Those with no control over their own lives want to control yours!

Dr. Helen links John Hawkins’ interview with Warren Farrell (author of Why Men Are the Way They Are.)

I haven’t read the book, but I felt sorry for a woman he quoted in the interview.

Basically what I’m saying in The Myth of Male Power is that power is about control over one’s life.

I once remember meeting a woman at a workshop who heard me say that and said, “Huh, let me run this by you. I’m a female in my 40s who is a medical doctor. I earn a good amount of money, but I became a medical doctor because my father was a medical doctor and originally my brother was going to become one. When my brother decided not to become one, my father was so devastated that I chose to become one. Then my father started paying so much more attention to me and focusing on me so much more that I couldn’t tell him the truth, that I really didn’t want to become a doctor. I, like my brother, wanted to become a writer. So I kept it to myself because I loved the attention which I interpreted as love. Now, long story short, I’ve become a medical doctor and given up what I really wanted to do. I guess I really don’t have control over my own life. I guess feminists would say I have power and you would say I don’t have power. Is that accurate?”

I said, “Yes, I’m afraid that that’s accurate.” And I said, “Do other people in the room feel that that’s accurate?” Virtually everybody in the room, female and male, raised their hand and said that, yes, they could see that the real power is about control over one’s life. Then I said to the woman, “What you’ve done, the decision you’ve made, is a decision that virtually every man has made. He’s learned from society that he will be loved, respected and more attractive to females, more respected by his parents and his peers, more honored by everybody if he earns more money.”

And as the author says, feminism is all about doing just that.

In such a context, the question what is power? becomes an obvious paradox.  If “power” means a lack of control over one’s life, then it isn’t real power at all. And if power means being able to command respect from others and tell people what to do, that certainly has its benefits, but at what cost? If the cost is not being able to do what you want to do, that cost is too high for many people, and they are perfectly willing to be “powerless” if that means they can then have “real power.”

I am again reminded of the slacker guy on the skateboard juxtaposed against the “power” woman.

At the time, the apparent role reversal intrigued me, but if we consider the above in light of real power, who has it? The corporate slave, or the skateboard slacker?

If feminism means the new women are giving up the right to control over their own lives, while the new men are increasingly just doing what they want to do, what, if any, are the moral or cultural implications?

Does that depend on whether we take a communitarian view and deem such men to be…. what? “Selfish”? Communitarians would say that people doing whatever they want to do comes with a price to society. Libertarians would argue that it is only the individual who pays. I’d be the first to argue that a guy should be allowed to to hang out and do whatever he wants, including riding a skateboard into his middle age years, but if he never makes any money at it, he has no right to come begging from the nose-to-the-grindstone types (male or female) who put on dreary suits and went to jobs they hated.  But I worry that certain communitarian types will be the ones who whether they have “real”  power or not, will have the power to control others, and that they might eventually tell the skateboard guys what to do.

People who are locked into doing what they don’t really want to doing have an ugly way of wanting to make others do the same thing. This unfortunate tendency may stem from human nature. Do people who lack control over their own lives have an emotional need to control others? I would hate to think that in return for their loss of “real power” that comes from having control over their own lives,  they would gain control over the lives of others.

What about those who see controlling other people as constituting real power, and who want it so badly that they are willing to give up having control over their own lives in order to get it?

If those kind of people get total power, what will happen to people who simply want control over their own lives?

Will they have to flee, like these Cubans who risked their lives in order to get away from the apparatchiks who in exchange for having no power over their own lives, were given the power to enslave others?

Here’s a picture of them in their leaking homemade “vessel.”

They sought to come here because they seek power over their own lives.

I hope it’s not too late for them to find it.

MORE: I am reminded of an earlier post I wrote about power, in which I admitted envying those who didn’t have it:

Much as I hate being honest with myself, I have to admit that I have been guilty of coveting those with less supposed “power” in this racket we call life. Years ago, I worked in a law firm I absolutely hated, doing the worst kind of drudgery which gave me nightmares by night, and having to keep track of “billable hours” which was a much worse nightmare by day, for I am one of those unfortunates who cannot perform mental work (which litigation is) if I have to simultaneously handle keeping track of time blocks and putting pricetags on it. I was miserable. And one day, a young guy about my age came in to fix the light fixture in my office. This was something I could have done myself, of course, as I am a very handy person and I love to work with my hands. But the guy was so happy and unperturbed — after all he was doing real work, which is its own reward — and I simply envied him. I knew that he would not only be able go home at the end of the day, but that he would not be awakened by litigation nightmares. He would not have his vacation weekends nullified by the last minute manueverings of opposing counsel, and he could not be forced to put in 80 hours a week. He was doing work which I saw as preferable to the work I was doing, he got paid a good wage (no doubt with full benefits) and at the end of the day his work was actually done (which mine never, ever was). Yet if normal people had compared us at the time, he would have been the “underdog.” Far from seeing him as that, I coveted his life in the way that others might covet the life of Bill Gates. Whether that was my personal form of “underdogma,” I don’t know. Did I envy someone for having “less” than I did? Under the circumstances, he seemed to have more. Far more. Can less be more? I don’t know, but I do know that I coveted what I did not have.

Did I have more power than he did? If having the legal power to ruin someone’s life with a lawsuit and making more money (itself highly debatable) constitute power, then maybe I did. But I did not like what I was doing and did not know why I was doing it. I might have been happier if I’d had feminism as a driving force, but who knows?