When I was about 30, I started working with a psychiatric admissions team, which received people in crisis and had to figure out quickly what was up. Beds were scarce, and people had lives to get back to if they were deemed safe. The details are fun, but unimportant to the main point that we admitted a very buttoned-down woman who had gotten herself in trouble at a bar, dancing on a table-top, flashing the other customers, and smacking the cop who tried to take her into custody.
Pro tip: It is considered bad luck in most jurisdictions to smack an officer of the law.
Yet intriguingly, her blood-alcohol count was 0% a half-hour later. We suspected other drugs, but when we interviewed her the next morning she was quite calm (and humiliated) and said "No, there were no drugs. This happens to me every once in a while and I just do these things for a few hours. It breaks my husband's heart, too." She had no explanation, and frankly neither did we. We could all make up stories based on our own priors, but as everyone at the table was well versed in such myth-generation, all could be easily shot down. We sent her home.
As she left the room, an elderly psychologist, from whom I expected a Freudian answer, instead said "Men all believe they can predict which women will dance on a table top. They can't." He smirked and then said "This is the central problem of psychology." In a way, he had a point, that much misery in the world is connected to the puzzle in its various forms, of men thinking they know things about women and sex that they don't, and even women not knowing themselves sometimes, acting in ways that puzzle them. Or sending out false signals obliviously. Nations rise and fall on such things, and certainly individual careers and families do.
7 comments:
There is something disturbingly mechanistic about this...as if some mental process was lying in wait and took over. Analogy that comes to mind is a computer interrupt system, which grabs control from the running program and takes over, without the program even knowing about it.
Is thee incidence of such behavior different between the sexes?...the Elderly Psychologist seemed to believe it was.
He was commenting more generally, and humorously. He had very little explanation either. Behavior always has an unpredictable quality. I think "dance on a table top" was a synecdoche for any adventurous sexual behavior, so that it also meant "which women might sleep with them" or "which women might be talked into kinky things." He used the current situation as an example only, not just that single behavior.
There was an article linked on Instapundit yesterday by a former editor of a women's magazine, in which she suggested that women readers would regularly lie to her about their desire to see attractive men on the covers of the magazine. In fact, whenever they would publish such an issue, no one would buy it. The truth was that women would only buy women's magazines that had images of women on them: her theory was that perhaps they needed to see something they could imagine as related to themselves, offering a vision of hope for what they might be if only they did this or that.
I was wondering after I read it if the women were really lying to her, or even to themselves. Perhaps they believe that is what they want (or ought to want), and really don't know what they actually want. Maybe she's right about the basic desire, but it never surfaces into consciousness enough to be acknowledged.
Grim, I think that sort of thing is difficult to suss out, but does drive a lot of the disconnect and misunderstandings of behavior. What people say they want and what their real-life preferences reveal that they want are different, and how much of that is deception, self-deception, or adjusting as one goes? It is the stuff of comedy routines at this point, some of them with pain detected behind them, of women saying they want certain things in a man but choosing other men, and men pointing this out sardonically. Yet it is something entire nations do as well. In fact, as men are still more group-status oriented, while women are more individual-bond oriented even now, I wonder if this deception vs self-deception is more individual with women, so that we notice it and can make fun of it, but men do it just as much but do so in service to the group's status. Just a guess.
And, how do we measure that?
I don’t know. In any case, my guess is that it is unusual for anyone— cops or otherwise— to try to constrain women who are dancing on tables and flashing customers. Certainly she got off easily for “smacking” (assault and battery) on a law enforcement officer.
Maybe it is a tacit admission of how little anyone understands women. Even themselves.
Post a Comment