My question is this: if I test so well, why is it that I am not on a beach somewhere right now?
Appreciated for your kindness and envied for all your experience, you are The Maid of Honor. Charismatic, affectionate, and terrific in relationships, you are what many guys would call a “perfect catch”–and you probably have many admirers, each wishing to capture your long-term love. You’re careful, extra careful, because the last thing you want is to hurt anyone. Especially some poor boy whose only crime was liking you.
We’ve deduced you’re fully capable of a dirty fling, but you do feel that post-coital attachment after hooking up. So, conscientious person that you are, you do your best to reserve physical affection for those you respect…so you can respect yourself.
Your biggest negative is the byproduct of your careful nature: indecision. You’re just as slow rejecting someone as you are accepting them.
Your exact female opposite: Half-Cocked Random Brutal Sex Dreamer.
ALWAYS AVOID: The False Messiah (DBLM), The 5-Night Stand (DBSM), The Vapor Trail (RBLM), The Bachelor (DGSM).
CONSIDER: The Gentleman (DGLM), someone just like you.
Link: The Online Dating Persona Test.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
So I got this again.
This is the same as I got before.
I have no energy for these kinds of games any more because it all goes towards my training, which is kind of (these days anyway) more of a complete self-annihilation — or jouissance — than sex.
I got the same result again, also. All of these tests make me quite conventional. I initially found this funny, now I find it dull … I need to seek some parodies. Some, I believe, can be found in that magazine, Anxiety Culture.
Yeah. The odd thing is that I really don’t feel as if I have a gender these days. Honestly, all of the libido-energy seems to go into sparring, with very little remaining. I think a lot of libido energy must be reaching out to others energy, but also raw aggressive energy, energy that is normally channeled into some kind of cultual or self-expression. Now, what I am discovering is that erotic energy is also derived from a sublimation of this prior, raw energy. So, whereas Freudians think that erotic energy IS this raw energy, I am not so sure. If the erotic energy is itself a product of sublimation, then the Freudian version of things is incorrect. IN any case if I burn this energy off as aggression, I do feel totally psychologically satiated (in a more complete way than via the burning off of energy erotically). AND there is nothing left.
Freudians base this analysis on men, I think, and on men who are socialized to Western norms – and they mistake this socialization for ‘nature’.
On types of energy, and roots of energy, I’ll have to think about this.
One of the things that I got from Theweleit (Male Fantasies) is that the way that the western bourgeois ego is divided (schematically, the erotic interests divided against rational economic interests) is the pattern that is suited to imperalist domination (rather than settling and cooperation). So, this division of the psyche is (perhaps I’m stating this more strongly that T would) inherently imperialistic.
One could settle down with the native women of the exotic lands instead of keeping them at a distance and dominating the natural resources of those lands. But one must not give in to eros. The bourgeois psyche prohibits it. Thus the division between eros and rational self-interest is in the interest of empire building and western supremacy.
T. is very good at describing all of this, as well as being good at describing how the bourgeois ego produces its own confusions. For example, if it is not allowed to take seriously its own erotic longings, then it is to some significant degree alienate from its own feelings. This produces a problem — for if one cannot determine any longer what is true and what is really going on around one by referring to the validating power of one’s own feelings, then one is significantly moved away from a direct relationship with reality, towards a more mediated one. What will the mediating power be? — ideology, notions of rationality, religion, and so on.
–On a semi-related note, one of the aspects of the western psyche which I find my puzzling is the tendency to want to always appear 100 percent confident and in perfect control. This manifests as an inclination not to ask questions, even when it would seem most beneficial or even necessary to ask questions. Those of the West who want to be perceived as most moral, rational and in control will not stoop to gathering empirical evidence. This seems related to the conceit of the patriarchal psyche which is always well divided from the reality that it would seek to dominate.
I have had much fun with this patriarchal psyche, because its foolishness knows no bounds. My main view is that if someone doesn’t ask me the right questions, then they have a right to labour on under any false assumptions they are nurturing. I’m not responsible for correcting a patriarch’s error — but I won’t remove the pits that he might fall into, either. That is hardly my responsibility.
Ah yes, this is why I like the T. book.
Western psyche needing to be in control:
“…This manifests as an inclination not to ask questions, even when it would seem most beneficial or even necessary to ask questions. Those of the West who want to be perceived as most moral, rational and in control will not stoop to gathering empirical evidence. This seems related to the conceit of the patriarchal psyche which is always well divided from the reality that it would seek to dominate.”
This is key.
Correcting patriarchs’ errors – you can’t – they won’t hear it anyway.
****
REEDUCATION NOTES:
Reeducation, of course, was on the one hand supposed to be about relinquishing control and getting in touch with feelings, but at the same time it wanted to replace eros with rational self-interest. HM. It is as though it was this western male hall of mirrors trying to cure itself with a new mixture of its same old poison.
Next note on Reeducation (I should find the right post to add these to, but I am too lazy right now), picked up and modified from a thread on Sage’s blog: *It was a series of lessons in taking blame, learning to turn rage and grief inward and also to question always oneself, and never authority.*
****
ON ENERGIES AND RELATIONSHIPS
On one of Sage’s comment threads someone told her that “there’s nothing worse than staying in a bad relationship that has no chance of getting better.” Of course we know this about Gothically bad relationships, but as I think about energy I wonder what the actual definition of a bad relationship – a personal one, a professional one, any kind – might be. Perhaps it would be about energies, which ones are liberated, how they are channelled, burned off, blocked. Then what would define a good and a bad relationship would be what it did with energies.
It’s hard for me to get the big picture on reeducation, at least in some ways. It seems to contradictory generally. I think that you must be right that it was a hall of mirrors trying to refract and then contain the aspects of the western male self which were thought to be problematic. From what you have told me, the reason that these aspects of the male self were problematic could have to do with the tensions that have built up within it, under the pressures of historical agendas throughout the eras. Thus the psyche sees its way out to be in the form of escaping feelings of responsibility for those things (morality, rationality, control) which are supposed to be the province of western maleness. Postmodernism, of course, opens up the imagination with the idea of a similar escape. But where to escape to, when revolution is not considered a possibility (because for the escape to be easy it has to be at the level of idealism and not at the level of material change)? There is still the danger of upsetting the boss, or the existing authorities, and thus making things even *less safe* than they had been when life was full of tension because of all the felt moral responsibilities stored up inside of one. One must bind oneself even more tightly to the material conditions of one’s economic wellbeing, by giving up the inner self of revolt that would put one tacitly at odds with the authorities (thus risking their outrage and consequent suppression of your smouldering resentment {this is of course, the shape of the Oedipus complex as it is being resolved.}) One resolves the inner tensions by giving them up and by accepting conformity to the reality that is — rather than fighting for the reality that one would prefer. Erich Fromm says that those who are neurotic (still fighting against conformity) are at least partially healthy because they are more vitalised than those who have given up the fight in order to accept reality as it is.
An essential ingredient of a good relationship is political equality : one person does not have the power to tell the other what to do. This ingredient is, by definition, missing from the employer/employee relationship. It doesn’t have to be missing from other relationships, like marriage, but usually, the general ways we relate within a society’s class relations, the ways we “make a living” are carried back with us into our personal relations with family, friends and lovers. Thus, love becomes a synonym for loyalty, possession and inequality in political power. Tensions arise and we become unhappy.
Mike – Political equality as key and love as a synonym for loyalty and possession in the absence of political power, OH YES, these things are what happens. (And – political inequality describes my current relationship, such as it is, and I do not know how to fix this; and the insistence on the idea that coordinators are employers and everyone else employees, coupled with the belief that our institutional structure is like that of the military, which is of course good, is what I do not like about the current leadership in my job. Interesting.)
Jennifer – the big picture on Reeducation is very hard to get! Apparently there is a type of person who actually has the problems it is designed for and is actually satisfied with what it offers as solutions. But: one of its big values was, precisely, “acceptance.” Accept reality as it is and you will be free, said Reeducation. I disagreed with Reeducation on which aspects of reality as it was were immutable, and I kept quoting Erich Fromm – who was unknown to Reeducation and sounded very, very odd to it. So this is all quite funny. Now the reason I am interested in figuring out Reeducation isn’t so much to get the grisgris off of me – it’s gone – but to figure out why it is so powerful in this country, what it is speaking to. I think this idea of refraction and containment of problematic aspects of the western male self (or patriarchal self – many Reeducands are women, albeit very patriarchal ones) gets close to the issue.
More to come on the middle part of your comment – very interesting indeed.
OK I am back. Just wrote up a teaching evaluation thing for someone’s tenure case and realized, once again, that I grew up in very privileged circumstances. Now, to teach, we are supposed to do certain things – the things which were done when I was a child – and which are now considered new. It is said that they did not exist before and perhaps they did not here. But what is now considered progressive and advanced here is far less so than what I experienced (and which level of advancement we have officially just achieved, but really not).
It is confusing, as was Reeducation, for similar reasons: it simply could not imagine that anyone might be advanced.
***
Also on Reeducation: now I see why it did not like psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and much psychology, for that matter, is or can be political. Reeducation was based on self help, although I did not realize that until much later, and self help is conservative by definition, I think: it is about honoring and fitting into the existing system, and believing you will “better yourself” in that way.
***
“One must bind oneself even more tightly to the material conditions of one’s economic wellbeing, by giving up the inner self of revolt that would put one tacitly at odds with the authorities (thus risking their outrage and consequent suppression of your smouldering resentment).”
This is indeed what many people seem to do … I think Reeducation was about getting comfortable with that. The fact that people have to work so hard to talk themselves into it is, in my view, indicative of a problem.
One of the aspects which has always puzzled me about those brought up in the West is their inability to grok other perspectives from those they are used to. It is quite shocking, actually, to constantly encounter this failure, in all sorts of places, and much more commonly than not. It’s related to the inability to ask questions — a feature of the western personality that I remarked upon earlier.
They don’t ask questions because they would receive answers that they are unable to grok.
My very first experience of this Western handicap happened about two weeks after I arrived in Australia. I have told this story before, and it is not a case of a sporadic person playing the *hole. My experiences over the years have convinced me that my encounter with the school librarian was an encounter with someone who was quintessentially Western.
So, I’m in the school library, 16 years old, and some other girl is showing me around. The librarian marches up and wants to know where I am from. I tell her, “Zimbabwe.” She seems rattled. My answer has caused her brain to fire off, “aberration, aberration!” She tells me that I’m being cheeky. I don’t know why.
And this first experience, I’m afraid, has been repeated over and over again, whenever I produce an answer which is culturally specific, rather than one which would have been a product of a continuous western education from babyhood on up.
I’ve been treated variously as if I were being cheeky, as if I wanted to proclaim my difference as a form of superiority (or inferiority), as if I wanted to draw special attention to myself (as a narcissist) and so on. The Westerner’s common inability to grok difference always produces alarm bells in their heads: “Aberration! Aberration!” After this comes punishment of some sort.
Yet really, when you think about it, it wouldn’t take much to pursue my answer further, and find out what it meant and what my intentions in answering that way were. Really, all that is required is some common sense and willingness to suspend judgement for a little while.
But Westerners? Do they ever suspend judgement?
Cheers Prof Zero. Two pieces, the first by me and second from Fromm:
Political Equality
Are you kidding me
I am owed
the misery of others
Otherwise
T’would lose my place
After all
I am
the artist
and that is where
it’s at
Give me stuerm and strife
Just make sure
I get my slice
Let elites reign on
o’er
impoverished life
Citizens!
I must create
And
as long as I
can feel no pain
Abstractions can be truth
Beauty can be lies
I tell you ‘friends’
forsooth
******************
“..freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from
traditional authorities and has become an ‘individual,’ but that at the same
time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside
of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state
undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities,
together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously.”
Escape from Freedom: first published in 1941
J – I think you hit the nail on the head there. Westerners do not want to know what lies outside them and cannot handle suspending judgment.
[This, of course, is what Reeducation blindly went at – it was upset because I do not tend to dither about everyday decisions – but really it knew somehow that rushing to judgment and not considering opposite views was problematic. The problem was that it did not know where to suspend judgment.]
This is perhaps why people think I am not Western or whatever it is they think … I have been asked whether I am a trained anthropologist because I observe before judging.
Mike – Fromm is so brilliant, thanks for this quotation. Earlier we were talking about reasons why we might *not* have lost the sense of the magic of childhood, entirely. I think one of mine is having read Fromm by chance early on, in elementary school. He is not hard to read and I ‘grocked’ a lot of it. But I need to reread. Interesting poem too!
Cero,
I think what I would like to see is a return to interacting as a two step process. What I mean is that it has become one step, somehow, so that whatever a person does in relation to another person is now considered somehow a sign of their deeper value system. It is as if by listening to what a person with an opposing opinion has to say, I actually BECOME that person in everybody’s eyes. So, don’t listen to an enemy because it will turn you into them! But this is a one-step process in which listening and evaluating have all become one thing. You can almost imagine the librarian (if she was capable) thinking to herself, “Oh a person from Zimbabwe? Well I’m not going to give her any unfair listening time — no special treatment!”
I have an acquaintance on email right now who is keen on confusing me with the authors I choose to read. Should I read a book and interpret the book in the way that I think the author intends to be understood, that means somehow that I have become the author and that his values and mine are precisely the same. This is silly, but it is a common assumption. After all, why would I be reading a book, apart from trying to have my opinions corroborated or authorised, or to borrow from an authority whatever it is my opinions are going to be? But this is a terrible notion of scholarship, and obviously it is the kind of feeling that fuels the fires of types such as David Horowitz against academia (he can’t imagine that being exposed to certain materials and then critically appraising them is a two step process. For him exposure=embrace of the values you are reading about.)
Anyway, this is the problem I have with those of the West right now. They perceive you to be taking all sorts of value-laden stances, when all you are doing is trying to get to the bottom of things.
And these cultural attitudes are also why the path to critical thinking is unnecessarily hard.
Interpreting as figuring out “what the author meant” – that’s the intentional fallacy!
Yes – *everything* said must fit into the western paradigm, it seems. That is perhaps the real reason why it is so hard to teach critical thinking. I always thought that in the U.S. it was because of our misunderstanding of free speech / diversity of opinion – it makes one’s opinion a “right” not to be discussed rationally. But the “fit it into what the westerner thinks” theory seems more apt.
Actually hearing people out and listening seriously to what I say is one of my own errors in (western) life, I have been told today. Every once in a while I hear that I am not fake enough or too sincere. This – the idea or realization that the dominant concept is *not* to listen or go outside one’s box – is an interesting perspective on that – the efficient way to operate, the way others expect you to operate, is on the idea that nobody listens, nobody hears. (Increasingly, I want to move countries.)
Well I should clarify that I’m not altogether against trying to take a historical approach to try to work out what the author might have thought, so long as “might” and “probably” or other qualifiers precede the declaration. In other words, one must know that what one is doing is an interpretion, albeit with historical reasons to back it up.
But on to other matters…
It seems like a good neo-colonial approach to deny that others (for example from third world countries) might have different processes of thinking to the ones that prevail in the West. This is a great way to have one’s cake and eat it too — because then it is possible to censure people like me for making the third worlders (of which I am one, despite the belying colour of my skin) out to be “non-Modern” or “different” or “exotic” somehow. You can say that I am being Eurocentric or even racist by pointing out the differences. At the same time, a very real but tacit Eurocentrism is allowed to become predominant under the unwritten (but heavily defended law) that “we are all basically the same, anyway.”
And yet we are not.
a) Or, if the author actually has comments, letters, etc. on the work.
b) Yes, in the “we are all basically the same” paradigm (?) the ‘Third Worlder’ is a deficient version of that same.
Hm – the west, as you say – or men, or people interested only in getting theirs, or people with a dark view of the world, as I would.
b) Practically the third worlder is a deficient version of the same, because he or she has to act AS IF they had all the advantages of a western upbringing (in other words that they are always intuitively in the know about how things work), whereas they haven’t had these advantages and aren’t allowed to say so, without becoming victim of the ideological logic of Western universalism belonging to everyone. So they’re not in a position to say that they don’t know something for a reason. They can appear not to know something, but they are not permitted to furnish a reason — least of all their own explanation. The latter is considered “arrogance”.
“‘…their own explanation. The latter is considered “arrogance’.”
Very astute.