Daily Blague

Ever since the election, I have been teasing out aspects of a prevailing social persuasion that is very different from my own. I call it a persuasion because I suspect that its religious claims are spurious, and its hostility to reflection and self-awareness make it utterly unphilosophical. I've decided that it is a mistake to label this persuasion "the patriarchy," but I haven't come up with anything better. Is there a myth about a man who would fall apart if he ever looked at himself in the mirror? In a conflation of the Narcissus and Medusa stories, our unlucky hero, upon seeing his own face, would turn to stone. If there were such a myth, this character's name would make the ideal label for what I've been thinking about.

In an article about John Travolta in today's Times, Caryn James writes of Mr Travolta's "religion," Scientology, that it considers "psychiatry and psychology to be evil." Some would say that this explains that flatness of many of Mr Travolta's performances - and those of his "coreligionist," Tom Cruise, as well. But forget about acting. Psychiatry and psychology have done more to undermine the myth of male supremacy than any other intellectual developments. They have exposed macho behavior as a bluff. I don't mean that tough guys don't really want to fight. The bluff is their pretense that fighting is so meaningful that it overcomes the pain of mayhem and death. But psychiatry and psychology have revealed that it is fear that motivates aggression. Tough guys fight because they're afraid not to.

When I started seeing a psychiatrist, in sixth grade, it was a family secret, a potential disgrace. (My adoptive parents didn't know what to do with me, and I didn't know what to do with life, and my sessions with Dr K-, aside from giving me a chance to talk about myself without being interrupted, accomplished nothing.) To an extent, of course, seeking psychiatric help sounded the alarm of significant emotional instability (the word was "mental" - itself a clue to this country's anti-intellectual posture). This was permissible in women, but in a man, even in a boy, it signaled the worst possible character defect that didn't involve outright criminality: lack of self-confidence. To be unsure of oneself was the cardinal failing. (I was actually all too sure of myself as a child. I was sure that I would never, ever fit in, and I was sure that I didn't want to, either. Only when it became necessary to make a place for myself in the world did I question this, and healthy self-doubt didn't take root until I was well into my thirties.) And then there was sex. Weren't psychiatrists thought to grill their patients endlessly about sex?

Surely one of the most interesting differences between men and women today is that women seem to have no trouble at all discussing their sex lives with other women. I've even overheard such conversations myself, in circumstances suggesting that my eavesdropping was neither unnoticed nor objectionable. Men, on the other hand... Sadly, it is very much the case that the fool who divulges his sex life to another man can be sure of winning that man's instant contempt. In order to talk about your sex life, you have to know something about it; you have to think about sex when you are not actually having sex. You have to look into the mirror.