A man is only ever rational in his indignation

Let us return to the common way in which consumerist oriented men establish their dominance. It's on the basis of a psychological double-bind, which a woman is not to escape from. Let us imagine if the typical gender psychodynamics were represented by a member of each party, who, for some unknown reason, were actually able to speak honestly (in Kleinian terms) about their actual relation to each other:

MAN: Emotional? It's how you are when I'm distressed.

WOMAN: I know that emotional is precisely how I am not allowed to be, if I am to represent a good part object* to men at large, rather than representing a scary, evil part object.

Note how diminished everybody and everything comes when these infantile psychological one side of the human psyche. And to be honest, I have never known one who was born and bred under the force of typical cultural consumerist consciousness to express his indignation without blaming the nearest female in his vicinity for it, saying that it was she, not he, who had caused the bump on life's otherwise necessarily harmonious highways, by being "too emotional".

As we can see, the conventional consumerist male is one who is very passive, in that he expects to automatically receive every positive thing in life, so long as "reason prevails".

His intellectual conception of reason is borrowed from certain 19th Century ideals of transcendence of the passions, an orientation towards science, and an idea of representing 'civilisation' rather than 'nature'. Yet great is his passivity towards the project of any actual self-improvement or in terms of orientating himself towards actual mastery of the material world. He wants to represent RATIONALITY itself (ie. in relation to womankind), and sees no reason why he shouldn't do so, but he has done absolutely nothing to achieve it. In fact, he wouldn't know where to begin to try to do so.

So, instead he sits around like a spider in his web, expecting to be gratified (a passive expectation which he associates with the reign of "reason".) And when something goes wrong with his plans, he alights upon culprit in the form and shape of any ordinary woman -- for he considers that women (in their nature) are responsible for upsetting the default reign of reason, which had been so rewarding to him, until reality had intervened and upset his plans for remaining perfectly passive.

Our 21st Century gent sees his self-identity in representing 19th Century rationality itself.

Yet, so secure is he in his surety as to what should prevail (by virtue of his capacity to consume), that he has not leaped into action all day.

And amazing, too, that despite no action on his part, women are falling like flies around him!


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Note: * A "part object" is the projection of either a nurturing (positive) or a non-nurturing (hostile) facility. It is called "part object" because the nature of the full human being (who is requisitioned to provide psychological nurturing) remains irrelevant to the psychological dynamics that are taking place.

ALSO NOTE: And of course, passive consumerism emulates the regressive qualities of suckling at the mother's breasts, so of course it invites the same psychological behaviours that predominantly occur during this stage. So passive consumerism leads to viewing women primarily in terms of either nurturing or non-nurturing part objects.

And that is why it doesn't seem to occur this way with Zimbabweans, despite their patriarchal society. Theirs is not yet as passive (in the sense of being consumer oriented) as industrially advanced, Western societies are.