Intimacy fail

Manly Thor's Day Special
Adam Cohen has a tune out called "What Other Guy".  It's kind of an embarrassment, especially for a guy who is nearly 40.



Let's look at some of those lyrics:

I know what you look like in the morning
Your kisses are soft and warm
I can draw you with my eyes closed
See you with nothing on but the radio

I know how many years of French you took
Your favorite movies, your favorite books
I know what really gets you going… glowing

He's singing this to someone he calls "Anne". And then, at the end of all this bragging comes the big question:

What other guy knows you like that?

Adam? Please step into my study a moment, There are few things we need to discuss. Here, have a Bourbon. I think you should.

Here's the thing Adam: You might not like the answer to that question of yours. No, I don't know that but I'd bet it's a pretty safe bet. The stuff you're talking about here is sex and intimacy stuff and unless you're the only guy so far, at least one other guy, and probably more than one, knows all this too.

I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything but this stuff you identify is also pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. This is the sort of stuff some gushy 19-year-old might latch onto when he decides that, wow, he really is in love. And you haven't been 19 for twenty years now so it's kind of, ah, pathetic that you write like this.

You see, what is going on here is called narcissism. No, not narcissism in the sense that you need to see a shrink but narcissism as in a normal tendency in human beings that we all share. It's also something we all need to learn to control so it doesn't hurt us or others just like we all need  to control our tempers.

Let me explain a bit. Let's look at some more lyrics:

I know what your hands do when you're kissing
Your number one and number two favorite positions
I know how your skin glistens, listen
I know where you go with your beautiful friends
I know what you taste like when the night ends

Is that last line your big trump card? I'm sorry to be snide about it but the big question is is this really about what you know about her or about what you want to believe about yourself? Because it sounds a lot more like your point here is really about the sort of guy you believe you are.

Yeah, different women really do taste different and we all feel like a Provençal poet and bon vivant when we realize that for the first time but you don't really think she wants to think about that too much do you? What image do you want her to have here? Maybe you passing a blindfolded taste test? "More than half the Coke drinkers tested preferred Anne or could tell no difference".

Let's be honest kid, the thing that really drives this song is a certain self image: that you're the sort of man who really knows a woman. But any guy who has had Anne knows the sorts of things you list here and maybe they even know a couple more you don't know about yet.

Yes I am rather harping on about this but it's for your own good. Because this narcissism stuff is serious business and it can hurt you. And yes I've been there. I suspect most guys do this, although, as I say, most of us have been through it long before our 39th birthday.

Think about what happens if Anne dumps you, or cheats on you, or you over-hear her tell her best girlfriend that her ex-boyfriend Thomas was crazy and she couldn't stay with him but boy did he know her completely—he knew her so completely it scared her a bit. Maybe the thing she really likes about this relationship with you is that it isn't so intensely intimate and she feels safer that way? Would you hate her for that? Because that wouldn't be right would it? She wanted love before and she hoped that those previous relationships would turn into that so she let her previous guys know what got her going too. And it broke her heart when it didn't work. You can't blame her for that.

But if this whole thing is really about your self image—as I've unkindly suggested above—then you're going to have a hard time. Because then it won't really be the fact of the other guys so much as that she has destroyed your identity. You won't ever be able to see yourself as the sort of guy who really knows a woman again. And if you have a lot invested in that self image (and I'm guessing you have as you are Leonard Cohen's son after all and that is quite the shadow to grow up in) then it's going to tear you apart to lose it.

The good news is that everyone goes through this. There is a moment in every man's life when he thinks of himselfa s the kind of guy who:

• really knows women
• doesn't get cheated on
• is always taken seriously about sex and intimacy.

But you aren't that guy because nobody is.

The special thing here is not that you've noticed these things but that she has surrendered them to you. You sing:

I know what you want by what you're wearing
The kind of night you're preparing

Really? You know that? If you do, it's because she taught you buddy. And you should be damned grateful that she has. And now you need to know two things:

1. Are you good enough to warrant these gifts?
2. Is this the sort of shared surrender you should be basing a serious relationship on? (And I know you love your dad but the brutal truth is that he wasn't very good at answering this question as witnessed by a rather long line of failed relationships including, most notably, the one with your mum.)

Catching a train

I'm going on a little vacation and doing it, as is my wont, in a very old-fashioned way. In a little while, I'll be in my stateroom. I haven't checked whether there will be a connection so I don't know if I'll be able to post.

In the mean time, here is the great Elizabeth Cotten with the masterpiece that she wrote when still a girl.

It's one of the more endearing things about the song that it is a little girl's song. There is a weird sort of white guilt-driven reverse racism that leads us to see great depth in songs like these but it is, in fact, the  childlike view here that makes this great.

The age of dismissive assessments

Megan McArdle picks up on another depressing cultural trend, the tendency for modern critics have to jump to a dismissive summing up in commenting on just about anything. Her immediate target was a article in Forbes about a recent business debacle. McArdle says that she generally tends to agree that a harsh assessment is due but then wonders about the form it took.

But how do we get from "that was a bad idea" to "Reed Hastings doesn't understand what business he's in?"  When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?

And that is a good question.

Part of the answer is age.  When I was in my twenties I had a tendency to assume that anything that didn't make sense to me didn't make sense at all and I had a tendency to assume that anything that bored me did so because it was actually boring. And, truth be told, I haven't entirely grown out of that. Generally, however, there tended to be adults in the room to do as McArdle did here and say, "If you know so much about big business, why aren't you running one?"

Nowadays, a voice like McArdle's is a rarity. Even writers I love reading do this sort of thing. And I'm pretty sure that someone could easily embarrass me by finding examples of me doing the very thing I'm complaining about here. There are probably quite a few of them. So the point here is not that some bad people do this and that they should have their knuckles wrapped.

What is it then? It's the larger cultural trend. This comes with an era that reveres youth. And youth isn't being helped by our reverence. Quite the contrary.

Disneyfication of the culture

I was standing in line at the express line at the grocery store this morning when a female boomer in her fifties ahead of me said in a raised tone, "How do you know about that song? It's ancient." She was speaking to the 19 year old guy at the cash. And he said, "The Lion King."

And then he added, I'm a Disney kid." To which she laughed and said, "We all are."

I'm no Disney hater and have defended them here before, but I find that very sad. It's not a good thing when the only things that tie us together culturally speaking are Disney, baby boomer hits from the 1960s and Christmas. Yes, I'm exaggerating but we're tending in that direction. It's all the worse when you consider that Disney makes very little original contribution to the culture besides recycling already existing cultural sources and rendering them banal in the process.

Case in point, this old song, whatever it was. I didn't hear the name of the song but I'm guessing it was "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

It's happened twice now so it must be really important

Sort of political Monday
Last week, Susannah Breslin blogged about her positive diagnosis for breast cancer. Medicine is a place where "positive" is a bad thing and "negative" a good thing.

Today, Pastabagel at Partial Objects writes about a woman who live-blogged her breast exam only to get an unexpected "positive" jolt. Pastabagel is really good on this so you might want to read the whole thing. For my part, I want to zero in on the moral and metaphysical aspects he brings up in two observations.

Here is the first:

At the end of her doctor’s visit, she learned she may have cancer. That is a frightening and sad conclusion to what I can only assume she thought would be a routine examination. But by publicizing her experience this way, she highlights the poignant limit of the connected world, and that limit is this: we all face death alone.

A good point made before by Freud and Wittgenstein but worth repeating to ourselves daily. Death is the limit of, well, quite possibly everything. And maybe you can already see where I'm going with this but are wondering how this is a political issue?

Here is the second of Pastabagel's profound observations:

But more importantly, and unlike photography, social media validates our own mistaken belief that our lives are worth visiting, that our private joys and tragedies somehow play out on a grander scale than is actually the case.

Psychotherapist Otto Rank wrote that the fear of life is the fear of separation and individuation. The fear of becoming an individual. Conversely, the fear of death is the fear of the loss of individuality.

So let's talk about Jesus now. No I'm not asking you to believe (I'm not insisting that you do anyway). But I want to consider some aspects that come with belief and the political impact this has had here in the west.

We argue more about this question on the leading edge of the experience: when exactly does that mass of cells become human? But what about the other end? When does "I" disappear and become organic matter suitable for growing plants out of? And why do I, even after death, deserve special consideration different from, for example, the cow I am eating parts of as I type this? (And yes, I know some people would say I don't.)

If we want to be "humanists" whatever we might make of that term, there are two very different ways into the position.

1. One is to argue that there is something about "humanity" that is so darn special that every single "human" must be treated according to different standards than those that apply to everything else on earth.
2. The second is to argue that there is nothing special about me all by myself and whatever special humanity I have is a function of the fact that God so loved me that ....

You can believe whichever one you want, meaning that I can't force you to take my side here. But consider the politics a bit. What consequences in terms of moral culture, which is the soil that politics is planted in, do you think follow from each of the above choices?

"Adam" means soil. From dust thou art and to dust thou shall return. That brute fact is as true for the atheist as it is for anyone else. But if we take it seriously, as seriously as we should, what are the limits of the claim that human beings are so special? Why should anyone else take our belief that "our private joys and tragedies somehow play out on a grander scale" seriously? Other than that we really, really want them to that is?

And how many other religions are there that attribute our specialness to God's loving us? That I would be nothing but another mass of organic matter except that God loves me? How many other cultures are built on that understanding? Yes, I'll cheerfully grant that our culture is full of lies and hypocrisy about this but you have to believe something in order to be a liar and hypocrite about it. So how many cultures are there like this? I'm not saying there aren't any, although I can't think of any off the top of my head. But politically speaking, if we are asking about one group of people accommodating themselves to another, it would matter a whole lot wouldn't it?

Are you serious?

Womanly virtues Friday
Let's take on the weird Time cover controversy. These covers all came out for the same week:

This issue has a lot of people asking, Does Time think Americans are stupider than Europeans? And  The Last Psychiatrist writing at Partial Objects points out something else:

The truth is slightly more complicated and simultaneously a lot scarier.

The problem is that the American audience for Time is 50/50 male/female, but for the European version it’s 66/34 male/female; and the Asian Time is 80/20. In other words, Time doesn’t think Americans are dumber than Europeans, it thinks American women are dumber than European men.

 Except, as he acknowledges, not really. The cover is intended to attract newsstand buyers so what Time really thinks is that potential newsstand buyers are more likely to be somewhat less wealthy and more female in the US than other markets and therefore less likely to be interested in hard news.

Only, lets take the "thinks" out of that analysis. Time magazine knows this to be true. And the issue is not intelligence but seriousness. Time knows that there is a large audience of magazine buyers in North America who are not terribly serious people and it knows that a lot of these people are women.

Note that I am not saying that there are no North American women interested in a serious news magazine. Of course there are. You can spot them because they read The Economist.

But anyone who has bought groceries will know that there is a large market for magazines for silly and frivolous people and will further know that this market is made up mainly of women. At Time Inc. they know this better than anyone because they created this market with People magazine. And People made even more money than Time because nobody ever went broke underestimating etc.

And that is a problem. There is a significant subset of women who read tripe like Time and watch tripe like The View because they aren't serious people and they aren't interested in becoming serious people.

The temptation is to blame the supply side of the equation. So long as magazines and shows aimed at women are shallow and unserious, women won't change. But the problem really flows the other way. So long as a lot women keep buying this stuff, they will remain shallow and unserious.

Taming the beast within

Manly Thor's Day Special
There is a biography of George F Kennan out that has led a few liberals to channel their inner tory. Consider this quote from Louis Menand in his review:

Still, buried within Kennan's realism there is a moral view: that in relations of power, which is what he thought international relations ultimately are, people can't be trusted to do the right thing. They will do what the scorpion does to the frog -- not because they choose to but because it's their nature. They can't help it. This is an easy doctrine to apply to other nations, as it is to apply to other people, since we can always see how professions of benevolence might be masks for self-interest. It's a harder doctrine to apply to ourselves. And that was, all his life, Kennan's great, overriding point. We need to be realists because we cannot trust ourselves to be moralists. 

 This is a familiar point to anyone who has read Lionel Trilling. Liberals tend to get swept up in the notion that human beings are perfectible. But they aren't perfectible. And thus the requirement to be, as Menand puts it, "realists".

Ta-Nehisi Coates, adds that the really interesting aspect of this is not political but personal:

Kennan is talking about how to govern a country. But I read him as also talking about how to govern ourselves.

And the quote from Brennan that leads him to this conclusion is this one:

Kennan himself "stressed the importance of the psychological dimension" in his life. He told Gaddis that "the inner emotional life of any person, as Freud discovered, is a dreadful chaos. We all have vestiges of our animalistic existence in us." Consequently, "good form," whether it involved the ceremonies of diplomacy or the constraints of marriage, "is really the thing to live for." He continued, "'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.' My God, I've coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so into the eighties." "All that has to be fought with. But the main thing is to try to play your role in a decent way."

Think about that for a while: "good form is really the thing to live for". Everyone be a good chap. (That quote, by the way, comes from another review of the Kennan biography in The New York Review of Books.)

Coates picks up, and he is right to do so, on the marriage stuff:

I think if someone had explained marriage to me in this way, as a younger person, I might have walked the aisle sooner. I understood the point of monogamy pretty well, having seen the other options up close. But I've never grasped ritual and ceremony because it's mostly been explained to me in gauzy sentimental vocabulary. ("A moment you'll never forget..." "Happy for the rest of your life..." "A beautiful moment..." etc.) I've always been more susceptible -- in both my personal and my political thinking -- to all our efforts to tame the beast within. 

And that is right. Because you will covet other women after you get married. You'll look over and think, "I'd love to see those ____!" and that is a problem because after you saw them, you'd want to squeeze them and then, and then, and then. And that desire will never go away. (And most men don't want it to go away.)

So, what do we do about it?

And here, I think, Menand and Coates might not like where their logic of the thing goes. For what does it mean to, "Play your role in a  decent way"? And then there are the questions that implies: "What role?" and "What social context does that role exist in?"

That second question is especially  troublesome because the role applies differently to men and women and different cultures handle this in vastly different ways. Infidelity is an issue for women too, of course, but women typically struggle with different problems when it comes to infidelity. Most women don't get on a bus or go into a coffee shop and see at least one person that they just want right now and that happens to me just about every time I get on a bus or go into a coffee shop.

But you can't change the inner behaviour, just the outer behaviour. And that means conforming to a role. It means being a good chap. That means that playing my role in a d decent way even though what is going on inside would shock my female companions.

It's fine to say "play your role in a decent way" but that requires an awful lot of stage setting to be a meaningful. It means something entirely different in western society where men are expected to  respect and even revere women as opposed to Iran where women's bodies are treated as occasions for sin. Like it or not, to talk about governing ourselves in this way requires not just that each individual look tame their inner beast but they do so according to the roles and conventions of a particular society.

An aside for other Christians, I think the key question for us to decide is what Jesus really meant by  "lust in your heart". Is that, as many people have wanted to believe, a psychological statement? Or does he mean you have to go a step beyond your normal psychological reactions?