autonomy myth

As a person who has not managed to achieve 'success' by current American standards, I continually look for reasons why this may be so. Is it my own dang fault, as The Secret would hold? Was I, like all those hapless Katrina victims, really asking for it, in some subliminal way we may never understand because we hadn't got our minds right?

Or is it something else - something I have no control over, some insidious, pernicious weed that invades my psyche daily, only on such a subtle level that I'm no more aware of it than the fish is of the water she swims in?

I'm voting for the latter. Because, try as I may, I feel like the fly trapped in a web not of my own making, and the more I struggle, the more stuck I get.

So I've been trying a different approach: Observe. Take notes. Ask a million billion questions a day, and see what answers other people have come up with.

And discover, lo and behold: It's not just me. I'm not the only one who feels like she's gotten a raw deal, the bum's rush, been sold a load of horseshit.

So I've begun to catalog the ways in which we're led down the garden path, to lay them out and enumerate them so that I can slowly counter them, one at a time, with messages of my own.

The first one I came to (and apparently something many people struggle with this, though few speak of it, at least not out loud) is the crushingly critical internalized voices of the parents that, to this day, still paralyze me with shame.

It's like having an invisible handicap, where someone has tied your shoelaces together every time you've tried to walk to the point that you no longer bother to untie them; and yet, you're expected to walk as if you're not dealing with some kind of incredible and insanely unnecessary burden (makes me think of hobbles, or high heels for women, or foot-binding). The other image that comes to mind is of two people running a side-by-side race, but one person gets the red carpet rolled out for him (pronoun choice deliberate); all obstacles are painstakingly removed from his path; he is showered with rose petals.

The other poor sod is tripped at every turn; has hurdles placed in her path at every opportunity; is mocked and derided, jeered at and catcalled until it's a wonder that she manages any forward progress at all. (Yes, I'm thinking of Hillary vs. Obambi, wonder-boy.)

So: Family is one major source of a persistent sense of lack of value, self-worth.

And being a woman. Holy fucking hell! This misogynist, patriarchal culture (which words I couldn't even have put in a sentence a few years ago) reinforces every bit of shaming and then some. I've become a regular reader of several feminist blogs, and went through a period of several years where I read nothing but women-authored books to try to wash the poisonous and pernicious effects of a lifetime of marinating in a male-dominated worldview from my psyche.

No luck. However, it's opened my eyes to a lot of things, to the extent that I no longer blame myself for failing to conform to the impossible double standards women are held to.

And I've also begun to see the ways in which men appear to be singlehandedly successful while in fact depending entirely on the support of the culture and the people (especially women) around them to prop up this self-sufficiency myth.

To that end, today's Google search string was: "The myth of male autonomy". I was trying to hunt down (yet again) the title of a book I read a while back that elucidated, rather nicely, I thought, the notion that the so-called autonomy of the American male is nothing more than an elaborate tall tale a la the Wizard ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"):

The male autonomy myth depends on the complicity of a whole host of enablers, not least of whom are the wives, sisters, daughters and other women in the lives of these men who come to believe that all their accomplishments were achieved single-handedly, and who have no awareness of their near total dependence on the women in their lives for their overblown sense of self.

Men are taught to believe they should be self-sufficient and autonomous (somebody watched the Lone Ranger too much as a kid). Toward that end, men have an extremely convenient sort of selective blindness that allows them to be totally unaware of all the ways in which they benefit from the support of the people around them and from the culture at large. The images of men in newspapers, magazines, movies and books all reflect 'heroes', even when the guy in question is a complete psychopath. Even the most horrific behavior by a man tends to be admired for its sheer hubris, if nothing else. Men admire someone who can kick ass, basically.

The propping up men's egos is so crucial to the functioning of patriarchal structures that it becomes the central theme for many of a culture's defining myths and stories. The Emperor's New Clothes comes to mind:



Another thing that adds to the distortion is the images we see in the media. Unlike women, who are held to increasingly impossible beauty standards, in most cases the images men see reflect people who look a lot like them. A guy who's nothing special in the looks department can go a long way - he can be ugly (Newt Gingrich, anyone?), fat, mean, surly, aggressive, greedy, self-absorbed, obnoxious, rude - the list goes on. And yet in men this is excused because, hey, that's just how men are, right? Frogs and snails and puppy dogs' tails.

And women are left holding the bag for all the social niceties and responsibilities (sugar and spice and everything nice). As Virginia Woolf put it, in A Room of One's Own:

Women have served all these centuries as looking–glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would he unknown. We should still be scratch ing the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking–glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

So, mind-worms to conquer: 1) Family; 2) Culture re: gender.

And third: The culture at large also feeds into a lot of false hopes that can devolve into self-bashing when reality fails live up to expectations (aka, the American Dream). Reading a Google Books excerpt from The Myth of Empowerment led me to this quote from Identity, American Dreaming, by Richard Powers, New York Times Magazine, Sunday, May 7, 2000:

Perhaps for this reason more than a third of us sometimes lament that our lives did not turn out as we wished. A third have visited therapists. Half know someone who has tried to commit suicide. Half of us think we don't get enough credit for what we do. We seem to be free to be everything we want -- except content.

For possibility and contentment may be sworn enemies. Pure potential and its despair combine to create the ideal late-capitalist perpetual-motion engine, with self-realization powering the drive train. So long as we believe there is no ceiling, there will be no end to the effort we'll expend on the way to self-making. Be all you can be. Go for the gusto. Such cheerleading cloaks the sharpest spurs ever invented. For in this country, if you don't become all that you pretty much want, you've only your own indolence to blame.

More 'false hopes' linkage from The Self-Esteem Trap by Polly Young-Eisendrath (bolds mine):

I had read every book out there on idealizing and indulging our children. For all that I read, I could not find a foothold that allowed me or my clients to climb out of the box we were trapped in. It felt as if we had glue on the bottom of our feet. The box is our shared cultural attitude: that everyone is special, a winner, with the potential to be great. Inside the box we believe that everyone has something extraordinary to contribute to life and that being ordinary is an embarrassment. This attitude makes a powerful demand on parents and children and creates excessive self-focus and relentless desires to be or have the best. And although parenting experts have critiqued and studied what’s inside this box, we have not been able to step out of it. Stepping out is too painful if we blame ourselves personally for being stuck here in the first place, or if we see no other alternative for happiness and self-confidence. In the 1970s and 1980s, teachers and parents began a campaign to cure low self-esteem in our young. Hoping to increase childrens' creativity and self-expression, this educational and parenting movement unwittingly promoted a self-esteem trap: unrealistic fantasies of achievement, wealth, power, and celebrity. When these expectations are not met in adult life – as inevitably they are not – the result is a negative evaluation of the self. And the trap of negative self-absorption cannot be eased or helped by more focus on the self. Quite a few good books have already been written on this subject, some based on studies and others on clinical observations. They identify a problem, although they call it by different names. And yet no one has uncovered the roots of the problem or found the cure. Obsessive self-focus, restless dissatisfaction, pressures to be exceptional, unreadiness to take on adult responsibilities, feelings of superiority (or inferiority), and excessive fears of being humiliated are the pervasive symptoms of the problem, recognized by those who are trapped and by those of us observing them – mental health professionals, educators, parents, and grandparents. I could use labels like ‘narcissism’ and ‘entitlement,’ but I believe they are insulting, especially when used in a judgmental, diagnostic, or accusatory way. Instead of labeling, I want to get us out of this harmful trap and to stop us from blaming ourselves and others.

There - I think maybe that last quote finally captured what I've been trying to get at with this whole long-winded post: Everybody, give yourselves a break (And that's my take-away message, which is not exactly, I think, what Polly Y-E intended to convey. Take what I need and leave the rest...) We are not all dealt an equal hand; life is unfair, and in a win-lose society, the natural unfairnesses of life are magnified by the enormous pressures to achieve and/or perform at ever-higher levels. Or, as Lily Tomlin said,

"Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it."

Lower the bar already, fer cryin' out loud :-)