In the New York Times Health section this last week psychiatrist Richard A Friedman writes that his male patients have appeared far more emotionally devastated by the nation's staggering financial downturns than his women patients. It's not that women don't get upset about job and money losses, he adds, but when it hits them, they don't feel like losers the way men do. Losers. What a terrible thing! "….Do men rely disproportionately more on their work for their self-esteem than women do?" he asks. "Or are they just more vulnerable to the inevitable narcissistic injury that comes with performing poorly or losing one's job?"
As someone who's been around this block many times before, I've observed something even more pernicious, more wounding, than either reliance on work or narcissistic injury, that's leveling these self-named "losers." It's something from another dark moment in our cultural past, something I first observed roughly two hundred years ago.
It was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that men and women, used to working in their homes and in society hand-in-hand, were suddenly hurled into separate spheres--men into the workplace, and women into the home. To assure that no crossing over occurred for either gender, writers and pundits went wild clarifying this new male ideal: the ambitious, tough, successful provider fighting alone in the brutal workplace; and his feminine counterpart, the selfless model of meek, devoted, domesticity.
Accordingly, men's heads were to be filled exclusively with thoughts of work; women's with nurturance--and voila! a new "masculine" and "feminine" psychology was born! But it was fake, and soon, men's sacrifice of their relational, emotional selves took its toll, as did women's sacrifice of their ambition, talent and self-concern. If a man failed to fit the ideal, he failed as a man. And if a woman failed to be a loving, selfless "angel in the house," she was a total flop--not even a woman but a useless, unfeminine thing. You know the stereotypes of the time:the wan, frail, Victorian woman languishing with the vapors, and the distanced, authoritarian husband who couldn't relate to his family.
Okay, so the old system has crumbled. But old cultural values live on within us--just as those from our childhoods do. Even as women flood the workforce, their depressive episodes even now tend to center on attachment issues. Men don't suffer so over attachment issues but they do over the opposite: detachment issues.
My sense is that if we look closely at the double meaning of this word "loser" we can feel the burden of idealization men carry from the past: First, they've flunked the ideal to which they've been held for so long. But worse is the loss, the poignant loss, of those parts of themselves taken away and buried when men were asked to become providers and nothing BUT providers. Look out for any kind of idealization, my darling earthlings, for behind it you will always see loss.
What can you give a lover who may have lost his shirt, and his self-regard for Christmas, for Hanukkah? Your undying appreciation for those parts of himself the workforce never embraced, but that you do: The nurturant, kind, good, generous men inside the provider. The winner you know he is, however devastated his bank account.
May you all have a holiday rich in real, true love--
TLG
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