Once more around the mulberry bush with the "Western man"

Adam Francis Cornford:
I would like to learn of these distilled generalizations, accompanied by a definition, even approximate, of a "Western man" and how he differs from, say, an "Eastern man."

Jennifer Armstrong:
You are postmodernist to the core and would raise the objection:'Because the sky is sometimes orange or purple, we are very wrong and prejudicial to say that the sky is blue.'

Jane Sedgwick:
I can even take it further and say Western men have castration anxiety, and hence they behave in the way that they do towards women.

Jennifer Armstrong:
It's strange how when you want to make any generalisations of 'the West', you are taken to task as if it were a sign of an extreme lack of sophistication to do so. There is emotional blackmail in this charge: "Generalise about us and we will paint you into a corner where you look unsophisticated." Nonetheless, I have to say that I have NEVER encountered, with any Japanese gentleman, the kind of presumptuousness about my putative "emotionality" that I encounter again and again with Western males.

Adam Francis Cornford:
No, I just like some degree of method and empirical backing in discussions like this. To the best of my knowledge, I might add, I have never suffered from castration anxiety. But I posed a very simple question: what is a "Western man"? I also asked: how is a "Western man" different from, say, and Eastern man? Or are you using the term "Western man" to mean "men from developed nations in the Northern hemisphere," for example?

Adam Francis Cornford: Oh--sorry, Jennifer. I think we cross-posted. The specific issue was then about male response to what some males consider displays of "emotionality." I guess I wasn't able to identify that as the issue. I'll need to think on whether, based on my own experience, I agree or not. I am generally suspicious of sweeping generalizations about either sex that ignore class and ethnicity, however.


Jennifer Armstrong: Okay, well you are not a postmodernist, because postmodernists do not believe in empiricism. There are somewhat justified reasons for this disregard of the empirical approach. As Adorno notes, the capacity of empiricism to discover truths is not independent of the ideological structures in which those "truths" are thought to be discovered. One need only look to the "evolutionary psychology" to see how "science" can be made to justify cultural prejudices about gender.

In any case, regarding the generalisation that both Jane and I have made about Western men: as I said, it is not wrong to generalise. To the contrary, I think that generalisations can be mightily useful, especially when founded upon experience. My experience is that Western men do tend to see "emotional displays" where there are none. As we have discussed before, my character structure, regarding emotion, tends to be especially reserved due to my British colonial background. (As an aside: I once considered myself "emotional" in relation to my Western counterparts just in the sense that my emotions are more integrated with what I take to be my 'rationality'. All the same, whilst I acknowledge emotions, I do not express them in a particularly free flowing manner.)

Now, I find, given my actual character structure, that Western men have nonetheless inclined to "read" much of what I say in a very different light. For example, an observation about something in the world is easily recast, because of my gender, as a kind of whiny "complaint". I would say that right wing men just about always make this error of judgement -- and seemingly deliberately and willingly so. Liberal men may or may not fall into this ideological trap. The further left you go, as a rule, the safer I feel that what I'm saying will not be given a ridiculous mask and overlay of sheer emotionality.

And, as I have made clear, Japanese men simply don't do this. For example, they can speak about their own bodily states quite freely and express their own emotional reactions in a way that, although somewhat repressed, is very clear that they "own" those emotional reactions and don't presume them to be coming from someone or somewhere else.
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