yo soy pasiva,” would be berating herself since she’d see herself as inherently passive.
Sure, Men Who Can’t Love doesn’t even blame the women in this way, but it still seems to be the women’s responsibility to prevent the problems that such men could cause them. No matter how outrageous is the men’s behavior, the women absolutely can’t change them and absolutely can change themselves.
Therefore, the victims would be the ones who’d get corrected. If their survival skills don’t seem to be adequate to deal with this reality, then they’d seem inadequate. In the end, what would really be taken seriously is how passively the women are reacting. And, of course, the only times that anyone would talk about how much more therapeutic it would be for these men to think, “Yo estoy despiadado,” than “Yo soy despiadado,” would be when a commitment-phobic man decides that he wants to get corrected since he no longer wants to play the victim role, the role of the phobic victim of being “trapped.”
In a section of Men Who Can’t Love about how likely the women are to blame themselves, he writes, “Nice, smart, good-looking women are considering analysis because they ‘love too much.’ I have seen no similar suggestions that might induce men into therapy because they ‘love too little’.” Though “women who love too much” are supposed to pursue men whom they think that they could “fix,” this book says that commitment-phobic men do the pursuing, but then act like victims of the women, “Had any of them moved in with a woman, become afraid of the commitment, and responded with rage at his entrapment—the proverbial caged beast, angry and abusive toward the woman he perceived as his captor?” As this book says about a relationship of one of these men, “But somehow, Karen had ceased to be his joy and had become instead his captor,” so this is nothing that the women did.
The book also says about “the commitment-phobic husband,” “His discomfort is often so great that he loses sight of the fact that his wife is a human being.... He is often a man without mercy. His anxiety to find space and freedom within a relationship in which he feels trapped is no less terrifying to watch than that of the recently captured animal. He is flailing, and it will do no good to point out to him that his wife is just a woman and that she probably loves him.” So even if he expresses his helplessness this viciously, we’re still to understand that it’s helplessness. If the women see them as helpless rather than as morally responsible, this would probably let the women be more serene, less resentful. And by definition, as long as someone does something destructive, especially if it’s irrational, then that’s human nature, or, at the very worst, slightly excessively normal human imperfection. If we expected men who feel that uncomfortable with anything, to just live with it, we might as well be expecting inveterate nicotine addicts to do without nicotine.
This fits the pattern of redblood-coddling. As in, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” the person who caused the problem seems to be a helpless victim of his own out-of-control emotions and desires, and possibly of what he did in the unchangeable past, while the victim seems to be the one who has a free choice in how to react now. In this case, men act in ways that had formerly been associated with the weaknesses of stereotypical women, and all are supposed to understand these weaknesses. A section of the book about commitment-phobic men’s evasiveness regarding why they did it, is headed, “‘I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS NOW’—HOW MEN PRESERVE THEIR MYSTIQUE.” It used to be considered a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, since her biology makes her unstable, so fighting this would be fighting the way reality inherently is. Now it seems to be a man’s prerogative to change his mind no matter what the consequences, since his biology makes him unstable, so fighting this would be fighting the way reality inherently is. The big difference is that when women are treated as helpless like this, they could also be impugned as manipulative, but when the strong act like a passive victims of their own feelings and the like, it would seem that redbloods’ desires mustn’t be impugned, restricted, etc. Since these women don’t act mercenary, you’d think that talking about them as manipulators would ring hollow, but what constitutes “manipulation,” is in the eye of the beholder.
No matter how pathological and destructive the commitment-phobic man’s behavior might be, it could automatically seem justifiable. In Italy, someone who falls in and out of love, easily and often, is called a “biodegradabile.” Such people could be both very pathological and destructive. Yet if you tried to stop one, he could tell you that:
He knows what’s right for his own heart, far more than you do.
A slogan that we keep hearing over and over again to support American troops staying in Iraq, is that those who want to set limits, want to “cut and run.” The more that war proponents repeat the phrase “cut and run,” the more that, it seems, those who want to leave Iraq are ignominious. We keep hearing other Nietzschian/cowboy themes, such as Cheney’s, “that we don’t have the stomach for a long, tough battle and that we’ll pack it in and go home,” and, “if the United States bails out on Iraq.” Staying and fighting seems red-blooded, übermensch, so leaving seems mollycoddle, untermensch. On the other hand, if, when explaining to to commitment-phobic men why they should stay, you used the phrase “cut and run” over and over again to describe their cutting out on their lovers or wives, that would seem as if you were trying to manipulate the men and, thereby, perpetuate the “traps.” That’s what would seem terrifyingly ignominious, mollycoddle, untermensch, etc. For commitment-phobic men to “cut and run” would seem übermensch, while for them to stay, and especially, for anyone to expect them to remain “trapped,” would seem untermensch.
That book makes clear that commitment-phobic mens’ behavior is wrong enough that the women shouldn’t take it personally, and if they’re lucky they could get the men into psychotherapy to stop this sociopathy. Yet self-help books like this one simply can’t reflect the magnitude of how morally wrong such behavior is, the way that feminist consciousness-raising would. Moral indignancy wouldn’t contribute anything to self-help problem-solving, and might only make the women look more like guilt-tripping manipulative captors. Each sociopath assumes that he has a right to do certain destructive things, and since no one else can change this, all must serenely accept it.
Men Who Can’t Love also includes statements from commitment-phobic men, such as Brad, who kept getting married and divorced, and said about his longest-lasting marriage, “every home-cooked meal to me was like another nail in my coffin.” He describes himself as having had been “disgustingly unfaithful to her,” said, “I belittled those things she did well,” and “I have the greatest respect for this woman who was much too good for me.”
Also, Don felt very attracted to a woman, and impulsively proposed to her six weeks after meeting her. He called up some of his friends and told them he’d gotten engaged. Within a few months he broke off the relationship with her, but, “Sometimes I see her in the neighborhood, and I’m tempted to try to start up again... but I know better.” He ends his story, “If I could give women one word of advice, I would tell them to watch out for the man who goes head over heels quickly, because as quickly as he pursues, that’s just how fast he retreats.”
So he warns women to be wary of guys like himself, just as Brad said his long-time wife was too good for him. Other guys are quoted as saying similar things. Those were even more self-critical than would be, “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would accept someone like me as a member,” since the reason why the club should reject these people, probably wouldn’t involve “not only bizarre and unpredictable, but downright insensitive and cruel” behavior. Yet it seems that men who’d warn women to watch out for men like themselves, or say that they compulsively treated their wives disgustingly, could do so without any shame, since it would seem that all must understand. Another guy said, “I said some awful things to my first wife.... My reactions were almost instinctual. I felt as though I was suffocating in the marriage, and it was so necessary for my survival to act this way that didn’t even think about what I was doing to her as I did it.”
Sure, many men would want to avoid being trapped by their lovers, so they might think that such feelings are only natural. Yet even these “Boys will be boys” men would realize that pathological gambling is very abnormal. The book In the Shadow of Chance, the Pathological Gambler, by Dr. Julian Taber, in the chapter “The House Call and the Madness of the Enabler,” tells of an intervention for a gambler, Kirk, who afterwards calls Dr. Taber and says, “I’m just not ready to be a husband and a father. What you did was give me the chance to call it quits and break it off once and for all,” and says about his wife, “I can’t gamble and have a family at the same time, not the way I gamble. And Sally’s too good a person for me to hurt any more than I have already.” She seemed to have been planning for enough of a career that she wouldn’t become one of the welfare mothers prone to depression, yet you could bet that their divorce would truly disrupt her life and their daughter’s. Near the end of the conversation, he said, “Yeah, I know I can’t quit for anybody else, and I’m beginning to think I may find my own reasons once I’m alone and don’t have to play the family game anymore. To tell you the truth, Doc, I hate gambling.” So the problem wasn’t that he was a helpless victim of his addiction to gambling. He simply had to stop playing “the family game,” no matter how much this cost his family, and everyone else who must count on a balanced attitude toward divorce, that you don’t stay in bad marriages or count on authority figures to hold marriages together, but at the same time, you don’t abuse this privilege by leaving for stupid reasons.
Ironically, in 2002, the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Wilton Gregory, said about the enabling of pedo-priests, “Now even an honest mistake is seen as malicious,” though, by definition, even though to call someone an “enabler” might sound like a malicious intent is being attributed to him, actually most enabling is just attempts to get along.
Yet what Dr. Taber goes on to say about that discussion, is, “The patients are always right! Learn to read their behavior and stop trying to impose your own expectations on them. That’s so hard to accept, and such an invaluable lesson,” “Given the right kind of help, most patients can come to understand their behavior, and when they do they usually know exactly what they have to do to make life better,” “With the right kind of help, Kirk would make it. Perhaps not in the ways we would wish, or on the schedule we would set—but he will do better if others do not try to impose their values on him, if others do not go on insisting that he be someone he lacks the ability to be,” and, “I could not bring myself to voice it, but the thought was loud and clear. Kirk was the wisest person at our conference that afternoon!” Dr. Taber said nothing about the crisis that Kirk was causing for such a stupid reason, only that Sally was so admirably strong-spirited that she’d very likely succeed. She’s not one of those mad enablers.
So we have Kirk saying that his wife was too good for him but he couldn’t continue the family game, and give up gambling, at the same time. It wouldn’t matter how much havoc his “don’t have to play the family game,” game would cause. What would matter is that any psychologist who’s trying to get someone to stop an aggressive behavior problem, had better make sure that he doesn’t feel that these efforts to get him to stop are due to some coercive authority. Mental health professionals who give psychological treatment to pedophiles mustn’t sound preachy and judgmental, either. They must accept aggressive human nature as in what Schopenhauer wrote about pederasty, “‘Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back.’ Therefore we cannot possibly escape this conclusion if we intend to proceed openly and honestly,” and realize that while women like Sally would be very motivated to become more well-adjusted to their new realities, pedophiles who’d think they could get away with it aren’t motivated to stop. Any psychologist who’d treat pervs had better get their cooperation, even if this means having an attitude of, “So you say that you must do something that would disrupt others’ lives, in order not to feel the stress that would drive you to molest? Well, you’re the one who knows best what would best change you!” Aggressive, hurtful character flaws, including those of pedophiles, pathological gamblers, or commitment-phobic men, could be called übermensch character flaws, since they’re strong, and are treated with a certain amount of deference.
Someone certainly has to take personal responsibility for this situation, which means, of course, cherchez la femme. And this book does indeed praise Kirk’s wife for being self-reliant, resourceful, and resilient enough to take care of her own problems once he gets a divorce and stops playing the family game. When it’s time for someone to take responsibility, cherchez la femme. Considering what’s at stake, one certainly wouldn’t have to be codependent to care a lot about this. Renaissance poet John Donne wrote, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Then you could add to this att the other harm that addiction does to people’s lives, that didn’t have to happen. As Albert Camus wrote, “Don’t wait for the last judgment. It happens every day.”
The whole reason why the thinking of codependents seems self-defeating, is that some people are so lacking in self-regulation, that the tenderness that tries oh so dedicatedly and desperately to persuade them into stopping that self-destruction, doesn’t work.
Both moralists and feminists have been shocked by this, but if those therapists ever talked to their perv clients in either a moralist or a feminist fashion, these pervs would respond, in effect, “Stop trying to trap me!”, and would truly feel this way. In fact, Arizona Illinois Massachusetts Minnesota New Jersey and North Dakota call their sexually violent predators laws “sexually violent persons acts” or something similar, since to call the pervs “predators” would have been untherapeutic for them. Even Meagan’s Laws, laws to keep pervs away from schools, etc., could dishearten those with pedophile desires who’d otherwise want to keep their abuses under control, give them an attitude of, “Why bother trying, if I’m going to be treated like this anyway?” The less trapped, insulted, disheartened, etc., the pervs would feel, the more that they’d be able to make life better.
Of course, if any of the women in situations like Sally’s were to see psychologists about their conflicts, these psychologists would require that the women adjust to whatever their realities are, irrespective of the stresses that they feel, the fact that they couldn’t decide not to play the single-motherhood game (a lot more difficult than the family game) anymore or leave any of their other stresses, etc. This double standard that would make more demands of the women, would seem feminist, since it would expect women to be strong and self-reliant. In fact, it would insist on the women’s stolid self-reliance, but would never insist on anything from the men who supposedly know exactly what they have to do to make life better, even if it wasn’t in the ways we would wish. Nothing could seem untherapeutic for these women, since any who don’t act self-reliant could seem to have been looking for an excuse to play the victim role, and the “untherapeutic” problem gave her the excuse.
Weak character flaws or supposed character flaws, including both the problems in these women’s self-reliance and the problems of the mad enablers, could be called untermensch character flaws, since that’s the sort of intolerance and contempt that people would tend to have toward them. If these women felt trapped, insulted, disheartened, etc., it would seem that they should choose to think in ways that wouldn’t lead to such feelings. These aren’t the sort of natural feelings that we’d serenely accept along the lines of, “‘Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back.’ Therefore we cannot possibly escape this conclusion if we intend to proceed openly and honestly.”
The same book also says the following, about someone else who meets the expectations that are made of Sally:
Consider a child with a large, purple birthmark covering half her face. If she lived in a world in which large birthmarks were seen as beauty marks, or as marks of royalty (as a lisp once was in Spain), she would be delighted with her face. Sadly, in our ordinary world, large birthmarks are rare and often lead to social rejection and ridicule. How do children handle such things?
The critical difference is in thinking. One child learns to shrug and say, “It doesn’t matter, I can be what I want to be and people will learn to accept me. And if they don’t, it still doesn’t matter. I don’t care what they think.” Caring is such a strong, double-edged weapon!
Such a brave and invulnerable child will answer comments about her birthmark matter-of-factly, or perhaps with indifference and a laugh. She simply doesn’t care about her risk factor, hard as that may be for many of us to understand. And she is willing to let others think whatever they like without taking their opinions too seriously. She doesn’t argue or fight or try to change what others think. She just gets on with life. She doesn’t care what others think. That runs counter to what most of us are taught to feel!
This is exactly what Sally is doing. She’s brave and invulnerable, so she’s getting on with life. No sexists ever taught her that women are too weak to handle their own realities. Addiction is supposed to take away addicts’ free will so much that addicts’ family members (but not the law) must treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity. Commitment-phobic men don’t seem that impaired, yet if any woman’s husband starts to treat her as a commitment-phobic man would, she’d still be absolutely unable to change him and absolutely able to change herself. The expectations made of her, would be the same as those made of Sally.
Just imagine what the psychologist of one of these women would think, if she said, “You say that my not adequately dealing with my family’s problems is passive-aggressive, passive, self-defeating, melodramatic, victim-posturing, self-pitying, resentful, and otherwise very un-Nietzschian? Well, once I don’t have to play the single-motherhood game anymore, I can quit those counterproductive tendencies. Given the right kind of help, most patients can come to understand their behavior, and when they do they usually know exactly what they have to do to make life better, and that includes me. I’m now the wisest person in the room!”
If men act like victims of the women in their lives, or victims of commitments that they made in the unchangeable past, that would suggest that everyone, especially these women, had better not try to “trap” them. The subtitle of the book The Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and Independent Kids,” so either these women would resiliently gain their independence from these men, or the women would seem to be trying to manipulate, trap, the men. Manipulation could seem to be the ultimate moral hazard, since it could be very powerful, very forceful and compelling, and one can’t defend himself against it without looking as if he’s re-victimizing victims. These guys could even say that they’re cutting out for the women’s own good, since, with these guys’ attitude problems, they can’t treat the women as well as they deserve to be treated. “Manipulative” is another way of saying “cunning,” and those in a position of strength, the übermenschen, couldn’t seem ignominious.
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 13
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
