"Charles II, himself a crypto-Catholic libertine, was reputedly appalled by James's folly in matters of religion and sex: 'My brother will lose his kingdom by his bigotry, and his soul for a lot of ugly trollops.'" John Mullan
"Toxic masculinity" is a term that has been around for a while. This article says it's been around since the 1980s and that matches my experience. it goes on to say that the term does not originate in any academic work but is simply a derogatory term that became common in grassroots feminism of a certain kind.
Important digression: If you set out to create a movement to ban music-playing ice cream trucks you'd attract some people with serious arguments and some people who just hate children. Man-hating feminists are real. No, not all feminists but some of them. "Toxic masculinity" was probably the product of feminists who just hated men at its origin.
In addition, it's a stupid term. Much like the equally odious "testosterone poisoning" it was originally used to suggest that maleness and masculinity are problems to be fixed. You see that attitude everywhere. Contrast the horrid Good Men Project with the very good Art of Manliness. And you'll get some notion of what I mean.
The term "toxic masculinity" should be abolished. And yet, somewhere along the line, there was an attempt to put some meaningful content to concept. Again, from the article I began by quoting:
For example, one book that seeks to raise awareness of issues that men face, titled “Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity” (1994), highlighted one of the earliest examples of toxic masculinity in the literature.
“Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity” the author of the book, Frank Pittman, said on the topic of young men without fathers.
Pittman chose his words badly. He should said, "Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards a parody of masculinity." For that is a very real problem. Boys without strong men as role models tend to seek role models in other boys or in superhero fiction. And there is something toxic about that. Think of the Crips for example.
Perhaps not so obvious, though, is that there are other parodies of masculinity out there. Far more pervasive than the the dominant, woman-hating variety is the parody of manliness you get when men turn to women to help them define their masculinity instead of other men. Again, I refer you to The Good Man Project.
A question for you to ponder: Is there a tension between what women you know say masculinity should be and what they actually respond to in real life? Or, if you are a woman, is there a tension between what you admire in the abstract and what you respond to in your life? I'm not saying that one side of this tension is all wrong and the other side is all right. Just notice that it's there and ponder it.
The video I linked the other day got a telling response on Facebook from someone who calls himself "Star Man Aquarius"
The bottom message of this video isn't entirely clear. Men around the world exist in various ways. There are archetypical masculine men, and there are archetypical feminine men. But all of them are MEN, and every man in this planet behaves differently from the other.
The problem I notice in the content of this discourse is that authentic behavior (with its weak and strong sides) is dismissed in front of mythical and archetypical behavior.
If my grandfather was abusive against men and women, and this is my family's core belief, I certainly would be avoiding evolution by just imitating my grandfather until I get to act just as he did, rejecting and approving the same ideas and ways of living like he did; never questioning or simply evolving such ideas, or habits, etc.
Mmm... I'm sorry but this is just not entirely convincing. (To find the original, log onto face book and find the Art of Manliness page. and scroll down until you find the video.)
I don't post this to mock. Amongst other things, English is obviously not SMA's first language. It also takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to call yourself "Star Man Aquarius" and I admire that, although I'd never use a handle like that myself. That said, the most stunning thing about this argument is it's weakness. Not a logical weakness. There is little logic there because there doesn't need to be. SMA sets a very low bar for himself. The argument he advances is really an excuse for remaining weak.
In the first paragraph he says that there are archetypal masculine and archetypal effeminate role models but that all men are men. Well, yes, if your standard for being a man is having an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. If you think men should actually be good at being men, however, SMA has nothing to offer you.
Now, consider the word archetypal. If you you check the video, Brett MacKay doesn't talk about archetypes. He talks about becoming the sort of man you want to be. The man you want to be! There is no archetype in that. Now what I suspect SMA sees that Mackay clearly has a particular model of manhood in mind and SMA is not big on machismo. Elsewhere he writes:
You can see this nice moustached guy talking to us about manliness in a very elegant way, and you can see him carrying an axe, too. He talks about «the circle of men», personal heroes, politicians, philosophers and also modern psychologists. All these very «successful» men -in the public eye.-
But he isn't talking about the «other ones». The little ones. The uncourageous ones. The ones that aren't heroes, that are sensitive, sentimental, etc. And we haven't got yet to the homoparental stuff (these are men too!), gay issues, etc, etc.
Again, English is obviously not SMA's first language and we see that he clearly misses the playful irony implied by the axe. But he is also pushing weakness; he is the sort of man that Nietzsche deplored.
I mean, if you really want to be like Liberace, then go ahead and be like Liberace. SMA's problem is that he wants society to help him become what he already is. He thinks society should love the little ones (I think he means "weak" when he says "little"), the uncourageous ones, the non-heroic ones, the sensitive ones and the sentimental ones. And society doesn't. It just doesn't and no one is going to make SMA king of the world any time soon. And why should it make him anything given that he is so little interested in making anything of himself.
And don't get fooled by the gay issues red herring here. Gay men are perfectly capable of being strong, courageous, unemotional and laconic as heterosexual men are. SMA is pushing gay stereotypes while pretending to be sensitive to gay issues.
But I relate because I would have agreed with him when I was younger. I was everything that he was and I had learned how to be helpless. It took me the entire 1980s to turn it around.
Notice these lines from the third paragraph:
If my grandfather was abusive against men and women, and this is my family's core belief, I certainly would be avoiding evolution by just imitating my grandfather until I get to act just as he did, rejecting and approving the same ideas and ways of living like he did; never questioning or simply evolving such ideas, or habits, etc.
That's a wacky argument because nowhere does MacKay say to blindly imitate the values that predominate in your family. He advises finding men who typify the man you want to be and imitating them. If your grandfather was an asshole, pick someone else!
Now that is obvious which suggests to me that SMA's problem is not that he can't figure out a way out of his trap but that he won't. There are thousands of male role models to follow, what SMA lacks is the courage to pick a type and follow it.
Now, you may be thinking (and SMA himself might say, if he were here) that MacKay's ideal man is pretty typical in the set of virtues he embodies. Well, the first thing I'd say is that you're just wrong if you think that. How many men like that are there? Not many. On the other hand, if the question is, "How many pasty-faced, physically weak, metrosexuals are there out there who think of themselves as individuals even though there are a dime a dozen? Well, there are a lot of them.
And I think the question you'd want to ask yourself if you are one of these men is, Do you really like and admire men who are just like you? Maybe you do but do yourself the favour of asking yourself honestly. There is solid evidence out here that effeminate men rate other effeminate men as lacking something. If that is your problem, there are two ways to solve it. 1) You can stop being effeminate yourself or 2) you can start evaluating other effeminate men more positively. What you can't do is keep on doing what you are. You need to pick a lane and drive in it.
I'm not going to comment on this there is nothing there that I would say differently. I remember figuring this out for myself around the time I turned thirty. The idea had been gelling for a few years before that—I could see that as I looked back and saw how I'd begun to change my life in a better direction—but it took me an awful long time. I wish there had been something like this around when I was a young man.
LA Confidential: The Manliness Lesson
Well, there isn't one, really, this being a woman's movie in disguise. But it sort of touches on something.
This image is a good way to introduce it:
Through a stupid and clumsy plot device, Russell Crowe's character Officer Bud White has just been made aware of the existence of photos of the woman he loves having sex with another man. So he rushes out in the rain and flips through them. This is a tribute, of course, to a famous scene in Chinatown. There are other homages to the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Blood Simple.
It works because we all know the feeling. The minute you discover that a woman you are in love with has had sex with another man, you start picturing it. You know it's a crazy thing to do but you can't help it. I've been there myself.
The thing, of course, is that the sex you picture has to perform a key psychological function and that is maintaining the vaguely narcissistic fantasy that this woman's love for you proves something about you. So the sex you imagine has to be animalistic and, oddly enough, erotically perfect in a way that the sex you have had with the same woman is not. It's torture of an exquisitely awful sort but, as the Last Psychiatrist notes, it's better than jumping off a bridge.
That loss of self is what you're trying to recapture with the masochistic fantasies: she's hot enough to have any guy she wants (and she picked you); she is in total control of her sex, wielding it for pleasure or for profit however she wants; so when she had sex with you, and liked it-- it signifies your own value. When some faceless stud undoes her bikini top in front of everyone, and she confidently flaunts her body-- that's your self-confidence she's flaunting.
The post that comes from is worth reading all the way through by the way. If any of this is sounding familiar, if you have ever entertained masochistic fantasies after being cheated on, read the whole thing.
I'd like to note something interesting though. In real life, the woman who cheated on you when you were twenty-five and having what you thought of as the greatest romance in the history of romance didn't actually have the greatest sex of her life with a super-well-endowed hunk when she cheated. She actually had a seedy little affair drenched in all the self-deception and vanity that affairs always are. But in Hollywood—where it is fantasy all the way down—the woman does have the fantasy sex when she cheats. (And the guy she picks is the perfect threat; in the case she cheats on Bud white, who worries that he is stupid, with the super intelligent Edmund Exley.) Hollywood gives us all the things that would usually be in our imagination played out in high quality Technicolor®.
Here is some more from The Last Psychiatrist
Look closely at these fantasies, at your own cuckold fantasies. Inevitably in these fantasies there is a fetish object, something that existed in your relationship. It's seems incidental to the fantasy but it is highly energized, eroticized: a piece of jewelry, clothing/bathing suit, or a location (car, bar, beach, etc). The sex is the visual focus, but the eroticized negligee that they bought when they were together is the true main character of the fantasy.
Men make the sex the focus, while women make the fetishized object more explicit: they obsess over the ex taking his new woman to the same places; or buying her "the same kind of scarf he got me"; or saying the same phrases ("that's what he used to call me.")
It seems masochistic, driving yourself crazy thinking about what you've lost, making the loss even worse by finding the specific ways that it hurts you.
In the movie the fetish object is the white dress that Kim Basinger is wearing. In real life, Bud White would imagine these things but here we actually get it.
A bit of trivia
Not really related to the above, but interesting nevertheless, one of the subplots involves a character named Tammy Jordan as played by Shawnee Free Jones. Poor Tammy is a poor girl trying to break into Hollywood but ends up getting exploited for the titillation of others.
Well, guess how poor Shawnee Free Jones is used by the makers of LA Confidential?
Yup, she is in the movie so we can all see a brief shot of her breasts, her bouncing breasts, and then she is done for. And her Hollywood career is not much more than that. She was in a number of other moves, almost always for her breasts, and then dispensed with. Her career was over by 2002.
But spell it out for yourself: The movie makes a moral point about how young hopeful actresses were exploited back in the 1950s by exploiting a a young hopeful actress today. And we all participate because we really want to see her breasts.
Voyeurism is a deeply interesting psychological phenomena.
In closing, Shawnee Free Jones is weird name no? That's because her father was a spirituality huckster.
Does driving a Porsche make a man more attractive to women?
Hey, they did a study? Your tax dollars at work folks.
The funny thing is not just that the answer is exactly what you would have guessed without spending a whole lot of money keeping otherwise useless academics employed. The funny thing is the great lengths they go to try and find a silver lining in the cloud:
However, there was a catch: Although women found the flashy guys more desirable for a date, the man with the Porsche was not preferred as a marriage partner. Women inferred from a man's flashy spending that he was interested in uncommitted sex.
"When women considered him for a long-term relationship, owning the sports car held no advantage relative to owning an economy car," said co-author Daniel Beal, assistant professor of psychology at Rice. "People may feel that owning flashy things makes them more attractive as a relationship partner, but in truth, many men might be sending women the wrong message."
He might be sending her the wrong message? Because the guy in the Porsche is looking for marriage and a nice little house in the suburbs? That must be why Porsche uses this sort of advertising to sell their product:
The copy reads "Owning a Porsche is not only about the driving experience". And you'll note the presence of the word "date" and the absence of any mention of marriage.
To get back to the news release accompanying the study, it makes interesting reading. There is a lot of stuff about how men use conspicuous consumption to get sex with women and, as above, about how women don't think of these men as good marriage partners but there is only one sentence telling you that the peacock strategy works if what you are looking for is sex:
According to the researchers, women found a man who chose to purchase a flashy luxury product (such as a Porsche) more desirable than the same man who purchased a non-luxury item (such as a Honda Civic).
Yup, women put out for guys in Porsches. Are you as stunned as I am at this unlikely result? I bet if a guy works out a lot to build up his muscles, wears nice suits and takes women to glamorous places in his Porsche that his chances get even better.
Downside, according to the researchers, when it comes time to marry, she'll settled for some schmo in a Honda Civic ... while the Porsche driver is out nailing her even hotter kid sister.
What's the take away here? I think it's this: You had better really want what you really want! Is love and marriage really your goal? I ask this in all sincerity because I don't think those guys who put everything into getting the Porsche and other accessories are really anywhere near as miserable as you might want to think they are so if you ever find yourself sitting around second guessing yourself for choosing the Civic live instead of the Porsche life you just might end up feeling bitter. (You could end up feeling even more bitter if the Civic life was the only choice available to you.)
I love this detail from the write-up about the study:
Women inferred from a man's flashy spending that he was interested in uncommitted sex.
Well, I'm relieved to find out that women are smarter than fence posts aren't you? But the thing is that the study also says they found those men more attractive. Like maybe the women were not adverse to a little uncommitted sex with a flashy spender.
Let's consider this from the perspective of Porsche guy: Guy buys Porsche because he is interested in getting uncommitted sex, woman correctly ascertains that he wants uncommitted sex and she is more attracted to him because he drives a Porsche. I'm not seeing any downside from his perspective here are you?
And if that doesn't hurt enough, I want you to seriously consider that the woman you marry may be just like the test subjects: that is that she really does find the Porsche guy more attractive but doesn't consider him good marriage material. As a woman friend of mine once crudely put it, "Once in her life every woman is going to go for a guy simply because he has a really nice car, a really nice investment portfolio or a really big ____." And then she'll marry someone like you.
This is another example of the Althouse Rule: When you talk about characteristics that distinguish women from men you always have to do so in ways that make the woman look good. That study stresses the fact that some guys are a bunch of vain peacocks in order to soft pedal the more significant finding that women are attracted to vain peacocks.
But but but ...
Yeah, I really wanted love and marriage too. And that is where I ended up but not because I wanted to feel superior to guys who drive Porsches.
When her state of mind is the whole of the truth Note to women readers: you may find this offensive.
A true story
Joel and Patti got married and for the first year they lived in an apartment. Then they bought a house. When the movers and their friends were finally gone they ordered Szechuan take out. Joel went to get it. Patti looked for the box with the dishes in it.
The only dishes she could find was their good china so they had Szechuan take out on Spode plates and ate with the flimsy plastic forks and napkins from McDonalds that Patti found in the glove compartment of the car. Neither of them had remembered to get something to drink so they toasted their new venture with lukewarm tap water in champagne flutes. They laughed and talked and planned late into the night. It was one of the most wonderful nights they'd ever had together.
Patti told everyone they knew about it which miffed Joel just a little. He saw it as a sacred, private memory for just the two of them.
Seven years later, Patti wanted to move. She told Joel her reasons. They were good reasons and he could see her point. The house no longer suited them and they had a daughter now and the local school was not the one they wanted to be sending her to. She wasn't of school age yet but she would be soon enough.
It took a few months to convince Joel but he agreed. At one point, Joel said, "I'll miss this place though."
And Patti said, "Not me, I've always hated this place."
Joel was shocked at this. He had fond memories and he tried to remind her of them. This was a big mistake because Patti's state of mind now was the whole of the truth. She hates the house now, so she has always hated it.
Joel can see that arguing is making it worse. The more he tries to convince her otherwise, the more adamant Patti gets. He realizes he will just have to give up on this but, before letting go, he mentions that first night. And she denies all memory of it because she really has forgotten. So he tries to remind her of the details but she gets angry because the discussion she wants to have right now is about moving out and she thinks he is trying to change her mind.
And she really tears into him, She not only tells him that this is his memory and not hers, she tells him that his obsession with "childish details like this" is "a perfect example of what's wrong with you".
This will happen to you
I watched that one happen. I've changed a few details so no one else will figure out who Joel and Patti are. At the time I thought Joel is just going to have be a man and to suck it up. And he did just that. But I was also sure it would never happen to me. It's always easier to tell the other guy to accept that life is like that so suck it up. Just a few years later it did happen to me for the first time. Not about a house but about something else and not with the woman I was in a relationship with but with a female relative.
It happened with a male friend once. But it happens more often with women. I think it is a pretty safe bet that it will happen with every woman you ever really care about.
The thing that really tears you when it does happen is that you lose something and you can never get it back. It's no help at all to Joel to know that he is right. That's the easy part. What he can never get back is the shared experience. It's no good to him to cherish this memory alone.
If you're any kind of a man, you already know that life means loss. You can accept that things you treasure will be lost. But you figured you'd always have the memories together. But one day, a woman you love will turn to you and tell you, "That is something that matters to you, I never liked it." And she will mean it as she says it.
Do women like courtly lovers?
Perhaps the question seems too stupid. "Of course they do," you say. "Why there is nothing more that women want in this brutal modern age than a return to courtesy and humility from men." Really? Because if that is what women really wanted, you'd think that more men would be cultivating it wouldn't you? I mean, even if only for very cynical reasons you'd think they would pretend long enough to get laid wouldn't you?
And there do seem hints of it. As Lewis says in The Allegory of Love:
To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth or even of the seventeenth century; and most of us have gone shopping in the twentieth with ladies who showed no sign of regarding the tradition as a dead letter.
I'm not so sure it was all that natural even in the thirteenth century. I'll tell you one thing that CS Lewis is far too genteel to say but I'm not: if you behave this way towards a woman, she may well let you and she may even take you shopping with her so you can carry her bags, drive her around in your nice car and buy her lunch but she sure isn't going to put out for you.
And we've all known guys who've tried this approach because we've all had to sit around drinking beers with the guy afterward while he bitterly criticized the woman in question and complained that "it's true, nice guys really do finish last."
Okay, this isn't a "game" or "seduction tips" site, so why go on about this. Well, because it is true: if you want erotic love from a woman courtly love is one of the worst ways to set about getting it. But you also ask, related to the above, if it is such a dumb way to get erotic love, why was so much literature ever devoted to it?
The answer to that is because it is a male fantasy. It's not the sort of fantasy men have while masturbating but rather the kind they have when they are without a woman to love. It's a sort of fantasy they have about what women fantasize about. I mention masturbation fantasies because, of course, the same guy who has the courtly love fantasy has those too and one of the things that drives the courtly love fantasy in the directions he goes is his certainty that real love cannot possibly be anyting like his erotic fantasies.
And there is the primary mistake. Assuming your erotic fantasies are not too weird, one of the big surprises of actually finding real love is that while fantasies are unrealistic, real women actually do crave sex and the actual stuff they respond to is much more like our sexual fantasies than it is like our courtly love fantasies.
We might miss this because there is a whole school of feminist and moral conservative paranoia that focus on the fear that men will become so addicted to fantasies or porn that real women will disappoint. If you want to see this paranoid argument about porn being better than reality thoroughly dispatched, go here. No really, go to that link and read it. Especially if you are a woman who has ever worried about whether your man masturbates too much. I mean it. If you have ever worried that some guy might lose his interest in his real partner because of porn or masturbation, go to this link right now and read the whole thing
Meanwhile, us guys who here in the guy room can ask ourselves a simple question. Think of a woman you like. Not some super hot babe you see but don't really know but an attractive woman you really like to talk to but who has some obvious flaws. In other words an ordinary woman you know and like. Okay, imagine that you have just learned that she thinks your attractive too and she is intrigued by you. No guarantee, no sure thing here—she is perhaps interested and that is all you know. Okay, here is your choice: you can go out with her for a drink alone together right now or you can jerk off to some really great porn. Which one do you want?
And that tells us something really important about courtly love: It was dreamed up by guys who didn't have such a choice. In much the same way that a bird in a cage can only imagine freedom as the opposite of being in a cage, a guy without a woman can only imagine "real" love to be the complete opposite of his masturbation fantasies.
I don't want to over play this hand: masturbation fantasies are not realistic either but the thing is we know they are fantasies. But reality is not and never will be the mirror image of a fantasy. What men forget when all they have is masturbation fantasies is that women do want to really get it. A lonesome guy I knew when we were both in our late teens once told me that he wished he could live in a world where women really did "all want to get it". What he couldn't see is that most of the women around him really did.
So he spent his life in pursuit of impossible dreams who let him grovel before them and serve him and then gave it to "some jerk" who didn't care. Meanwhile the girls he actually seemed to end up with angered him. There is a Charles Bukowski poem called "quiet clean girls in gingham dresses ..." that embodies the mindset perfectly:
all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes,
madwomen. I see men with quiet,
gentle women I see them in the supermarkets,
I see them walking down the streets together,
I see them in their apartments: people at
peace, living together. I know that their
peace is only partial, but there is
peace, often hours and days of peace.
What the guy in the poem never sees is that the whole thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you see that clean, quiet girl in her gingham dress well, she's kind of hot isn't she. She may be subtle, restrained, elegant, classy in public but you can imagine her all flushed, her pupils dilated, her eyes with that rather vacant look of total abandonment, her breasts heaving as she breathes harder as she gets more and more out of control. You've already imagined that haven't you. And you really are counting on her really wanting to get it? Am I right?
If not, let me assure you she wants you to take her shopping.
Bring back the Viva
Today's award for chutzpah goes to this young man:
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
That's courtesy of Adjunct Law Prof Blog who found this in the New York Times.
All sorts of thoughts come to mind here. Does the University of Maryland really assign essay topics as stupid as "the Great Depression"? Probably not. More likely NYT reporters are too stupid to make the fine distinctions necessary to describe the paper in question more accurately. (Don't blame them, they probably went to Harvard the poor dears.)
More significantly, however, this incident drives home just how important it is to bring back the viva. Make every single student, write a thesis and then (assuming they pass) stand up in front of a panel of professors and defend it for a few hours.
Real life is like that. No matter how good your written proposal might be, it's your ability to stand up and make the case out loud that makes the day. Any career that really requires a university degree requires us to develop this ability.
I'd even do it for undergraduate degree. I'd make the difference between an ordinary and an honours degree hinge on the exam. For undergraduates I'd skip the thesis. I ask those who wanted to qualify for an honours degree to appear before a committee who would assign him or her a series of questions and then allow them to pick any one and base their answer upon anything they had studied in the course of obtaining their degree. I'd allow them to take no more than twenty minutes to say it all. Then I'd make them field questions from the panel for at least an hour.
Any man who would be a man should be able to do this.
I know a lot of people would, if they read this, think, "I never could do that." But you could and if you were given three years to prepare yourself for such a thing, you'd manage it.
The manly art of rhetoric
The Art of Manliness site is planning a series on rhetoric. I love rhetoric and look forward to it. So far they only have the introduction up.
When I was a university debater, we used to do exhibition debates for high schools. I remember one English teacher was thrilled with me after one such debate. He loved my style of argument and he wanted his students to see this so he made a bunch of admiring remarks disguised as questions afterward.
I disappointed him. He praised my logic and I said that it wasn't about logic. Logic kills debate. I'm not saying that illogic wins or should win but that logic is just the frame you hang an argument on. What really matters is persuasion.
No where is this more clear than in love. Sexual love. That is where rhetoric matters most and huge part of being a man is knowing how to talk someone into love.
I was thinking about this the other day because my niece came to town. She is a staggeringly beautiful young woman and very smart to boot. Every time I see here we talk about writing. She loves Frost at Midnight, Emma and Plato.
This last time we talked about Plato. While eating Indian food with a group of people we know and love, which I think is an ideal setting to discuss Plato. She mentioned The Symposium, The Republic and The Phaedo. I, rather unfairly, asked her questions about the arguments and plots of the dialogues thereby putting her on the spot in front of others. She came through with flying colours as I hoped but was not absolutely certain she would do.
She'd never read The Phaedrus though. I gave her my copy as a going away present.
For my money, this is the greatest Platonic dialogue of them all. It's about erotic love and the central issue is whether it's better to have sex with someone you are in love with or whether it's better to have a casual arrangement with someone you are attracted to but not infatuated with. Three quarters of the book are the greatest defense of erotic infatuation ever written.
Of course, being Plato, it's about man-boy love, Plato was the original NAMBLA man (I love putting things like that in posts as Google bait to see who they draw in).
It has another weird twist though. as I said, three quarters of the book is a defense of erotic love. The last quarter is suddenly about rhetoric. This really puts some readers off. "Where the heck did that come from?" It's not completely crazy, Socrates and Phaedrus (the only two characters in the story, "Phaedrus" is pronounced fee-druss BTW) have been discussing not so much love as speeches about love such that, logically, the transition makes perfect sense.
What is hard to understand is the rhetorical transition. It just seems natural to go from an analysis of a bunch of speeches about love to a discussion of love in general. To go from a these speecehs to a discussion of speeches in general seems weird.
The answer to the puzzle is that Plato thought that love speech was the ultimate form of speech. All of the speeches in The Phaedrus as well as those in The Symposium can be read not just as speeches about love but also as attempts to seduce particular people. I suspect that, for Plato, seduction was the highest form of communication. A political speech or a legal argument was a poor cousin by comparison.
I think he was right. Nothing tells you that a man is not really a man more decisively than his not being able to talk comfortably and persuasively to women.
PS: Percy Bysshe Shelley did a translation of The Symposium and, even better, it is available in a good, cheap edition today*. He did not do The Phaedrus, and that is tragic, but his one Plato translation is one of those books you have to read; ideally, you should read it when you are nineteen.
*This site is not monetized. I get not a single cent from the links I put up.
Exceptions to keeping secrets
A man is very careful about the secrets he promises to keep because he will keep a secret almost all the time.
It follows then that the first rule about secrets is not to accept every one that is offered to you. Like all responsibilities, secrets seem like something worth having but usually are not. But if you take them, you're stuck with them and you have to follow through on the promise to keep them, even if the promise is only implied when you were told the secret.
Secrets are like keys. Every key on your key ring is power but when you get too many it goes the the other way—you become the person at every one else's beck and call when they need a door opened. You gain power through secrets but you also surrender a little at the same time.
If you're going to keep a secret, both the secret and the person who gives it to you have to worth it.
There are exceptions where we should not keep a secret. You need a really good reason to keep a secret from the police for example.
The more important exception is if you are married. The only secrets a man keeps from his wife are secrets such as what her birthday present is going to be.
A married man may tell his wife anything he hears and trust that she too will keep it a secret. If that really bothers you then always pick single men as your confidants although that single man may get married someday too. The point being that God and spouse, in that order, take precedence over all other relationships.
Sometimes I have had to establish this boundary with people I know who fail to see this. It innevitably angers them when I tell them but marriage is serious business, much more serious than any other relationship except the one we have with God. Because it is important to make the point, I make the telling as unpalatable as possible for them.
Hef and sexual objectification
Roger Ebert has written a long piece defending Hugh Hefner. It's worth a read, click on over and check it out.
I don't know that I agree entirely. In any case, I have no intention of dealing with it point by point. But there was one issue that leapt out at me:
Nobody taught me to regard women as sex objects. I always did. Most men do. And truth to tell, most women regard men as sex objects.
Like a broken record now, the people who want to condemn porn come back to this point about objectification over and over again. But Ebert is absolutely correct here. Learning to objectify women sexually is like learning how to like the taste of sugar or the touch of soft, warm skin. No one has to teach us to do this because we all do it naturally.
A further point made by Christina Nehring in her book A Vindication of Love is that it is normal and good that we objectify one another during sex. In fact, as she notes, most of us sometimes want to be thought of as objects, that is what we want when we want people to think us desirable.
And Nehring, perhaps because she is a woman, gets to the real problem which is not porn. Here it is from a male perspective. I get up in the morning and go to buy coffee and, as I walk down my driveway, two hot girls from the local university go by. I look at them and I objectify them. To be honest, they're helping but I meet them more than halfway. I think of them all day and at three o'clock in the afternoon, I switch Firefox to private browsing and Goggle "college girl" and click on images. Now I'm really objectifying. Okay, but I'm also in love with a real woman: I don't think of the woman I love and cherish like that too do I? Surely I don't objectify her.
Well, if Ebert is right, and he is, I do. We all do. And while it may be true that most women sometimes objectify men, I suspect the real issue is that women are more amenable to being objectified than we and they let on. That, as Katherine Hepburn does to Jimmy Stewart in the final scenes of Philadelphia Story, there are some moods where she will shock us by asking "Why ever not?"
And that is the real problem isn't it? This objectification doesn't seem to fit with our ideas about love. A man expects a woman to behave herself naturally.
I grew up in a tough mill town and there were several porn theatres just a few blocks from my house. I saw a few porn films in my teen years and that a lot of that early porn tended to always follow the same plot. A woman would be bored with her current lover or even just curious and she'd set out on an adventure in which she'd have sex with a variety of partners: one would typically be black, another would be an anonymous encounter where names weren't even exchanged, one would be dominant, one would be another woman .... And it always ended with her, now fully satisfied, and in bed with some guy she loved (often the guy she'd started with).
The reason for this plot line was, if you'll pardon my being a little explicit, to satisfy the customers. In the days of porn before people watched it at home, a bunch of guys would be in a theatre, none of them sitting very close to anyone else. Every once in a while one of the guys would get up and leave and that was because the woman had just played the scene he'd come for, whoops, I mean the scene that matched his preset desire. Yeah, I know, it's gross. If the floor was sticky you didn't think that someone had spilled their soft drink if you know what I mean.
Now you know why home video revolutionized the medium.
But here is the thing, remember that last scene, the one where the woman is united in blissful sex with the guy she really loves? It was boring. Really, really boring. And unfair if you think about it. She gets her hard core thrills with a bunch of strangers and then she comes home and has gentle, soft-focus "lovemaking"with the guy who really matters to her. Even porn maintains this double standard: enjoying a woman is one thing and love is something else.
There is something that tells us that it may be okay to go out and sow some oats but then you're supposed to come home and settled own. We might think it an important developmental stage to have some fun or we might think it just tolerable or we might think it a serious sin requiring serious penance but that objectification stuff has nothing to do with love.
A weird jump
Hold on 'cause I'm going to take a really weird leap now.
In the early 1980s, I was in a Thai restaurant and unwillingly eavesdropping on the couple at the next table. The woman at the table said she was really tired because she had been working so hard lately. The man made sympathetic sounds and supportive comments.
Sounds like a pretty normal conversation right? But it wasn't because she then went on to explain why she was so tired. She told him that every night, after falling a sleep, she traveled to another plane of existence where she met other people like herself. There, she and they worked all night long to build a new world. This new world was necessary because we were so determinedly destroying the present world that all humanity would have to be transported to this new place. They were working against the clock because no one knew when time would run out for the earth but it could be any time now.
I caught the guys eye at one point and he looked a little ashamed. Whether it was at the conversation or about what he was doing I don't know. After they had left, I thought, "It's amazing the crap men will pretend to agree with just to get laid."
And it is amazing.
But, looking back through the lens of twenty-five years life experience since then it seems to me that the real exploitation ran the other way. This woman wasn't crazy. She may have talked herself into sort of believing some of what she was saying but her talk wasn't the talk of a delusional person. I think she knew full well that by holding out the prospect of her putting out she could string this guy along. She knew that he would play along with her self-aggrandizing fantasy life in return for a chance at sex.
Hers is an extreme example but you can step into any coffee-shop in the land and catch a conversation in which someone with sexually power strings along some poor victim. A lot of women never even come across with the sex. They have the power and they use it.
It's rarer to see the game work the other way but it can happen. There was a guy named Adrian who went to school with me who did it. He came from a family of superb athletes—both his parents were elite cross country skiers—and he had blonde hair, blue eyes and a body to live for. He used to sit at parties with a guitar and girls who desperately wanted to have sex with him would endure hours of Adrian talking about what he called "my music" in order to do so.
Typically, he'd have more than one pursuing him in cut-throat competition. I remember sitting with my then girlfriend across the room one party and making some mocking comment about what was going on with Adrian and realizing from her offended response, that, if I hadn't been there, she would have been right in their with them.
The thing is Adrian could barely play that guitar. He had to ask other people to tune it for him. He was trying to learn, or at least he said he was. He had a notion every bit as crazy as the woman building a new world. He thought he already had the music in him and learning how to play guitar was just a technical detail like someone deciding they wanted to go to Cleveland and all they had to do was buy a ticket. And so he talked about his music and he used the girls who were willing to listen to him to make the fantasy seem a little more real.
The man in the restaurant and the girls at the party were both objectifying someone else sexually but the real exploitation was going the other way. Sexual objectification is an exploitation game where you can turn the tables at any time. The trout can aggressively pursue the fly, thinking of it with no more compassion than we think of when eating a potato chip. But the trout can also be enticed to attack a carefully presented decorative bit of feather and gaudily coloured thread with a hook in it.
Let Lady Gaga explain it to you:
Now I get even weirder
Okay, this is where I take all this somewhere eudaemonistic.
I think the lesson here is that what can redeem us is if we see what we are doing as fitting into some larger end. For me that means this:
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
There is nothing you can do to stop looking at women with lust. You're genetically programmed to do it. There is nothing you can do to stop wanting to see her naked, to stop wanting to get her so hot that she does things she doesn't normally do and so forth. And there is nothing you can do to change the fundamentally aggressive, predatory nature of sex; as I've said before, sex may start loving and tender and it should definitely end that way but no man or woman is thinking about peace, love and understanding in the 90 seconds immediately before coming and anyone who tells you different is a liar.
The thing you do have control over is the larger context. What life plan do all these individual acts fit into? Is this going somewhere real or are you too just bluffin' with your muffin or whatever it is you have?
That won't sit very well with some, Hef wouldn't like it for sure, but I think that if you really want to avoid exploiting others, you need to fit into God's plan.
Go ahead and generalize about women
I still remember a terribly pained conversation in which I upset a friend of mine by laughing his face.
In the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation he pounced on something I said really aggressively. It was a conversation about politics not about women (I'll get to women later). The problem was that while there were lots of cases to back up my claim it wasn't universally true. And I said, "I didn't say it was universally true I said itw as generally true."
That's when it happened. My friend took up this very solemn attitude and said, "You should never generalize."
That's when I laughed. It wasn't just the obvious irony impairment in his using a generalization to condemn generalizations, although that was, and is, funny. It was the serious moral tone. He said it in the same tone he might have used to reprimand someone for drinking and driving.
That tone goes double when it comes to generalizations about women. It's just not done nowadays. It used to be done all the time and even feminist icons like Virginia Wolf used to generalize freely about women.
When I say "generalize" here, I mean generalize in in a critical way. No one will give you even a moment's grief if you say that women are more sensitive (in a good way), that they have more meaningful friendships or that they have more empathy than men.
No the manly generalization is the critical one and all men will find they are discouraged from doing so. This is weird because women make critical generalizations about men with no fear of retribution.
The thing about generalizations—are you sitting down for this?—is that they can either be done well or they can be done poorly. I know, generally speaking, that is about as trite a thing as can be said. But it is nevertheless true.
There are hundreds of stupid generalizations about women. If I hear one more person telling me about what to do when a woman asks, "Does this make me look fat?" I am going to laugh in his face so hard he'll get spittle in his eyes. But there are useful generalizations to be made and no man should stop out of some fear of being a pig for having done so.
There is a response to that Katherine Miller piece I wrote about earlier here. It's a male response. The male in question, whose name is Cameron Parker, chides Miller for being too concerned with mere style issues and not for the deeper truths. I can't help but think he also wants to suggest that he himself does many of the symbolic things Miller considers unmanly but is not actually unmanly.
Which is a bit of a problem in itself. I remember seeing a skinhead back in the 1980s who assured me that he wasn't like those other skinheads and the proof if this was that he wore a button that said "Skinheads against racism".
Symbols are more than buttons we can take off or put on. No one can do like some Lewis Carrol character and declare that symbols, gestures and clothing mean only what they want them to mean. It matters how we wear the symbols but the also symbols mean something independent of anything we might indend. The clothes, make up and tattooes on Amy Winehouse in the video for "I don't want to go to rehab" tell us pretty clearly that she should go to rehab.
But Cameron Parker misses the point entirely and thinks that Miller is just being superficial when she list the attributes she doesn't like. And you can see it here:
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short.” From “Man Up,” it’s clear that Miller likes her men nasty, brutish and tall.
The problem here is that Parker doesn't grasp what brutish really means. Miller does and gives us a good example here:
Fratastic can thrill a girl with Lost Generation levels of raging and fluent French, but in between tequila shots, he’ll judge anyone with a harshness that stings.
That is what real brutishness looks like. It's that combination of accomplishment with a deep insecurity that causes the person to go for the dagger to the kidneys when they think they can get away with it. You want to see what a real brute is like, read Frank Rich in the New York Times.
What Miller wants—and she says so—is a man she can rely on in a crisis. That Cameron Parker can't tell the difference between that and brutishness doesn't speak well of him.
Someone over at The Corner has this quote up today:
America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.
That's from a young conservative named Katherine Miller and it's an excerpt from a new book. You can read the entire excerpt here. (Readers of this blog should click on the link just to see whose photograph they picked to portray what a man should be.)
In my typical shallow way, I'm going to focus on just the bit I have highlighted. There is something important there. It's an odd thing for a single man to understand a whole lot about women's dress. For a married man it probably ought not to be; for his wife has presumably been telling him about this stuff and he, therefore, ought to have been paying attention. But a single guy knowing enough about women's dress to run off the designer's name is a bad thing.
Proust could do it—I've been reading Proust again—but that is no recommendation. Proust wasn't into girls and he wasn't much of a man in any case, although he was a great novelist.
When the Lemon Girl and I were just beginning dating but not being public about it, a coworker of ours once complimented her shirt. I was a little surprised by the compliment at the time because it was a fairly ordinary shirt of the sort that a lot of girls wore. The Lemon Girl just smirked at this and then patiently explained to me, as one might explain to a child, that the shirt wasn't the point. "When a guy says 'nice shirt' he really means 'nice breasts'," she said.
And suddenly all was clear; that was what he meant and I knew it because he'd expressed the thought to me privately. The point being, that is what a real man is supposed to mean when he compliments a woman on her clothes. The point of complimenting a woman on her clothing is not to compliment the clothes. The point is, "You look good in that shirt," with the emphasis very much on the "you".
Complimenting a woman on her clothing is a polite way of telling a woman she has a beautiful body without being explicit about it. It's polite because you leave her the option of not acknowledging the full meaning of what you have said. If you tell her you really like her skirt she can smile and say "thank you", thereby acknowledging what ought to be the real meaning of your compliment, or she can tell you where she bought it, thereby deflecting both the meaning and you away from her intimate self. There is an entire secret language, consisting of both words and gestures, that goes with these things.
An old roommate of mine used to spend a fortune in pursuit of women he had zero chance with because he just didn't get it. He would particularly fall for waitresses because they would be nice to him so he kept trying. And he kept trying and trying and trying and trying.
What Doug could never pick up was the subtle signals that these women were sending him. They were nice to him but they were also drawing a line. He could never see that girls had a way of receiving compliments that was receptive but would also send signals that beyond a certain point he would not go. The whole issue was particularly complicated with people in the service industry because a good part of their job requires them to be receptive and friendly so they couldn't really tell him to piss off without risking the loss of their job.
(As an aside, what Doug did was, as a consequence, very close to harassment. It wasn't overt enough to count as such legally speaking but I'm sure some of these girls felt quite pestered by the guy.)
Doug couldn't see this and after a while I began to suspect that the real problem was that he wouldn't because Doug had a deep resentment of being rejected. A big part of being an adult is being rejected. It's one of those things an adult learns to deal with.
Doug still remembered a girlfriend who'd dumped him when he broke his leg skiing (a really serious break that ended his competitive skiing). On one of her visits to him afterward, when his parent's helpfully left them alone, she stunned him by telling him it was over.
When I first met Doug, I took this story at face value. I just took it that his ex-girlfriend was a heartless bitch who'd walked into his family home to see him lying helpless on the couch, encased in this huge cast, and callously dumped him.
As I got to know him better, I began to wonder if there wasn't more to it. I never doubted the facts. I knew the facts were right as the story was later told to me by a friend of the girl who dumped him and she told essentially the same facts and she didn't think much of what her, by then, ex-friend had done to Doug either. But she did wonder why he was still going on about something that happened back when he was seventeen now that he was in his early twenties.
That bothered me too. And when I looked at the way he talked to girls, and the way he missed what ought to have been obvious hints, I began to see denial. I have no doubt that his earlier girlfriend might have been nicer about it, although we might also wonder how much nicer it would be to have nursed him through his injury only to dump him.
My guess is that she saw something in Doug when he hurt himself that she didn't like. I don't really know this for certain but I think she saw something about the way Doug was dealing with the accident. She saw a sort of victim-hood or, more accurately, an attitude to victim-hood. For Doug really was a victim, he wasn't making that part up. But she saw a guy who was responding in a way that told her he wasn't much of a man.
She may not have thought it through consciously. Consciousness is over-rated. The guy who saw the Lemon Girl girl looking really good in a shirt may not be consciously aware that the thin horizontal stripes accentuated both the curve of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach. He just knew that he really liked what he was seeing.
Doug's girlfriend really didn't like what she was seeing.
And it came out when I knew him as a kind of solipsism. He only saw things as they related to him. He didn't see women he liked as other people who needed to be impressed and he didn't see that women looked at him and they wanted to see manliness the same way he wanted to look at them and see womanliness. So he never bothered learn the language that would have allowed them to tell him whether or not they were interested because that way he'd never have to face rejection
(There will be at least one more post on this subject.)
Do I cry? Yes I do. At funerals and patriotic memorials yes. Sometimes at the theatre or when listening to music. Sometimes when remembering things. Very happy memories tear me up.
As a rule I try not to however and I resist it whenever I think people are watching precisely because I believe that men are supposed to be in control of themselves at all public moments outside of funerals and patriotic memorials.
I do think the sight of a man struggling against tears can be moving. Provided he wins. Otherwise not so much.
But what if a woman asks or tells you to let your emotions show? Should you do it?
Absolutely not.
Here is what is happening. We all imagine that what works for us will work for others. Women like talking about their feelings and having a good cry helps them get over things. So they ask us to do the same when they are feeling down.
That's why they do it.
Of course they also tell us that they won't think less of us if we do. She isn't lying to you when she says this. She is lying to herself. She will think less of you. And it doesn't matter how much she doesn't want to think less of you. She can will herself with every bit of will power she has not to think less of you and it won't work.
Here is why it won't work. What she loves about you is your emotional stability and your strength. That's what makes you different from her. It's what makes you the rock she can build her life on. She won't hate you for getting weepy but she will think less of you. Your status will change from the sort of man she takes seriously to the sort of man she treats like one of the girls. You don't want to be that.
I know, I know, every once in a while you'll hear some woman talking about how wonderful her best girlfriend is and wishing that she could have that sort of relationship with a man. Does that sound like a good idea? Ask yourself this, do you want to be her best girlfriend? Don't consider the question in the abstract, notice how women actually treat their best girlfriends. Notice how they talk about their best girlfriend when she isn't around, notice the rivalry between women and their best girlfriends, and notice just how much they really trust one another (as opposed to how much they say they trust one another).
I'm serious, make a study of it and then decide,
Meanwhile, here are a few really good ways to deal with sadness in your life:
Go for a hike
Even better, go for a hike with a rucksack on your back.
Even better than that go for a hike with a rucksack full of fishing gear and a fly rod on your back.
Even better than that go for a hike with a rucksack full of fishing gear and a fly rod on your back and come back to have a Classic Bistro steak frites with a bottle of wine with someone you like.
Even better than that go for a hike with a rucksack full of fishing gear and a fly rod on your back and come back to have a Classic Bistro steak frites with a bottle of wine with someone you like who is female and can be counted on to wear something nice, flirt with you and talk about anything but what has you down.
Even better than that go for a hike with a rucksack full of fishing gear and a fly rod on your back and come back to have a Classic Bistro steak frites with a bottle of wine with someone you like who is female and can be counted on to wear something nice, flirt with you and talk about anything but what has you down unless you bring it up later while having a good whiskey in front of the fire and then will only listen sympathetically.
Even better than that go for a hike with a rucksack full of fishing gear and a fly rod on your back and come back to have a Classic Bistro steak frites with a bottle of wine with someone you like who is female and can be counted on to wear something nice, flirt with you and talk about anything but what has you down unless you bring it up later while having a good whiskey in front of the fire and then will only listen sympathetically and then will cuddle up next to you, kiss you and give you a really good ... uh, lets just say a really good time.
Cry or not to cry
The Serpentine One sent me a link to an article in the local paper about men crying. It appears that no matter how many times experts tell us that it is okay for men to cry, people are still surprised and disappointed in men when they do. Here is the key line from the article:
The article is, quite frankly, a lot of the usual crap featuring quotes from someone named Jackson Katz who is a "gender scholar". Pathetic.
The worst part is the unintentional irony. Quotes like this:
"There are these ritualized times when men are 'allowed' to cry and not have it count against them," says anti-sexism activist Jackson Katz, pointing to funerals, sports victories and moments of profound patriotism as examples. "But when you cry outside those occasions, your manhood is questioned. Part of male socialization is learning those rules."
Well, yes, that is exactly it. The problem is that Katz thinks it is a bad thing that men don't cry in front of others more often.
And then this:
"There's this idea that being a real man means being in control -- of others and of yourself.
"And crying is a metaphor for loss of control," says Katz, author of The Macho Paradox. "That's the heart of the matter right there."
How stupid is this? For starters, crying is not a metaphor losing control. To cry is to lose control. If you cry during a crisis you are useless.
And yes, a man is in control of himself. And he should be a good leader.
This is sort of a response to some of yesterday's comments but not really.
The point that was made in the comments was that the problem with Catholic priests commenting about sexual fantasies is that they don't know what they are talking about. Well, maybe they don't and maybe they do. Every Catholic priest was once a teenage boy ...
In any case, I think people can meaningfully think about experiences they have never had. I think that, for example, a fabulously wealthy movie star can do a convincing portrayal of someone working for minimum wage at a fried chicken restaurant in small town Mississippi. And I think a middle class high school kid from Finland really can sing and play the blues and I think a woman can understand male experience and vice versa.
It takes hard work and imagination but it can be done.
The problem with Monsignor Pope's observations about sexual fantasy is not that he couldn't have understood an experience he presumably doesn't have anymore but that he did not succeed in understanding it. And that may not be entirely his fault.
The truth is that it takes a lot of courage to understand ourselves well enough to really connect with others (and connect with ourselves). It's much to deal with any one of a number of preset identities and thrust them upon the people who make us a little uncomfortable. That, oddly enough, is what I think Monsignor Pope's did when he wrote about sexual fantasies. He began with the moral conclusion and then imagined the kind of inner experience that would support that conclusion. He didn't begin with the often puzzling if not downright weird ways we actually react.
Who knows why we fantasize? I don't. It isn't just about sex. Every culture in the world has a strong element of fiction and fantasy. How to make believe is one of the first things we teach children.
There is also a long line of moralists going back through time who have attacked our tendency to make believe. Monsignor Pope's argument descends from Plato through Saint Augustine through the modern anti-porn movement.
Augustine got more heated up about tragedy than porn. It bothered him, as it should bother us a little, that we can watch a tragic story on stage or the screen or listen to a sad song and cry about it while people right next to us suffer and we do nothing about it. The world is full of people who need love while we entertain ourselves with fantasies about love. There is a truth on Monsignor Pope's side of this: there are husbands and wives who sit feeling lonely and neglected while their spouse shows more interest in a fantasy than in them.
But it does not follow that the relation between fantasy love and real-life neglect is causal; it is not necessarily the case that these people neglect their spouses because they have fantasies. In some cases maybe they do but it much more likely that fantasy will increase someone's level of arousal and make them more likely to please their spouse.
The option that Monsignor Pope did not consider is this: what if fantasy can helps us to give ourselves more freely and completely to others? Or, and this is the point I am building towards, what if fantasy helps women to give themselves more freely and completely to the men they love? Because I think there is a difference between men and women here.
Think of a non-sexual example. Francine loves skiing and she is sitting at her desk working and she closes her eyes a moment to daydream about skiing. Does anyone seriously think even for a second that this moment of fantasizing makes her less likely to go skiing this weekend?
Okay, critics may say, but what about the content of the fantasy. If Francine lives in an eastern town with a small ski hill and she fantasizes about going to Vail, won't that make her more likely to be dissatisfied with what she has? I don't think so. I think the woman who is already dissatisfied with her local ski hill may well be more likely to fantasize about Vail but I don't think fantasizing about Vail will make the woman who enjoys skiing on her local hill less satisfied with it.
The thing is that women who know how to be satisfied tend to get satisfaction and women who don't know how to get satisfaction don't get it. Fantasizing about sex is one of the things women do to make their bodies respond. Think of it this way, if you want to smile you can just pull up the corners of your lips but if you want to be really smile you need to think of some happy thought first.
The thing about fantasy, however, is that it is fantasy. It doesn't have to be real and it follows its own rules and those rules are different from real life. What women fantasize about does not have to be anything like what they'd really want. In fact, there is no reason why the two should connect. It's fantasy after all.
Okay, but what about men? This is supposed to be the Manly Thor's Day post and here I am talking about women and their fantasies all the time. Well, here is where I will concede some ground to Monsignor Pope, it is different for men. I can't speak for all men but I tend not to fantasize during sex.
Not for any terribly profound moral reason. I don't have and never have had much trouble making my own body respond. For me the difference between good sex and great sex is the woman's reaction. When she is really aroused and excited things are better. Much, much better. If fantasy is going to get her there, then I want her to fantasize.
I'm going to get there anyway whether I fantasize or not and I'd rather she dressed up and flirted with me to warm me up because that is much more satisfying than my sitting around daydreaming about what she might do. That requires some considerable effort and role playing on her part. That is she has to get into her role for the occasion.
Why can't she just be herself? Well she is being herself but herself is a number of diverse roles that she can adopt for different occasions. And it isn't always easy for a woman to move from one to another.
Fantasizing will help her do this for exactly the same reason that visualizing success helps athletes achieve success. I want her to think about the kind of fantasy that will get her aroused and then behave in a away that parallels but does not correspond exactly to that fantasy. And, I'll be honest, I want her to do it for me. I see her willingness to sit down and fantasize this way—helped by whatever else helps her, dressing up, wine, music or even some self-stimulation—to get herself warmed up for love as a generous act to me. Because it is.
And that is difficult for her.
The challenge for me as a man is creating and sustaining an atmosphere where she will feel comfortable enough to fantasize about what she wants to fantasize about because it arouses her and opening the door to let me in on that experience. It is all the more difficult because her needs vary and often vary to the point of completely contradicting one another. But I can deal with it if I am willing to be a man about it.
