On Belonging
This post is an amatuerishly skeptical look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and why it seems some large contingent of the population cannot move past 'belonging'. I'm positing but not asserting that the need for belonging explains far more human behavior than say, a sincere conviction in any particular ideology.
The internet was around when I was a teen, but you had to call it up. I by 1999 I came to know one guy in the year above who had used a credit card to buy stuff off the internet, and he was a bit of a freak. In the late 90s internet shopping was treated with the kind of skepticism driverless cars were, or I'm told, horseless carriages were.
I tell you this because you may have forgotten or never known a world in which you couldn't import your fashion from New York, London, Tokyo, Paris or Portland in the time it takes a warehouse to dispatch and a postal service to deliver.
So how did teenagers know what to wear when blogs and look books didn't yet exist, you had to wait a good 14 seconds for a single jpg to depixelate into a readable resolution, and just about nobody mail ordered anything ever? For the most part, the Ballarat solution (and near as I can tell, the Geelong, Bendigo, Bairnsdale, Sale, Shepparton et al. solution) was surf brands and surf shops. Oakley glasses for all, billabong, rip curl, roxy.
I recently caught up with a friend from highschool and he was reminiscing about the Rip-Curl Tracksuit Pants epidemic. I tried to google me up an image for you, but it seems Rip-Curl continue to exist and manufacture tracksuit pants, and these things were no Levi 501 classic timeless designs it seems. But my friend was talking about how he had a borderline tantrum to get his parents to buy him a pair, and how they were just about mandatory.
Though at this catch up, I was still wearing shorts. He seemed to have forgotten that around that time I was already established as a freak who always wore shorts. I was probably going through the phase where I had one pair of shorts I loved so much, I didn't want the inconvenience of washing and drying them to put them out of rotation, so I was coloring in food stains on them with a sharpie.
There was also a day, my beloved mother, with the best of intentions, took my brother and I to 'the' store for cool teen fashion. I forget what it was called now and it no longer exists but something like 21 Jump Street but obviously not that. Much like the surf brands though, what was for the most part 'cool' then was innocuous geometric designs of a limited range of pantone colors. I found these boring, the most exciting surf brand, Mambo had probably already been ruined by releasing it's Dad collection.
I vividly remember announcing in store 'I don't like any of these clothes, Dad and I are going to check out Target.' and the look of horror on my mother's face. It was quite satisfying, and worth the trip. Mind you, these were the days when I wanted nothing more than to bring a girl home that my parents would disapprove of.
I can't recall if it was before or after this, that one such girl introduced me to the op-shopping scene. And here I get to if not the meat of this post, the end of a disclaimer.
I'm at a distinct disadvantage when talking about the psychological need for 'belonging' because there is so much observable human behavior, that I have simply never experienced. I'm not immune from belonging, long periods of social isolation get me down. The most depressed I've probably ever been was 3 months I spent travelling through Asia, where every human interaction was a commercial transaction etc.
But I don't understand how a person can pick up a shirt, from a pile of identical shirts in a store and say 'cool shirt, this is going to be my look' are they secretely hoping that the retailer made a massive blunder in ordering said shirt, so niche in it's appeal that the 8~10 others would go unsold? In a big city like Melbourne, 10 shirts maybe triggers an intuitive calculation of the odds you'll ever see one of the other patrons in your shirt on the same day, but in Ballarat a city that literally has 'the street' to 'go down' the odds of you seeing someone dressed identically to you and making you feel like you've voluntarily put on a uniform is 10/10.
I don't understand it viscerally. And I'm not sure I understand it intellectually. Problematically it's also one of the most dangerous philosophical ideas/conceits that has it's own disastrous history - that there's a thinking elite and a cud-chewing herd. The temptation to look down on 'the plebs' is a disastrous act of hubris, and it's also great hubris to ever assume one such as myself possesses any particular insight. Sufficiently removed, there's probably a perspective that can see I have no less tendency to conform than anyone else.
Let's introduce some of the theory, from the now increasingly ignored and dismissed field of scientific inquiry psychology. Starting with the big dog in this fight - Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
I studied this in my marketing degree. And marketers while having many methods of demographic and psychographic segmentation, use one dichotomy of segmentation that is 'opinion leaders' and 'opinion seekers' that I've always found the most descriptive of consumer behavior and easiest in a practical sense. Do people lead or follow?
To reconcile the two, Maslow's heirarchy in brief says, if you have a broken leg, you don't give a fuck if the roast pork has another hour before it's done. If you are in perfect health but standing in the rain naked with nothing to eat, you don't much give a shit about the new Yeezy colorway dropping this friday. If you do have food in your belly, a roof over your head, walls to keep the draft out and a door to shut on any that would murder, molest or rob you while you sleep, then you start worrying about being the only Jew in the village, and maybe it's time to accept Christ as your savior - bam this is where Maslow's hierarchy hits 'Belonging' and those who bothered to click through the link may notice that it reads 'Love/Belonging'
Is it a verticle heirarchy then or is it a tree? Do we read that '/' as 'or' or do we read it as these two things are synonyms? because I'm fairly certain they are not. While probably an arbitrary compromise betwixt two students of Maslow's theory charged with creating an svg graphic file to be released into the commons, I'm going to suggest this might be a possible explanation betwixt 'opinion leaders' and 'opinion seekers'.
Specifically, how much belonging is enough? It should be pointed out, that much of marketing and economics, in a rare overlap of the schools basically feel there is never enough. And this is how are markets are based. Hence in the world's wealthiest countries we have obesity epidemics, but also that people can never be rich enough and thus we have some multi-billionaires, phones can never be functional enough hence we have 2 models of iPhone released a year etc.
Economics argues that your basic person consumes to the maximum of their utility 'curve' and that there's no satiation. Marketing by suggesting their are opinion leaders and opinion seekers, takes a slightly more optimistic view of our common humanity.
Can someone ever belong enough? Can they be satiated with belonging? In a eulogy delivered last year I made a very arrogant claim that I'd narrowed down my list of two people I'd go against the rest of the world for, unquestioningly and now one of them was dead. It's impossible to do the affect forecasting of being that unpopular, however, I do believe myself sincere in saying, those are two people I'd never even risk betraying, even in death.
My satiation point is probably a bit higher than 2. But if you are the only Jew in the village, I imagine it's a very different story of Christian conversion (assuming away Christian pogroms, which I know, is a big assumption) if you are a member of a large, loving, functional Jewish family, or whether you are an orphan or exile with no attachment.
This has been an overcomplicated way of getting at - if you are getting your belonging needs met somewhere, then you don't need to get it elsewhere.
Now I've had to do a bit of reading, not even rereading, because all of my life I've been a terrible student, attention was basically extended only so far as I could be confident I'd pass the final examination.
After social belonging needs, comes Esteem and esteem in the hierarchy is described on Wikipedia as "Esteem needs are ego needs or status needs. People develop a concern with getting recognition, status, importance, and respect from others. Most humans have a need to feel respected; this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect. Esteem presents the typical human desire to be accepted and valued by others. People often engage in a profession or hobby to gain recognition. These activities give the person a sense of contribution or value. Low self-esteem or an inferiority complex may result from imbalances during this level in the hierarchy. People with low self-esteem often need respect from others; they may feel the need to seek fame or glory. However, fame or glory will not help the person to build their self-esteem until they accept who they are internally. Psychological imbalances such as depression can distract the person from obtaining a higher level of self-esteem."
Which all I'm saying is, if it was me, and I was concerned about inattentive people like me passing potentially expensive tertiary education subjects, I probably would have divided 'esteem' into the social need for belonging, and self-esteem as next up on the heirarchy.
But when I think about it, this is probably another either/or. You can observe people in the wild who need esteem from their peers, and those who seemingly, can provide it for themselves.
I have not studied enough psychology to assert with any confidence where self-esteem comes from. Whether it is nature or nurture, and I couldn't even make a bet with any confidence extrapolating out from my own experience. I suspect the positive psychology of Maslow here would intersect with the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and John Bowlby. Probably a great deal of the shame research Brene Brown has done and the differences between shame and embarrassment or humiliation.
I guess my basic position is that some people unable for various reasons to esteem themselves, get on a hamster wheel of needing constantly to be esteemed externally by peers. This hamster wheel has probably grown more strenuous by the application of social media platforms and smart phones, but other people appear to be, if not immune to the hamster wheel, quite resilient.
And psychology provides many many tools, frameworks from which to posit and speculate, and most importantly - test what might be the driver of whether one does or doesn't take to the hamster wheel. Correlations between the big 5 personally traits, studies of adverse childhood experiences and yes, though you may dislike it, differences between genders can be tested for.
Now, whether a 1990s teenager in Ballarat buys a pair of Rip Curl trackie dacks or not is one mysterious phenomena. What about whether they buy into an ideology? A political party? A set of values?
Because, of course, the kids that bought their clothing at op-shops, and wouldn't be caught dead in late 90s Balifornia wearing surf clothes where themselves not immune from a sense of belonging, a need to be esteemed by peers. It's just that their peers weren't the majority. By and large, the kids that didn't wear surf clothes did sit up the back of the oval smoking dem cigarettes. They wore black nail polish and/or lipstick, tried to bend and break school uniform policy with too short skirts or passing off doc-martins as school shoes. They died their hair the same colors, or had chains to their wallets. They were easy to know and recognize, their behavior could be just as easily predicted. They were simply the alternative, unpopular tribal option.
Google image search the term 'Gender non-conformist' and unless the algorithms work differently for you than I, observe the degree of conformity within a non-conformist community. And this makes sense under Maslow's hierarchy, because this is a group that cannot fit in and then progress up the hierarchy. But through the internet, or moving to certain metropolitan suburbs they can get their esteem needs met and move on to self-esteem by being both connected and themselves. They are non-conformist, but not alone in doing so, even though every single departure from a gender role is gender non-conformist, it does not in practice seem to be a self-identified term associated with moving away from something, so much as toward something else. Perhaps a synonym could be 'Non-binary conforming'?
Now, let's take the Bryan Kavanaugh confirmation hearings as a powerful demonstration of belonging needs. I feel the situation was over-analyzed. Here's the rub, the Republican primary process leaves them vulnerable to the party being hijacked by non-establishment candidates. This happened with Trump. Trump isn't just non-establishment, but completely incompetent, he didn't 'tap into' his base, he is his base. He doesn't understand how the government of his country works and based on his behavior in office, probably thought the President could do whatever they want.
In an act of doing whatever he wanted, he just randomly bicked Bryan off a list of acceptable candidates presented to him by a conservative think tank. A list that functionally was 'people who will keep the republican base happy.' And he thus picked the wrong one.
Now even if you believe that given the importance of the office, and what is known about human flourishing, every name on that list is in some sense 'the wrong one' BK was the wrong one even from a Republican perspective. And thus Mitch and pals got lumped with a fucking disaster that coincided with their one and only chance to confirm a republican pick to the supreme court.
They were faced with a dilemma, do we confirm some arsehole who happens to be on 'our team' even though he as an individual is reprehensible? or do we investigate him thouroughly, demonstrating our strong conviction and belief in justice and the sanctity of the office to which they could be appointed?
They chose belonging, over and above esteem, self-esteem and self-actualization. Even in Maslow's hierarchy, they went low, instead of high.
And thus, the United States of America has on it's supreme court a living embodiment of their lack of regard for 'justice'.
Now earlier in the week, I drew this design for a sticker:
For those who do not Habla Espanol, (like me) the bubbles translate top-to-bottom as 'I'm a feminist' and 'Me too'. The downside of this design is an implicit message that women are nothing but prey, and men nothing but predators. I don't personally believe this, for me it's an illustration of two dangerous subsets of people but I don't get to enforce that it isn't a broad generalization as it stands alone. And I'm okay with that, it's intended to offend.
I was not to know, that in my home city of Melbourne, possibly around the time I published this, another young man would stalk and kill a young woman, again in the northern suburbs.
The police have arrested her suspected killer, and the press coverage seems to be confident they have their man because they are publishing pictures and excerpts from his social media posts, which included this one:
"Shoutout to all the men going through a lot, with no one to turn to, because this world wrongly taught our males to mask their emotion & that strong means silent."
Presumably it was included in the article, not to demonstrate that Aiia's killer was 'woke' to Toxic Masculinity but to establish that he was possibly mentally ill.
I don't wish to go trawling, nor needlessly expose myself to all the vitriolic hate of the peanut gallery that can comment on shit, but the thing is, I can see the same person that crafted this sentence saying 'come on guys, this is our problem it's time to step up.' in the wake of Eurydice's murder on social media.
To me the relevance is that it's easy to say shit. In the wake of this latest crime, the easiest hand washing station has been offered by popular author Clementine Ford.
Because when I posted my sticker design, I was thinking specifically of the men who 'spoke up' on social media in the wake of Eurydice's death last year, about 'checking your mates' and 'calling out toxic masculinity' and 'stepping up' and shit, because I was wondering after these fine words, what these men had been doing, what was phase 2 of ending violence against women? What positive, affirmative deeds had they been carrying out?
I don't know. But one of these men linked up Clemintine Ford's offering of absolution. Intent does matter, I sincerely believe Clemintine doesn't wish to absolve men, but wants to see an end to male violence against women, but functionally I feel this particular editorial about as effective as my facetious sticker design. And again to be charitable, my understanding is that the editor, not the author choose the title of a piece.
But apparantly, all you have to do is pick sides. I could not have chosen a better illustration that most of people's professed political beliefs are a manifestation of social belonging needs and external-esteem needs.
In the case of men specifically, it's a need to be seen to be on the right teem that results in wolves in sheeps clothing. In the same article, Clemintine asserts with more confidence (perhaps for good reason) than I have, the relationship between becoming a Codey Hermann or James Todd is:
"You want to know the common thread linking every man who decides to rape and murder a woman just making her way home at night? They’ve laughed at sexist jokes. They’ve agreed that "women ain't shit". They’ve liked a comment online that says "feminism is cancer" or "that bitch needs a dick in her mouth to shut her up".
If all I have to do though, is pick sides, I picked my side a long time ago. It was a pretty easy and obvious choice, one might even call it intuitive. Nobody ever swings by to check my credentials, my qualifications, my devotion to the side. Much as I can call myself a Carlton Supporter, and have never been a paying member and to have attended a whole 3 Carlton games in my life. Most of what I do as a Carlton Supporter, is not support my team. Is Murphy still captain? I don't know.
In my life, I've heard one guy remark 'all women are sluts, they just don't know it yet.' Yet I know plenty of stories of guys that have partaken in abusive relationships, that outwardly are paragons of male feminist virtue.
As evidenced by Nike, Cosmo-Uk, Disney, and most recently Gillette, the fact is Progressive values are what Rip Curl Tracksuit Pants were in 1998~99 Ballarat. They are what all the kids are doing, and while it shouldn't be discounted as an indication of actual progress, it is still functionally a garment that is easy to wear.
And I am yet to see evidence, that being both male, and a feminist requires anything of men. Though skeptical, sincere male feminists may exist. At the very least men who sincerely think they are male feminists.
But despite the 'best' 'efforts' of some of my male counterparts in the wake of Eurydice's death last year, another woman's life has been snuffed out in an extreme act of selfishness. What I can only offer as explanation as to why Melbourne has not become safer but a more dangerous culture for women to live in (statistically speaking) is because much of the behavior is about belonging, not actualizing values held by the self. Furthermore, I'm pessimistic that women can do more than call on men to call on other men, because most people are preoccupied with lower hierarchical needs, like food and shelter.
I mean I could have made this point much more easily by pointing out the sheer number of people who want something done about climate change but haven't bothered to change energy companies. But a woman has been killed by a man, again.
To female feminists and in particular, women who are leaders, high status women if you are frustrated by all the fucking lip service muddying what you are trying to achieve there are a lot of historical male leaders that struggled with this very phenomena and generously wrote about it for future leaders, including but not limited to Machiavelli addressing sycophants at court, Marcus Aurelius wrote much of the problems arising from the human material we have to work with, as did the Stoics in general. There might be something in the Eastern Traditions too, but none spring immediately to mind. I go East for martial philosophy generally.
The internet was around when I was a teen, but you had to call it up. I by 1999 I came to know one guy in the year above who had used a credit card to buy stuff off the internet, and he was a bit of a freak. In the late 90s internet shopping was treated with the kind of skepticism driverless cars were, or I'm told, horseless carriages were.
I tell you this because you may have forgotten or never known a world in which you couldn't import your fashion from New York, London, Tokyo, Paris or Portland in the time it takes a warehouse to dispatch and a postal service to deliver.
So how did teenagers know what to wear when blogs and look books didn't yet exist, you had to wait a good 14 seconds for a single jpg to depixelate into a readable resolution, and just about nobody mail ordered anything ever? For the most part, the Ballarat solution (and near as I can tell, the Geelong, Bendigo, Bairnsdale, Sale, Shepparton et al. solution) was surf brands and surf shops. Oakley glasses for all, billabong, rip curl, roxy.
I recently caught up with a friend from highschool and he was reminiscing about the Rip-Curl Tracksuit Pants epidemic. I tried to google me up an image for you, but it seems Rip-Curl continue to exist and manufacture tracksuit pants, and these things were no Levi 501 classic timeless designs it seems. But my friend was talking about how he had a borderline tantrum to get his parents to buy him a pair, and how they were just about mandatory.
Though at this catch up, I was still wearing shorts. He seemed to have forgotten that around that time I was already established as a freak who always wore shorts. I was probably going through the phase where I had one pair of shorts I loved so much, I didn't want the inconvenience of washing and drying them to put them out of rotation, so I was coloring in food stains on them with a sharpie.
There was also a day, my beloved mother, with the best of intentions, took my brother and I to 'the' store for cool teen fashion. I forget what it was called now and it no longer exists but something like 21 Jump Street but obviously not that. Much like the surf brands though, what was for the most part 'cool' then was innocuous geometric designs of a limited range of pantone colors. I found these boring, the most exciting surf brand, Mambo had probably already been ruined by releasing it's Dad collection.
I vividly remember announcing in store 'I don't like any of these clothes, Dad and I are going to check out Target.' and the look of horror on my mother's face. It was quite satisfying, and worth the trip. Mind you, these were the days when I wanted nothing more than to bring a girl home that my parents would disapprove of.
I can't recall if it was before or after this, that one such girl introduced me to the op-shopping scene. And here I get to if not the meat of this post, the end of a disclaimer.
I'm at a distinct disadvantage when talking about the psychological need for 'belonging' because there is so much observable human behavior, that I have simply never experienced. I'm not immune from belonging, long periods of social isolation get me down. The most depressed I've probably ever been was 3 months I spent travelling through Asia, where every human interaction was a commercial transaction etc.
But I don't understand how a person can pick up a shirt, from a pile of identical shirts in a store and say 'cool shirt, this is going to be my look' are they secretely hoping that the retailer made a massive blunder in ordering said shirt, so niche in it's appeal that the 8~10 others would go unsold? In a big city like Melbourne, 10 shirts maybe triggers an intuitive calculation of the odds you'll ever see one of the other patrons in your shirt on the same day, but in Ballarat a city that literally has 'the street' to 'go down' the odds of you seeing someone dressed identically to you and making you feel like you've voluntarily put on a uniform is 10/10.
I don't understand it viscerally. And I'm not sure I understand it intellectually. Problematically it's also one of the most dangerous philosophical ideas/conceits that has it's own disastrous history - that there's a thinking elite and a cud-chewing herd. The temptation to look down on 'the plebs' is a disastrous act of hubris, and it's also great hubris to ever assume one such as myself possesses any particular insight. Sufficiently removed, there's probably a perspective that can see I have no less tendency to conform than anyone else.
Let's introduce some of the theory, from the now increasingly ignored and dismissed field of scientific inquiry psychology. Starting with the big dog in this fight - Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
I studied this in my marketing degree. And marketers while having many methods of demographic and psychographic segmentation, use one dichotomy of segmentation that is 'opinion leaders' and 'opinion seekers' that I've always found the most descriptive of consumer behavior and easiest in a practical sense. Do people lead or follow?
To reconcile the two, Maslow's heirarchy in brief says, if you have a broken leg, you don't give a fuck if the roast pork has another hour before it's done. If you are in perfect health but standing in the rain naked with nothing to eat, you don't much give a shit about the new Yeezy colorway dropping this friday. If you do have food in your belly, a roof over your head, walls to keep the draft out and a door to shut on any that would murder, molest or rob you while you sleep, then you start worrying about being the only Jew in the village, and maybe it's time to accept Christ as your savior - bam this is where Maslow's hierarchy hits 'Belonging' and those who bothered to click through the link may notice that it reads 'Love/Belonging'
Is it a verticle heirarchy then or is it a tree? Do we read that '/' as 'or' or do we read it as these two things are synonyms? because I'm fairly certain they are not. While probably an arbitrary compromise betwixt two students of Maslow's theory charged with creating an svg graphic file to be released into the commons, I'm going to suggest this might be a possible explanation betwixt 'opinion leaders' and 'opinion seekers'.
Specifically, how much belonging is enough? It should be pointed out, that much of marketing and economics, in a rare overlap of the schools basically feel there is never enough. And this is how are markets are based. Hence in the world's wealthiest countries we have obesity epidemics, but also that people can never be rich enough and thus we have some multi-billionaires, phones can never be functional enough hence we have 2 models of iPhone released a year etc.
Economics argues that your basic person consumes to the maximum of their utility 'curve' and that there's no satiation. Marketing by suggesting their are opinion leaders and opinion seekers, takes a slightly more optimistic view of our common humanity.
Can someone ever belong enough? Can they be satiated with belonging? In a eulogy delivered last year I made a very arrogant claim that I'd narrowed down my list of two people I'd go against the rest of the world for, unquestioningly and now one of them was dead. It's impossible to do the affect forecasting of being that unpopular, however, I do believe myself sincere in saying, those are two people I'd never even risk betraying, even in death.
My satiation point is probably a bit higher than 2. But if you are the only Jew in the village, I imagine it's a very different story of Christian conversion (assuming away Christian pogroms, which I know, is a big assumption) if you are a member of a large, loving, functional Jewish family, or whether you are an orphan or exile with no attachment.
This has been an overcomplicated way of getting at - if you are getting your belonging needs met somewhere, then you don't need to get it elsewhere.
Now I've had to do a bit of reading, not even rereading, because all of my life I've been a terrible student, attention was basically extended only so far as I could be confident I'd pass the final examination.
After social belonging needs, comes Esteem and esteem in the hierarchy is described on Wikipedia as "Esteem needs are ego needs or status needs. People develop a concern with getting recognition, status, importance, and respect from others. Most humans have a need to feel respected; this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect. Esteem presents the typical human desire to be accepted and valued by others. People often engage in a profession or hobby to gain recognition. These activities give the person a sense of contribution or value. Low self-esteem or an inferiority complex may result from imbalances during this level in the hierarchy. People with low self-esteem often need respect from others; they may feel the need to seek fame or glory. However, fame or glory will not help the person to build their self-esteem until they accept who they are internally. Psychological imbalances such as depression can distract the person from obtaining a higher level of self-esteem."
Which all I'm saying is, if it was me, and I was concerned about inattentive people like me passing potentially expensive tertiary education subjects, I probably would have divided 'esteem' into the social need for belonging, and self-esteem as next up on the heirarchy.
But when I think about it, this is probably another either/or. You can observe people in the wild who need esteem from their peers, and those who seemingly, can provide it for themselves.
I have not studied enough psychology to assert with any confidence where self-esteem comes from. Whether it is nature or nurture, and I couldn't even make a bet with any confidence extrapolating out from my own experience. I suspect the positive psychology of Maslow here would intersect with the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and John Bowlby. Probably a great deal of the shame research Brene Brown has done and the differences between shame and embarrassment or humiliation.
I guess my basic position is that some people unable for various reasons to esteem themselves, get on a hamster wheel of needing constantly to be esteemed externally by peers. This hamster wheel has probably grown more strenuous by the application of social media platforms and smart phones, but other people appear to be, if not immune to the hamster wheel, quite resilient.
And psychology provides many many tools, frameworks from which to posit and speculate, and most importantly - test what might be the driver of whether one does or doesn't take to the hamster wheel. Correlations between the big 5 personally traits, studies of adverse childhood experiences and yes, though you may dislike it, differences between genders can be tested for.
Now, whether a 1990s teenager in Ballarat buys a pair of Rip Curl trackie dacks or not is one mysterious phenomena. What about whether they buy into an ideology? A political party? A set of values?
Because, of course, the kids that bought their clothing at op-shops, and wouldn't be caught dead in late 90s Balifornia wearing surf clothes where themselves not immune from a sense of belonging, a need to be esteemed by peers. It's just that their peers weren't the majority. By and large, the kids that didn't wear surf clothes did sit up the back of the oval smoking dem cigarettes. They wore black nail polish and/or lipstick, tried to bend and break school uniform policy with too short skirts or passing off doc-martins as school shoes. They died their hair the same colors, or had chains to their wallets. They were easy to know and recognize, their behavior could be just as easily predicted. They were simply the alternative, unpopular tribal option.
Google image search the term 'Gender non-conformist' and unless the algorithms work differently for you than I, observe the degree of conformity within a non-conformist community. And this makes sense under Maslow's hierarchy, because this is a group that cannot fit in and then progress up the hierarchy. But through the internet, or moving to certain metropolitan suburbs they can get their esteem needs met and move on to self-esteem by being both connected and themselves. They are non-conformist, but not alone in doing so, even though every single departure from a gender role is gender non-conformist, it does not in practice seem to be a self-identified term associated with moving away from something, so much as toward something else. Perhaps a synonym could be 'Non-binary conforming'?
Now, let's take the Bryan Kavanaugh confirmation hearings as a powerful demonstration of belonging needs. I feel the situation was over-analyzed. Here's the rub, the Republican primary process leaves them vulnerable to the party being hijacked by non-establishment candidates. This happened with Trump. Trump isn't just non-establishment, but completely incompetent, he didn't 'tap into' his base, he is his base. He doesn't understand how the government of his country works and based on his behavior in office, probably thought the President could do whatever they want.
In an act of doing whatever he wanted, he just randomly bicked Bryan off a list of acceptable candidates presented to him by a conservative think tank. A list that functionally was 'people who will keep the republican base happy.' And he thus picked the wrong one.
Now even if you believe that given the importance of the office, and what is known about human flourishing, every name on that list is in some sense 'the wrong one' BK was the wrong one even from a Republican perspective. And thus Mitch and pals got lumped with a fucking disaster that coincided with their one and only chance to confirm a republican pick to the supreme court.
They were faced with a dilemma, do we confirm some arsehole who happens to be on 'our team' even though he as an individual is reprehensible? or do we investigate him thouroughly, demonstrating our strong conviction and belief in justice and the sanctity of the office to which they could be appointed?
They chose belonging, over and above esteem, self-esteem and self-actualization. Even in Maslow's hierarchy, they went low, instead of high.
And thus, the United States of America has on it's supreme court a living embodiment of their lack of regard for 'justice'.
Now earlier in the week, I drew this design for a sticker:
For those who do not Habla Espanol, (like me) the bubbles translate top-to-bottom as 'I'm a feminist' and 'Me too'. The downside of this design is an implicit message that women are nothing but prey, and men nothing but predators. I don't personally believe this, for me it's an illustration of two dangerous subsets of people but I don't get to enforce that it isn't a broad generalization as it stands alone. And I'm okay with that, it's intended to offend.
I was not to know, that in my home city of Melbourne, possibly around the time I published this, another young man would stalk and kill a young woman, again in the northern suburbs.
The police have arrested her suspected killer, and the press coverage seems to be confident they have their man because they are publishing pictures and excerpts from his social media posts, which included this one:
"Shoutout to all the men going through a lot, with no one to turn to, because this world wrongly taught our males to mask their emotion & that strong means silent."
Presumably it was included in the article, not to demonstrate that Aiia's killer was 'woke' to Toxic Masculinity but to establish that he was possibly mentally ill.
I don't wish to go trawling, nor needlessly expose myself to all the vitriolic hate of the peanut gallery that can comment on shit, but the thing is, I can see the same person that crafted this sentence saying 'come on guys, this is our problem it's time to step up.' in the wake of Eurydice's murder on social media.
To me the relevance is that it's easy to say shit. In the wake of this latest crime, the easiest hand washing station has been offered by popular author Clementine Ford.
Because when I posted my sticker design, I was thinking specifically of the men who 'spoke up' on social media in the wake of Eurydice's death last year, about 'checking your mates' and 'calling out toxic masculinity' and 'stepping up' and shit, because I was wondering after these fine words, what these men had been doing, what was phase 2 of ending violence against women? What positive, affirmative deeds had they been carrying out?
I don't know. But one of these men linked up Clemintine Ford's offering of absolution. Intent does matter, I sincerely believe Clemintine doesn't wish to absolve men, but wants to see an end to male violence against women, but functionally I feel this particular editorial about as effective as my facetious sticker design. And again to be charitable, my understanding is that the editor, not the author choose the title of a piece.
But apparantly, all you have to do is pick sides. I could not have chosen a better illustration that most of people's professed political beliefs are a manifestation of social belonging needs and external-esteem needs.
In the case of men specifically, it's a need to be seen to be on the right teem that results in wolves in sheeps clothing. In the same article, Clemintine asserts with more confidence (perhaps for good reason) than I have, the relationship between becoming a Codey Hermann or James Todd is:
"You want to know the common thread linking every man who decides to rape and murder a woman just making her way home at night? They’ve laughed at sexist jokes. They’ve agreed that "women ain't shit". They’ve liked a comment online that says "feminism is cancer" or "that bitch needs a dick in her mouth to shut her up".
If all I have to do though, is pick sides, I picked my side a long time ago. It was a pretty easy and obvious choice, one might even call it intuitive. Nobody ever swings by to check my credentials, my qualifications, my devotion to the side. Much as I can call myself a Carlton Supporter, and have never been a paying member and to have attended a whole 3 Carlton games in my life. Most of what I do as a Carlton Supporter, is not support my team. Is Murphy still captain? I don't know.
In my life, I've heard one guy remark 'all women are sluts, they just don't know it yet.' Yet I know plenty of stories of guys that have partaken in abusive relationships, that outwardly are paragons of male feminist virtue.
As evidenced by Nike, Cosmo-Uk, Disney, and most recently Gillette, the fact is Progressive values are what Rip Curl Tracksuit Pants were in 1998~99 Ballarat. They are what all the kids are doing, and while it shouldn't be discounted as an indication of actual progress, it is still functionally a garment that is easy to wear.
And I am yet to see evidence, that being both male, and a feminist requires anything of men. Though skeptical, sincere male feminists may exist. At the very least men who sincerely think they are male feminists.
But despite the 'best' 'efforts' of some of my male counterparts in the wake of Eurydice's death last year, another woman's life has been snuffed out in an extreme act of selfishness. What I can only offer as explanation as to why Melbourne has not become safer but a more dangerous culture for women to live in (statistically speaking) is because much of the behavior is about belonging, not actualizing values held by the self. Furthermore, I'm pessimistic that women can do more than call on men to call on other men, because most people are preoccupied with lower hierarchical needs, like food and shelter.
I mean I could have made this point much more easily by pointing out the sheer number of people who want something done about climate change but haven't bothered to change energy companies. But a woman has been killed by a man, again.
To female feminists and in particular, women who are leaders, high status women if you are frustrated by all the fucking lip service muddying what you are trying to achieve there are a lot of historical male leaders that struggled with this very phenomena and generously wrote about it for future leaders, including but not limited to Machiavelli addressing sycophants at court, Marcus Aurelius wrote much of the problems arising from the human material we have to work with, as did the Stoics in general. There might be something in the Eastern Traditions too, but none spring immediately to mind. I go East for martial philosophy generally.
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