(Don't) Tell Me What You're Thinking

Here’s a common scenario. Not universal, and sometimes a stereotype, but common:

A woman wants her male partner to speak more openly about what he’s thinking or feeling. He continues to keep his thoughts or feelings to himself.

Sound familiar? Now, how do we explain this phenomenon?

This phenomenon happens for multiple reasons. Put away your axe to grind for a moment. There is not just one factor at work here. It’s just not as simple as “women say X and men say Y.” It’s not as simple as “women are raised to be X” and “men are raised to be Y.” It is not just some simple sort of gender programming where women tell men to share their feelings, while men tell men not to share their feelings. Don’t put the blame all on men or all on women.

 

Here’s just one factor:

Men do pay attention to signs and signals about how they’re supposed to communicate feelings. We men pay attention to the messages, but collectively the messages seem inconsistent. Men are actually getting many conflicting messages about sharing their feelings, and many of those mixed messages are from women, not from men. Any common male behavior you don’t like is in some part a product of women’s behavior, just as any female behavior you don’t like is in some part a product of men’s behavior. I have always paid far more attention to what women say about feelings than what men have said. My caution about sharing feelings has way more to do with messages from women than from men.

Contrary to the popular stereotype, women do not spend all their communication with men trying to get men to talk more. Consciously or unconsciously, women spend at least some of their time *discouraging* men from talking.

Look around at male/female romantic relationships on the whole. For every moment like this scenario where a woman says “tell what you’re thinking!”, somewhere there’s another woman telling a man “I don’t want to hear it!” In some cases, a man may hear mixed messages from the same woman, even within the same conversation. For example, “tell me what you’re thinking,” then his honest answer, then she says, “I can’t believe you said that to me!” Bingo, mixed message – encouragement followed up with a penalty.

Other ways people discourage honesty or openness in their partners:

1. Asking him to lie for you to other people
2. Complaining that he was not convincing enough in his lies to other people
3. Complaining to your friends, “Can you believe he said that to me?”
4. Telling him “wrong answer!” when he speaks honestly
5. Telling him what words to say to you
6. Telling him what words to never say to you
7. Telling him “here’s what I want to hear from you right now.”
8. Asking a question that demands The Right Answer
9. Asking a question that’s really a cover for another question

(Does any of THAT sound familiar?)

 

I’m not sure many people understand how the same question can sound so different to a man compared to a woman. I don’t know if many women realize how much “what are you thinking?” sounds like a trick question. This is where one of those big miscommunications happens. What something sounds like may be totally different than the original intent. Men hear a trick question even if most of the time it’s not meant to be a trick question.

It only takes a few times before even the stupidest man starts to apply inductive reasoning – that old thing where “two times is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.”

So, in the absence of consistent messages, many unsure or literal-minded men like me choose caution as the best approach. This is not the best approach for the relationship as a whole, obviously. Over the long term it’s one of the worst approaches, actually. But, in the moment, from the guy’s perspective, discretion feels like the better part of valor. This is not to rationalize a man’s emotional distance, but to explain where he may be coming from.

Yes, your butt does look big in those jeans. My butt looks big in my jeans, too.

Life is fair.

Life is fair.

There, I said it, and I’m somebody. Somebody has just said life is fair. Let me go on record as saying life is fair. Let me say it multiple times, in multiple tenses, just to make sure:

Life is fair. Life was fair. Life is going to be fair.

This is how I’m going to become famous. By uttering that one sentence, I can now become a household name, because in writing that one sentence I have destroyed a giant cliché. The cliché is “No one ever said that life is fair.” Now, anyone who reads my blog will be able to say that’s not true, because I said it. You can quote me, give the URL, print out this blog entry, give the date and time, you name it, there’s proof.

Same thing with “Where is it written that life is supposed to be fair?” Right here: Life is supposed to be fair. Life is supposed to be fair. It's written right here on this obscure blog.

Now if you’re really clever or want to forget reading this or don’t want to stoke my ego, you could of course offer your own individual rebuttal whenever anyone says the cliché. For example:

Trite Idiot: “No one ever said life is fair.”

You: “Life is fair. Now you can’t say that anymore.”

I’m not saying I believe that life is fair. I recognize the mountain of counterevidence against the idea of the inherent fairness of human existence. However, the trite proverb is that no one ever said it, not that no one ever believed it. I am perfectly capable of saying something or writing something online that I don’t really believe. I’m clearly not alone in that ability. You can disagree with me all you want, but you can never say that no one ever said it.

There is one major flaw in all this, which is that my attempt can be thwarted by the logical fallacy of equivocation, which (as I understand it) includes changing the definition of a word in the middle of a debate in order to prove the original statement. It’s extremely common and it’s a total no-no as far as rational discussion goes, but a lot of people fall for it or are tempted to use it. So, for example:

Trite Idiot: “Nobody ever said life was fair.”

Smartass: “Temujin said it just last week on his blog.”
Trite Idiot: “Who’s Temujin?”
Smartass: “Nobody.”
Trite Idiot: “See, I was right. Nobody said life was fair.”


P.S. I'm a trite idiot myself sometimes, so please don't anyone take that as a total insult. I don't use that phrase to suggest I'm a better person.

Radical Centrist Idea #3: Second Amendment Abortion Rights

Another Reason Why I’m Completely Unelectable

Totally Fair, Totally Offensive Idea #3:

Bridge the liberal/conservative divide by treating abortion as a gun rights issue.

What American partisan politics needs is more outside-the-box thinking. For example, American politics could end much of the nasty wrangling over abortion if someone could create a clever way to use firearms technology. If someone could perfect a procedure in which a doctor could perform an abortion using a handgun, terminating the fetus without unduly harming the pregnant woman, then much of the conservative criticism of abortion rights should evaporate overnight.

Perform a pregnancy termination using a firearm, and this would make abortion clearly protected by the Second Amendment. The NRA would have to take a pro-choice stance. It would be a simple matter of redefining the procedure as “standing your ground against a dangerous intruder.” Declare the fetus to be a burglar, claim you were afraid for your life, and the NRA has to support your right of self-defense. Any time a woman dies in childbirth, Second Amendment gun-rights activists could then say, “if only she had a gun on her, that wouldn’t have happened.” And, people against gun control can then say with great conviction, “when abortion is outlawed, only outlaws will have abortions.”

Meanwhile, in the absence of such technology, we’ll just have to make do with what we have. So, if Second Amendment truthers are willing to define “arms” broadly enough to include just about anything, then I wish to include every abortion instrument under the definition of “arms.” I hereby declare the razor-tipped curette as my self-defense weapon of choice. If abortion is murder, then that means there was a weapon used. Something used as a weapon can be used in self-defense. Something used in self-defense is in principle protected under the Second Amendment. I hereby declare all abortion instruments to be part of my national heritage, and I am within the spirit of America to resist any attempt by my government to restrict my use of it. You can take away reproductive rights from my cold, dead fingers.

Here's my vision: the NRA merges with NARA and become a political powerhouse covering the entire political spectrum. They already use the same letters. They can call it N(A)RA.

 

Radical Centrist Rule #2: Take the Whole Country

You can file this next to my previous immigration compromise, which liberals and conservatives can both hate in equal measure:

Whatever country in the world the U.S. should take as its model for national health care, the U.S. should also take as a model for immigration policy.

You want Switzerland's very solid universal health care? Then you take Switzerland's very restrictive immigration laws. You want China's really cheap universal health care coverage? Then you have to take China's incredibly stringent immigration laws.

(In order to get a visa to work in China as a teacher, I was required by the Chinese government to have a full physical exam, complete with an HIV test, TB screen, and an EKG. No one with a heart condition is allowed to immigrate to China to work. I had to demonstrate to the government of China that someone in the government of China had officially invited me. Now THAT is a tough immigration policy. China won't even let overweight people adopt babies from China. Definitely hard core.)

Let liberals import another country's health care system, and let conservatives import the immigration policies. Unless we're saying that not everything Europeans do should be emulated.....

 

My Radical Centrist Proposal -- Something for Everyone to Love and Hate

Or:
 
How a Fetus is Like an Illegal Immigrant

 

 

In American today, liberals and conservatives are both inconsistent in their politics. They’re both hypocritical in some ways. What I propose is the perfect political compromise, which will force both sides to be consistent. It is such a perfectly balanced compromise that it will never happen. (This  idea seems so obvious to me now that I can't possibly be the first one to think of this. I have to assume that someone else has come up with this before, probably Bill Maher or Dennis Miller).

So, here’s my new rule for American law:

Anything you can do to a terror suspect or illegal immigrant you can do to an embryo/fetus, and anything you can do to an embryo/fetus you can do to a terror suspect or illegal immigrant.

 

You can’t be a conservative who argues that non-citizens are people when the people are unborn but then treat non-citizens like non-people when they’re immigrants. You can’t be a liberal who says that non-citizens are people too no matter where they're born and then deny non-citizens rights just because they aren’t born yet. One side wants to deny equality for those not born in a particular place, and others want to deny equality for those not born.

 

Because, basically, a fetus is an undocumented alien. It’s not a citizen, because under current law a citizen has to be literally born in order to be a citizen. There’s an actual “place of birth” on all the forms, whether it’s a birth certificate, passport application, etc. Being born in a particular location requires that you are actually born.

If a fetus is to be treated as a citizen, then you will have the really awkward legal situation of one citizen living entirely inside another citizen. When you look at how the U.S. government treats “Indian nations,” which are officially nations living inside another nation, you get some idea about how well that one-inside-another works out in practice. Not so great. Those reservations are great foreign countries, aren’t they?

 

Then there's the really tricky scenario for anti-immigration and anti-abortion conservatives -- what do you do about pregnant illegal immigrants in the U.S.? Being born in the U.S. automatically makes a person a U.S. citizen, so does that mean all immigrant fetuses are also citizens? Or, are conservatives suggesting that some fetuses need protection and others do not? Tough call.

The federal government has done nothing to formally approve the existence of any particular fetus in America. There is no visa for it, and it doesn’t exist in any government records anywhere – no Social Security number, no citizenship status, no eligibility to get a job, and no driver’s license (the ultrasound ID photos tend to be really hazy). No paper trail at all, just here without anyone in authority giving it permission to be in this country. So, why not treat all fetuses the same way America treats *all* undocumented aliens?

Just declare your fetus an “enemy combatant,” and conservatives have to let you do whatever the hell you want with it. If conservatives protest, just tell them that they have to take your word for it, that for reasons of national security you can’t explain why your fetus is a risk to the entire country, because telling them all the details would compromise intelligence sources. Just refer to abortion as “enhanced interrogation of a terrorist suspect,” and conservatives should stop asking you questions about what you’re doing. Ask them if they're willing to risk a repeat of 9/11 by refusing to give the "good guys" all the tools they need to fight the "bad guys."

 

If they protest that the aborted fetus is innocent, just tell them you had to strike in a pre-emptive military action because the fetus was clearly showing the intent to acquire Weapons of Mass Destruction. Call it the Uterine Corollary of the Bush Doctrine. Call them bleeding hearts and suggest that they are giving aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom. They're pretty big on that whole "enemies of freedom" schtick.

Sometimes the Simpletons Aren't So Simple

Here's one of the stories we're working on at this hour. Like I said, this is a blog about everything.

The central myth of our gendered society is the idea that men are simple and women are complex. This is the underlying vision of masculinity and femininity that continues to shape people’s thinking, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. Ultra conservatives and radical feminists both seem to maintain the same major stereotype about how basically simple men are and how complex women are. Pat Robertson and Andrea Dworkin would appear to agree on this basic point. Their competing ideologies flow in part from the same basic myth.

It’s a very popular, very rarely challenged assumption, probably because it’s such a useful myth. No matter what your rant is about gender, you can make any point you want by appealing to this basic stereotype. Men have benefited from the myth and been hurt by the myth. Women have benefited from the myth and been hurt by the myth. Sometimes being labeled “simple” is an insult, and sometimes it is a badge of honor. Similarly, being “complicated” can look like you’re “sophisticated” or “evolved,” or the label can make look like you’re chaotic or irrational.

Men themselves may be the biggest proponents of this simplistic view of men. Pretending to be simple can be very useful in getting out of boring social obligations, after all, and there’s great benefit in lowering your girlfriend’s or wife's expectations of you.

I propose the strangely radical concept that men can be just as complex as women. More specifically, in the aggregate, on average, any given man may be as complicated as any given woman. Men and women may be complex in totally different areas, and some individuals may be “wired” more simply than others, but I recommend that we suspend the assumption of male simplicity for the moment.

Unfortunately, this looks like a very dangerous, inconceivable idea to many people. Too much of the way society organizes itself is based on this stereotype, and a lot of people have a lot to lose if people started assuming men and women were equally complicated. The whole advertising industry would have to retool, at the cost of billions of dollars. This revolution would lead to a wholesale turnover in the self-help industry and might turn the bestseller lists upside-down. Imagine if men and women were both from both planets – how many books is THAT going to sell?

(On the upside, the men's fashion industry might get a big boost from this revolution -- imagine if you could market something besides the exact same tuxedo for every man going to a formal event. Imagine if a man's tuxedo could go out of fashion as quickly as a woman's evening gown. Cha-ching! Twice as much money for the fashion industry generated by every Oscars night. Think outside the box, people!)

At the very least, let’s step back and think of it as a hypothesis that men are simpler than women. Maybe it's true, maybe not. How would one go about testing that theory? What kinds of proof would you accept one way or the other? I suspect most of what you think supports this stereotype is just wishful thinking and confirmation bias, only seeing what you want to see.

Maybe I’m wrong, and on the whole men really are simpler than women. I’m just amazed at how few people challenge the stereotype at all. I’m amazed at how much is built on this stereotype, even though it goes unchallenged. Even if men are simpler than women, I seriously doubt the difference is as big as we’ve been led to believe.

What’s remarkable to me is how often men are given reminders that men are simple. Everywhere we turn, the media images in pop culture tell us that we’re simple-minded, over and over again. It’s like society has to constantly remind us to think in very limited terms.

But, if we really are naturally and contentedly simple-minded apes, then it’s a waste of energy to remind us to behave like that, because we would already be doing it. If we are already the kinds of men portrayed in beer commercials, then the beer commercials don’t need to tell us how to behave like that.

So, why remind people to act a certain way if they’re already acting that way? Reminders are for people who sometimes forget, sometimes resist the expectations put on them, or sometimes break the rules. Perhaps the answer is that many men seem to be violating that stereotype, which is why the reminders continue to exist. Too many men appear to be more complex than they are supposed to be, so someone has to put them back in line.

 

So, guys, don't go back in line. If you were ever in that line in the first place, that is.

Please don't vote.

I won’t tell you to get out there and vote. In fact, I think it would be disingenuous of me to tell people to register if they haven’t already.

First of all, I doubt that this would work anyway. Are there people out there who are right on the edge of registering to vote, haven’t quite gotten around to it, and my nagging them puts them right over the edge? Somehow, I doubt it. I am fatalistic about telling people to vote, the same way that people are fatalistic about voting itself – will my one voice really make that much difference?

Second of all, I do understand the idea that the greater the voter turnout, the “healthier” the democratic system. There’s a certain collective goodness that comes from more participation compared to less participation. On the other hand, to my mind that depends on how people cast their votes. There are candidates and proposals that are disastrous if they win. I don’t want people voting in such a way that makes the situation worse.

Frankly, not every voter acts in a responsible way. I do not want to encourage lunatics and the feebleminded to cast a vote just to cast a vote, or just to be "part of something." I am not convinced that an ignorant, thoughtless vote is always better than not voting. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were originally crafted with the assumption that the majority of voters can be wrong and that you have to protect the country against irresponsible forms of democracy.

Along the same lines, if you’re waiting for someone else to remind you to vote, you are probably not highly informed about current events in the first place. If you are only swayed when somebody reminds you to vote, then you may be too easily swayed to be a responsible voter. If you need me to tell you to vote, then you really shouldn't be a voter.

If you're silly enough to think that refusing to cast a ballot will be an effective political strategy, then you are terribly misguided and therefore should not vote in the first place. If you are silly enough to think that your one vote makes no real difference, that actually shows a bit of mathematical wisdom on your part, but you can't see the forest for the trees and therefore should not be voting anyway.

Third, there’s my own political self-centeredness. I only want to encourage you to vote if you’re going to vote the way I do. I don’t want to encourage the other side, which is of course made up of the worst sort of people, and it’s beyond me how anyone can vote for them. And, the fewer other people vote, the more relative power my vote has. Being one out of 40 million gives me more power than being one out of 80 million.

Finally, I think telling people to vote has become clearly counterproductive. I suggest we try some reverse psychology in order to increase participation, especially if you want to get more young people to vote. Tell people NOT to vote. Tell them that the government does not want them to vote, and that this is “for your own good.” Tell younger voters that they are too young to have such responsibility and should leave these decisions to people who know better. Make some sort of absurd movie called “Voting Madness,” in the style of “Reefer Madness,” that shows people the horrible dangers of casting a ballot. Get some disgraced authority figures to tell people to stay away from the polls. Have both Obama and Romney tell the people in the other party to skip the election.

Make voting into more of an act of rebellion or counterculture and less one of those boring things from high school civics class, and you may be getting somewhere. Tell people not to, and watch them thwart you at every turn.

Of course, I will be voting. I will vote for all the reasons you are supposed to vote. I actually believe in all the great reasons to cast a vote. If you don't have any of that commitment, then please stay away.