In Greek mythology, Antigone
displayed all the traits we now freely criticise
Slavoj Žižek
When I try to explain to
students what “free associations” mean in the psychoanalytic treatment, I
regularly refer to the well-known saying: “Don’t throw the baby out with the
bath water!”
When a psychoanalyst asks a
patient to “freely associate”, i.e. to suspend control of the conscious ego and
say all that comes to mind, does that psychoanalyst not demand almost the exact
opposite?
The patient must throw out the
baby (the ego) and keep only the bath water of free associations. The idea is,
of course, that this “dirty water” will bring out the hidden truth of the sane
and healthy ego itself. Don’t forget that the dirt in the water comes from the
baby, not from outside!
Does the same not hold also
for many fake ecologists? They are obsessed by healthy “sustainable” dwellings
in clean green habitat, ignoring the dirty water that freely floats in the
polluted surroundings. If one wants to deal with pollution in a serious way,
the first thing to do is to focus on the dirty surroundings and to analyze how
our isolated “sustainable” habitats merely export the pollution to their
environs.
Perhaps, we should adopt the
opposite approach, along the lines of what they are doing in Japan: concentrate
as much pollution and population in big cities, so that they function as dirty
babies in (relatively) clean water.
Another example: the sheer
number of paedophiliac crimes that took
place in the Catholic church all around the world, from Ireland
and Pennsylvania to Australia. These are crimes committed by members of an
institution which propagates itself as the moral compass of our society, and
they compel us to reject the easy idea that the Church could simply throw out
the bad priests and keep the good.
There is an “institutional
unconscious”; an obscene, disavowed underside that sustains the public
institution. It is not simply for the sake of conformity that the church has
tried to hush up its pedophilia scandals; rather, in defending itself, the
church is defending its innermost obscene secret.
Perhaps the clearest example
was provided by the recent debate
on toxic masculinity. In the response to the recent Gillette ad about
making men less violent, and better, we often heard the idea that the ad was
not directed against men, just against the toxic excess of masculinity. In
short, the ad just signalled that we have to throw out the dirty bath water of
brutal masculinity.
But there are problems here.
Let’s take a closer look at the list (proposed by the American Psychological
Association) of features supposed to characterise “toxic masculinity”:
suppressing emotions and masking distress; unwillingness to seek help;
propensity to take risks even if this involves the danger of harming ourselves.
I don’t see what is so specifically “masculine” about this list.
Does this not fit much more a
simple act of courage in a difficult situation where, to do the right
thing, one has to suppress emotions, where one cannot rely on any help but take
the risk and act, even if this means exposing oneself to harm?
I know many women – as a
matter of fact, more women than men – who, in difficult predicaments, have not
succumbed to the pressure of their environment and instead set about acting in
just this way. To take the example from
Greek mythology: when Antigone decided to bury Polynices, did she not
commit exactly an act which fits the basic features of “toxic masculinity”?
She definitely suppressed her
emotions and masked her distress, she was unwilling to seek help, she took a
risk which involved great danger of harm to herself. In our age of politically
correct conformism, such a stance poses a danger.
We find traces of this
classical feminine figure of courage in today’s popular culture, notably in two
TV series, Homeland and The Killing.
The heroine of Homeland is Carrie
Mathison, a CIA officer with bipolar disorder involved in fighting terrorism.
Her strict sense of justice compels her to violate many rules and get in conflicts
with her superiors which even endanger her life. It’s similar with inspector
Sarah Lund, the heroine of the superb Danish series The Killing, another
borderline character who reacts violently to the hypocrisy of the establishment
and ends up being totally excommunicated. God give us as many of these
toxically-masculine women as possible in real life!
There is an delicious old
Soviet joke from the “Radio Yerevan”
genre: a listener asks “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car on
lottery?”, and the radio answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t
a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”
Does exactly the same not hold
for toxic masculinity?
Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is
masculinity really toxic?” We can guess the answer: “In principle yes, it’s
true, only this toxic content is not specifically masculine at all, plus it
stands for what is often the only reasonable and courageous way to act.”
No comments:
Post a Comment