Passive aggression

I know, it's supposed to be "passive-aggressive" and not "passive aggression".

But here's the thing: the easiest person in the world to lie to is yourself. That's counter-intuitive because you know you're lying when you lie to yourself so you should be able to catch it. You don't catch it, however, because you are co-operating with the liar. The fact that you and the liar are the same person makes that co-operation ridiculously easy.

That is why we all mess up on passive-aggressive even though we know what it means.

It doesn't help that words tend to have different volumes. "Passive" is a rather passive word that meekly fades into the background and "aggressive" makes a lot of noise. When we use the expression, we hear the following:

passive-aggressive

And all we can we think about is the aggression. I think we can get a better grasp on it if we think of passive as modifying the aggression.

The mistake is to think that passive-aggressive means to put up with a lot of nonsense until you can't stand it anymore and then you lash out irrationally. That's not actually what it means. Of course, that is something that we all do. And that kind of explosion is always preceded by genuinely passive-aggressive behaviour. But genuine passive-aggressive behaviour usually doesn't produce that sort of explosion. It's analogous to the relationship between reckless driving and accidents—you could drive recklessly for years without having an accident.

And for most of us, it certainly is for me, the real problem is not the explosions that rarely but occasionally happen but the stuff we do all the time without any serious consequences.

If you think of "passive" as modifying "aggression" you get a better image. Now, that passive is shrinking that aggression rather than meekly disappearing in front of it. For that is what passive-aggressive behaviour really is. It's the habit—all virtues and vices are ingrained habits—of saying "yes" when you really mean "no". And then you start failing. You forget to do stuff, you do it poorly, you procrastinate. None of this seems aggressive because it's all so passive.

And the solution, perverse as this will seem, is to stop being passively aggressive and become bluntly aggressive. The solution to being passive-aggressive is to start saying "no" much more often.

More to come ...

Does that brain study really prove what we think it proves? Or, the long arm of Descartes strikes again?

You may have read that having a male brain will earn you more money. Or maybe that female brains are better at multitasking. But there is no such thing as a female or male brain, according to the first search for sex differences across the entire human brain. It reveals that most people have a mix of male and female brain features. And it also supports the idea that gender is non-binary, and that gender classifications in many situations are meaningless.

First thing to consider is that this study may or may not be right. We won't know for certain until a whole lot of checking and challenging is done and that will take, at a minimum, the better part of a decade.

But, just for the purposes of argument, let's take it as read that the study is right. That there are no significant differences between male brains and female brains. What would that prove? And, What wouldn't it prove?

Just this morning, while walking my Schnauzer, I saw a game of Quidditch. It's a pretty silly game played by pretty silly people but, that's okay, because playing games is largely about being silly. Quidditch is kind of like the game in the Harry Potter books except that there is no magic involved, which, come to think of it, means that it's completely unlike the game in the books. But it is a game and an athletic game at that.

It was being played by both men and women and the men were, with one exception, how to put this kindly, not very athletic. All except the one were pathetic, unfit slobs to be honest. The women were in better shape and I would guess that they all go to exercise classes and eat healthy food. I'm reasonably confident in this judgment as the women were wearing skin tight clothing that made it rather easy to assess their bodies. They also ran quickly and smoothly without fatiguing. They were pretty fit. For women. And there's the rub for the men completely dominated the game. And nobody playing seemed surprised or dismayed that this was the case.

What has this to do with brains? Well, did you notice how the above study has a strong rationalist bias embedded in it? The whole argument is framed in a way that the only possible way to define "gender" is in terms of brains. You couldn't say it assumes that our brains do or do not define gender because that wouldn't be nearly strong enough to define the way the study has been framed. The question is set forward in terms that no other conclusion is possible. It does the equivalent of asking, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

But let's try another question: If the brain is not determining gender, could something else be doing the work? Something like, here's a crazy idea, your body maybe? Want to know if you're a man or a woman? Lift the waistband of your pants or skirt and look down.

That runs against one idea of freedom. It was an idea my parents were very fond of. "You can be anything you want to be if you just set your mind to it." Or, "set your brain to it", if you're more physically minded (and this should strike us, there is something decidedly unphysical about wanting to speak in terms of "minds" or "brains" to begin with). But your brain may be irrelevant. You can take the same engine and put it in a car or a school bus and it won't make the car able to carry forty students and it won't make the school bus as fast as the car. You may think that gender is a social construct but you aren't going to make most girls as good at Quidditch as most boys will be.

If we accept the possibility that the same brain may end up functioning in very different ways then we might consider the possibility that it will be very different when we put it into a body with lots of muscle, that is flooded with testosterone and has a penis and testicles as compared to a body that has less muscle, a completely different hormone profile and a vagina and ovaries.

It occurs to just about everyone to wonder, at some point in our lives, what it would be like to inhabit another person's body. What would it be like to "be inside" a body with different sex organs. But notice the move you quietly made without acknowledging it simply by wondering about this "possibility" that is currently impossible and may never be possible. You have assumed that the "you" in this story is something other than your body. You're talking as if your identity was something like the driver of a car and that you could simply get out of one and into another.

The assumption here is that your mind, and not your brain, "mind" meaning the things you experience, believe and remember, is what makes you who you are. But there is no particular reason to conclude that. It might well be that putting your brain in another body would force you to change who you are completely by forcing you to experience, believe and remember completely differently than you now do.

If that's true, and I think it is, then the moral questions arising from gender differences are as simple as figuring out your sex—male or female— and then trying to be as good at being a man or as good at being a woman as you can be.

Come back with me to grade school a moment and let's ask a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys what it would be like to "be" inside a girl's body for a change. One of the boys will inevitably make a joke about how the first thing he would do would be to take his/her clothes off and check out a naked girl. One good thing about it, thinks the heterosexual male, is that you could spend all the time you wanted looking at and touching a girl body. And that may be one of the neat things about being a girl for some girls (have unlimited access to touch a boy's body is a bigger part of the thrill of being a boy than most boys would like to admit). But what if you don't like what you see? As a boy, what you see is a big part of what you like about girl's bodies and some bodies thrill you more than others and some not at all. And, while the average boy or man thinks it's pretty cool to touch breasts, it's different to touch yourself than it is to touch someone else. You're still going to want to touch other people and, well, that's going to take some working out isn't it. And, eventually, you're going to get around to thinking that it would be nice to have other people touch you and there are going to be a lot more boys stepping forward to offer than girls and you just may not find any of the few girls who do step forward appeal to you. And when you're finished working all that out, you might stop being a boy brain in a girl's body and just be a girl al the way through.

Or, you could make yourself miserable and unhappy for the rest of your life by fighting against it.

Aggression and vulnerability

Aggression doesn't get much love.

There has to be more to it than that. We (and hundreds of other species) wouldn't have evolved to display aggression if it didn't accomplish something useful.

It's primarily a defensive tactic. Acting in an aggressive manner is sort is like waving a gun around without meaning to use it. We hope that it will deter others without our having to follow through. Thus, aggression often makes us weaker. The only person aggression works for is the person who intends to follow through. In gun safety classes, they tell you never to pull a gun out unless you intend to shoot someone. That applies to aggression as well.

I recently had to deal with an unacceptably aggressive man and, unlike what I usually do, I thought through all the above. The first thing I did was to determine that he could not hurt me. Or, to put it another way, that should he do his worst, I could live with the consequences. Once I was satisfied that I had more moral and physical strength, I worked out my response. My strategy was threefold: 1) Forget about him and what he wants and relentlessly focus on my desired outcome; 2) Remember that while the aggressive actor needs an immediate response it is not in my interest to give it to him; 3) Stand up for what I wanted in a quiet but unshakeable way. It was a little unnerving how completely he caved.

Hiding your vulnerabilities isn't exactly the same thing as aggression but it is driven by similar motives. If, like me, you come from a family where people who were supposed to support you instead used your vulnerabilities to manipulate you, you will have learned that it's a bad idea to let unsafe people know where your vulnerabilities are.

And you will have learned the further lesson that just because someone loves you doesn't mean they are can be trusted. But it also doesn't follow that once you've located someone who can be trusted that they will love you or continue to love you. That's something we just have to live with. There is nothing you, or anyone else, can do about it.

Asking for love

Yesterday, I was talking about love being something you don't have to ask for. Okay, but what can we do with that knowledge?

Weird leap: research tells us that the submissive partner in a love relationship is more vocal than the dominant one. Are you vocal during sex? Are you more vocal than she is? Vocal here means both words and sounds you make. The take home point is that if you keep talking about what you want with the woman in your life you're sending her a very clear signal that you are the submissive partner in this relationship.

And there is this helpless little boy inside us who wants to blurt out that he needs love and, damn it, this is what he'll do what he needs to to get it.

In the end, she may not love you. Or, she may love you for a while and then stop. Or, she may intend to love you but just doesn't know how to love a man and has no intention of figuring out how to fix that. And the whiney little boy inside you probably can't change that. And even if he succeeds, it comes at a price you shouldn't want to pay.

If you have to ask for it, it's not love

There is, of course, a necessary qualification: there will be things that the person you love can't guess. Sometimes you may have to tell them what you like and don't like.

But if it doesn't happen if you don't ask, she doesn't really love you.

Jealousy is often really about you

I was listening to an interesting podcast at The Art of Charm about retroactive jealousy. That is when you get jealous of your girlfriend's or wife's past partner.* If you have any reason to believe that that applies to you, check out the podcast.

What interests me here, however, is how the case of retroactive jealousy allows us to see in particularly clear light that a large component of all jealousy it is really about you. It stands out in this case because you don't typically know much about this person you're jealous about. In some cases, you've never met them and, even if you did, it was probably a limited and strained conversation. So the jealousy you feel about this person is mostly your insecurities projected onto them.

It's perfectly normal to feel a little doubt at the start of a relationship but that should fade over time. But if you still feel jealous about someone's ex months or years into a relationship there is a problem. When that happens, it is your insecurity, your sense of being an impostor that is at work. And the solution is to work on yourself. Self-love is crucial. Yes, it can be overdone but I am convinced that there are far more people who are suffering from a lack of self-love than an excess of it in this world. You cannot love anyone else, not even God, if you cannot love yourself.

In a small number of cases you can be consumed with jealousy and unable to see it because it feels like you have lots of objective evidence to confirm it. The jealousy you feel, instead of the anger you ought to feel, is really driven by your fear of leaving her. You think there is something wrong with you, that you only lucked into getting this woman to be with you, that you'll be all alone forever if you dump her. And that is blinding you. You can't see that she is the problem and that the sooner you get rid of this selfish jerk who is sucking all the energy out you, the happier you will be.

* I'm a man and unapologetically write as one. You can always reverse this and apply it the other way if you are a woman or gay or lesbian. That would require some adjustments because there are huge differences between men and women. 

Another image: What are they selling?

 Okay, this may seem obvious. They're selling a birthday card.

But what is the woman who buys this card selling?

It doesn't help to know that the inside is a cheap joke about calling Chicken Delight because they have the best legs around. Ha ha.

But step back and consider the larger message. It's suggestive and slutty on the outside and cold-hearted denial on the inside. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what a man wants in a relationship. And, for an added bonus, she's mocking you for wanting what you want.

Why would that be appealing? Why would you want to get into or stay in a relationship with a woman who is sending you that message?