Tag Archives: authenticity

Shadow Masculinity

22 Mar

Last week, as I sat reading about psychological defense mechanisms, I read the definition of displacement and it got me thinking about what it means to be a man:

Displacement is a defense mechanism that shifts sexual impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target.  It separates emotion from its real object and redirects the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less threatening, so as to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening.

As I sometimes bemoan to my friends, this pretty much describes all of conventional American male sexuality.  It’s so rare that a heterosexual man’s romantic/sexual impulses end up being expressed to the woman who inspires them.  The conventional American man sees a multitude of women in his everyday life who attract him — who captivate him walking down the street, waiting in line, or sitting in the cafe — and he engages practically none of them to communicate his interest.

Instead, the conventional American male inserts a distance between himself and any woman who could reject him.  He spends the majority of his everyday sexual life staring at women he’ll never talk to from afar, stealing glances on the street or subway car, or swimming in magazine stands of glossy covers, movie stars, and a thousand-forty other distractions from the absolutely terrifying act of walking up a beautiful stranger and expressing interest.  Unfortunately, the handful of men who are capable of this act are often closed off in other ways, displacing their passion and replacing it with strategy:  the pickup artists, the douchebags, the serial hunters.

As a result, male sexuality in our culture may seem to be ubiquitous, but what you see is rarely real male sexuality.  It’s only the leering powerlessness that’s left in the absence of real masculinity.  Real masculinity is relegated to the shadows, and we are a nation of half-men.

If you are not strong enough to make yourself vulnerable and express your interest directly, you are not strong enough to date the woman you want.

Matt is the ultimate handyman.

I am a Four

21 Jul

Seth Miguel rocked my world.

He introduced me to the nine personality types of the enneagram.  Which are you?   Here’s the best description of me I’ve ever seen.  I’m a four:

* Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance
* Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity)

Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, and take care of their emotional needs before attending to anything else.

This is only the beginning!  Watch me get eviscerated and explained by clicking the red link below to read more! (more…)

Finding Your Calling & Choosing a Field

16 Jul

This makes me feel better about my own bio page, finally someone understands:

Dobelli:  At what point did you know that you had found (or defined) your field?  Some folks, like Benoit Mandelbrot, find it very late in their careers.  How did this come about?  I don’t think you woke up one morning and had your eureka moment.  Or did you?

Taleb:  Karl Popper wrote that there were no disciplines, just problems.  So I always knew what my problem was:  chance and misunderstanding of knowledge.  I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.  But I am still looking for a discipline.

The interview between them is in a PDF file (directly linked here).   Taleb is so much cooler than he gets credit for.

Authenticity vs. Popularity

8 Apr

gossip-girl-jenny-humphrey-taylor-momsen

“At least it was my face on the cake.  I know that it’s hard 4 you guys to understand, but i LIKE being me.”

– Little J stands firm last week, having reclaimed the “true self” Alice Miller speaks  of.

How I Really Feel

22 Mar

Every person’s life is  animated by one of two desires.  We either live to avoid discomfort, or we live to have as much intercourse with the world as possible.

By intercourse, I don’t mean merely sexual intercourse.  I mean a “give and take” with life:  taking in all the myriad things the world offers, and as a result having something meaningful and unique to give back with confidence.  This kind of intercourse almost always involves stepping out of your hiding places.  It’s often emotionally raw and you feel awkward doing it at first.  The reward for doing this, though, is that you feel new pleasures and understandings inthings that you didn’t even know you lacked before.  These pleasures and understandings are impossible without walking through that discomfort.

I suspect that everybody’s life, at times, traffics in both realms:  avoiding discomfort and having as much intercourse as possible.  Clearly, everyone is capable of both.  But make no mistake:  when you look at the lives of others, and when you look at the results of your own life, it’s not difficult to tell which of these desires animates your daily existence.

It’s really that simple.  The two are, over any length of time, absolutely, unconditionally, mutually exclusive.

Which desire animates you?  Which one, when you look back at your life so far, has produced your favorite moments — the give & take or the drive to remain comfortable?  Which, ultimately, has produced deeper comfort in your life?

When your sleepy eyes open tomorrow morning and no one else can hear, ask yourself how you really feel.

We Bonded Over Broken Bones

27 Jan

The concept of this song by Owen is simple enough:  a guy and a girl, strangers, sharing a hospital room for broken bones, start to fall in love.   What the song means, though, and how it’s really helped me to understand my relationships, is after the “keep reading” link below.

Enjoy the song first — it’s short, and light, beautiful, and acoustic.  The lyrics are right below the video.

We bonded over broken bones.
Who’s broke skin, who’s fractured in two places, and whose hurt the most.

We bonded over broken bones.
How many Vicodin we took before bed, how many we sold
to the band sleeping on our floor;
Week one of a two week tour.
God knows, they’ll need it more than us.

You and me; an x-ray machine.
I swear that day you saw straight through me.

We’re two bags of bones, broken and talking
of people we both know in common.
Amongst other things that I shouldn’t mention.

You and me: a hospital love scene.
If only these broken bodies were ours forever.

For the relationship of this song to, well, my relationships, click the “keep reading”.

(more…)

What We Fear & What We Feel

19 Jan

The most appealing opinions in the world, for most people, are those that relieve us from having to go learn something else.   If you feel that philosophy is worthless and impractical, you certainly don’t need to struggle through Plato, do you?  If you feel like the world of fashion is just superficial and shallow, you don’t need to learn the basics of style, do you?  If you think that therapy is just a scheme to divorce you from your money, you certainly don’t need to try it, do you?  If you think that life is best when you just “soldier on”, rather than engage the  practice of sitting and feeling the emotions that make you most uncomfortable, then why bother?  If you can read a book about the economics of the “information age”, you can skip the need to understand traditional finance in your small business, right?

And so our opinions and values begin to reflect not so much what we feel, but what we want to avoid feeling.  As a consequence, the world becomes much simpler to us:  Republicans are evil, the old economics are passe, quantum physics is a spiritual idea rather than a mathematics (and Newton gets the finger), and you can just go ahead and skip reading all of literature, philosophy, religion, and source texts.   No need for therapy or meditation, of course, because [fill in opinion that makes it moot here].

Yes, this way of living makes things easier in the short term — but it also divorces us from reality, and from feeling like ourselves.  We may get to skip feeling silly while we learn something new and question our current feelings, but we end up feeling like we’re not really the person we’re trying to be.

Too often our lives take the shape of the places we’re afraid to go.

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