Women are Crazy vs. Men are Assholes

I'm sorry I've been so lacking in posts. There are a million excuses I can think of but being in lalalala new boyfriend land is probably the main one. But on the upside, I've been thinking tons!! about love and men and women and relationships and I'm looking forward to writing about them.

First, on the subject of "women are crazy" vs. "men are assholes". During my single life, I had many conversations with my girlfriends about how guys are assholes. They just don't get things, don't respond to situations appropriately, lack emotional response.

As I started to hang out with my boyfriend and his friends, though, I started to hear more and more that girls are 'crazy'. I think this is the equivalent feeling among a lot of guys, similar to the consensus among women that men are assholes. This equivalence got me thinking.

To be a true feminist, and thus to expect fully equal treatment between men and women, one must do the hard work of examining your own biases towards the opposite sex. So if I disagree that women are crazy, then I have to figure out what is causing me to believe that men are assholes, generally, and how that relates to the feeling that women are crazy.

Here's what I came up with. Women and men have a differing tendency of reaction and action, the former being a purely internal process and the latter being a purely external process. (Of course all of these are sweeping generalities and say nothing of the specific). So, given a situation, women are more likely to react to it, where men are more likely to act on it. Thus, women spend more time considering, pondering, investigating the details and the emotional consequences of certain actions or observations they have made. Men on the other hand are less likely to consider how they are reacting to the situation and more likely to just do something about it, or ignore it (which is actually, in many cases, a quite forceful action). As such, women are perceived by men as 'crazy', since they are likely to make perceptions or observations about a situation that a man doesn't. And men are seen as 'assholes' because they act on the situation without taking into account these perceptions and observations that feel obvious to the women.

I think it's nice to frame these generalizations this way because I think thought of in this way both sides have work to do. And perhaps this is one of the great benefits of being in a relationship. For women could learn from men how to act on their feelings and men could learn from women how to put their feelings into action.

Of course the words men and women here are somewhat useless, as I think in any relationship, be it heterosexual, homosexual, etc, it's not necessarily the gender that determines who's more or less assertive, more or less emotional. This is just a way to frame the conversation of one kind of division you might find in a relationship, and how learning to respect the other's skill is the first step in learning how to incorporate that skill into yourself.

Narcissism Does Not Mean Self-Love

There have been some recent studies on narcissism that a Scott Barry Kaufman outlines nicely in this post, and a blog on psychology today writes a 'field guide' to narcissism.

The dictionary definition of narcissism is: inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. I think this definition is a confusion, and too often people confuse Narcissism with Self-Love. Kaufman summarizes the behaviors of a narcissist as follows: "Leadership/Authority, Self-Absorption/Self Admiration , Superiority/Arrogance, and Exploitativeness/Entitlement."

What's striking about these features is how under the right circumstances they could be positive traits, i.e., having good leadership skills, self-esteem, self-confidence and the ability to seek help from others. But these are not exactly the opposite of the behaviors above. The opposite would be Passivity/Lack of Control, Self-Hatred, Inferiority/Insecurity, Self-Pity. So what is the 'core' emotion that these two sides rest on?

I think the answer is self-love. These are questions I think about a lot, because it is something I really struggle with. Often, I want to be proud of something that I have done, but I have a voice in my head that says if I start feeling proud I will become a narcissist. Since I won't allow myself to feel proud or good about who I am, I start hating myself. After a while I realized this kind of thinking had kept me from caring about others, in the same way those with the classic narcissism described above are kept from caring about others. Because of this, I've come to view narcissism and self-hatred as two sides of the same spectrum, and both emotions that lead to similar negative external behaviors.

I think self-love is the healthy feeling that resides in the middle of those two negative poles. The desire for self-love can be answered by one rejecting oneself and classifying oneself as unlovable, or this desire can be fulfilled by deciding that one is worthy of love by external standards(whatever deemed important by the individual: beauty, intelligence, success, partners with status). The first leads to self-hatred and second leads to narcissism. It is a confusion of the term narcissism and self-love to say that narcissistic people love themselves, because I don't think that they do in an honest way. I think to do this, you have to both fully realize the enormity of your flaws and find a way to love yourself for them without trying to will them away by living up to external standards.

I can't honestly say that I have successfully found a way to love myself in the ideal way I describe. But I think I have gotten a little closer by telling myself to "cut yourself a break, everyone has flaws but you are still lovable". I find this ironic because it is also the advice I would give to narcissists, although perhaps as "cut yourself a break, everyone has flaws but you are still lovable."

Louis Kahn: Visionary

I recently watched this documentary about the life of Louis Kahn, filmed by one of his children, Nathaniel. At Yale, I was in the midst of some of Kahn's most beautiful buildings, and had a friend at Exeter who showed me his library when I was a freshman.

Louis Kahn had three families, one child in each one. So one wife, and two mistresses. When his two mistresses got pregnant, he did very little to support them. In the movie, both women state that this surprised them, that they expected Mr. Kahn to do something, like leave his wife or acknowledge his children once they got pregnant. But he didn't. And yet, on the flim, both women appear to still be in love with Mr. Kahn, and harbor little if any bitterness towards him. His first mistress, Anne Tyng, actually says she believes all of Kahn's children and loves are part of a large family.

Throughout the film, almost everyone that Nathaniel interviews tells him what a spiritual and visionary man Louis Kahn was. It's times like these that I wish it was traditional to speak only honestly of the dead, but it's repeated so many times it seems it must be true. The most heart wrenching moment comes in the end, when Nathaniel visits the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, and is told, in so many words, that his father brought democracy to Bangladesh.

On paper, Kahn's personal life seems like a despicable sham. Neither of the women he had affairs with ever remarried, and they both live alone. And yet on screen, they at least appear content. They seem to love him and be satisfied with the relationship they had with him. I certainly believe that social standards for what an individual should do in the archetypal relationships: mother, father, wife, husband, child, are extremely confining and inadequate to describe the full range of love relationships that are possible between human beings. The standards don't allow for the infinite possibilities of connection in human interaction. Perhaps Louis Kahn, and other visionaries who led seemingly horrendous personal lives were just living their personal lives with the way the lived their working life: bravely and boldly bucking societal pressures and to fully live in their idealized world.

I'm not saying that everything Louis Kahn did in his personal life was greatness. Rather, I'm suggesting that it's easy to immediately discount the relationships visionaries engaged in as incongruous with their output as creators, when really it could be our own social standards that limit our understanding of his relationships. What if societal conventions about love relationships were loosened and relaxed, and love was defined not by sexual commitment but by deep and honest connection over intellectual and spiritual interest? What would we think about Louis Kahn's life then?