Personae Non Grata

As a teenager, I once wrote an entire essay arguing that the indefinite article a/an is the first sign that you’re dealing with an imbecile. What, for example, is the difference between someone who says “I am Catholic” and someone who says “I am a Catholic”? Or someone who says “I am liberal” and someone who says “I am a liberal”? The difference is that the first person is giving one (of possibly very many) descriptors of him- or herself, while the second is identifying entirely with a social role. The same can be said of someone who says “I am a nerd” versus “I am nerdy,” someone who says “I am a spiritualist” versus “I am spiritual,” someone who says “I’m a Yankees fan” versus “I like/love/support the Yankees,” and so on. Would you call yourself feminist or would you call yourself a feminist, because only the former is a person. The latter is an artifact, a thing, altogether cobbled from the  hearts and minds of others.   

I’ve grown up a lot since writing that original hate-speech, and I now consider it to be rather reductionist, but the principle of the thing is still valid and in fact I now consider it more apt than I ever did before. From Carl Jung – and expounded upon by Joseph Campbell – we learn that the very words person and persona come from the Latin word for masks that were used on-stage by actors in Roman drama, through which they “sounded” (per-, through; sonare, to sound) their lines. The reason for this is pretty simple: nobody came to a play with a program featuring a dramatis personae or list of characters because there weren’t any printing presses, so in order to remember who was speaking you needed only to look at his mask. If whoever is talking looks like Oedipus, then whatever he’s saying is what Oedipus is supposed to say. In society, according to Campbell, “one has to appear in one mask or another if one is to function socially at all; and even those who reject such masks can only put on others, representing rejection.”

In that one prescient sentence, Campbell predicts the hipster subculture about a half-century before its inception.

So we’ve all got roles to play, and we’re supposed to behave according to the parameters associated with those roles. Idealists like to argue that we should strip off our masks and live in a more natural state – which just underscores the point, since that’s exactly what idealists are supposed to say. In reality, we cannot, in our present civilized state, ever strip away our masks or entirely step out of our roles because of just how deep they go. We pretend we don’t like criminals, for instance, but in fact in a tacit way we mostly feel that criminals have a place in society; they are on the opposite side of the balancing-beam from philanthropists, and they provide paying jobs for cops, judges, security thugs and jailers. What we really don’t like is unpredictability. This is why “crazy” people get locked away in institutions and/or medicated into vegetation, regardless of whether they are actually a threat to themselves or anyone else – it’s because they’re unpredictable. An insane person might walk into a grocery store and start doing a strip-tease for the potato chips, and that scares us – or anyway it scares our social leaders – far more than an armed gunman. At least armed gunmen act like armed gunmen, in a predictably ruthless and naughty way.

It warrants noting that there really is a way to live outside of behaviorally-constrictive social roles, and it’s the way we all live as children before we get shipped off to the factory (elsewhere referred to as a “school”) to have our spontaneity stripped away and replaced with predictability. That’s what schools really teach, incidentally; you can jolly well learn readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmetic at home with your parents, but only by having both stern adults and a densely-packed peer group referring to you over and over as “the nice boy” or “the mean girl” or “the joker” or “the scholar” or “the jock” or whatever do you get pigeonholed into the role that’s supposedly your identity. Before this process occurs, however, we are as malleable as clay, being totally different people in each and every setting in which we find ourselves. Naughty, nice, friendly, lazy, courteous, quiet, loud, thoughtful, reckless… we respond to our environments the way chameleons respond to colors. And in fact it’s the very spontaneity of pre-adolescence that Zen people and their ilk aim for in their practice. The end game of non-attachment doesn’t mean letting go of your television; it means letting go of your supposed identity and, ultimately, your very self.

But that’s for Zen people. As for the rest of us, we come to adopt our social identity as our actual identity not because we’re lazy or sheep-like but because, contrary to a silly cliché, we only see ourselves in other peoples’ eyes. Everything we exude, every action we take or appearance we assume creates an impression in others, and it’s that impression that shapes our conceptions of ourselves. Which seems simple enough and is actually pretty self-evident, but for the following: when we focus too much on the impressions we make on others it makes us appear to be fake, our identity mere affectation. True, in the strictest philosophical sense all identities are fake – if by “fake” one means inorganic or not so of its own accord – but, like the film buff who detests spoilers and behind-the-scenes stills, we loathe actually seeing that fakeness. Nobody goes to a puppet show to appreciate the wires. And the fakeness of identity is nowhere more obvious and ingratiating than in people who identify themselves wholly, emphatically, and exclusively with the details of a single social role.

You don’t have to look far to find examples of this. Leak a story or start an internet meme that associates toughness with eating radishes, and the stores around every frat house will suddenly be radish-free. Plaster pictures or stories all over the place linking rock-a-billy music with Sailor Jerry-style tattoos, linking Dr. Who with steampunk, linking hippie music with hula-hoops or tight ropes (call it a “slack line” all you want; it’s still the same thing I saw in the circus when I was nine), linking night-clubbing with bright things in martini glasses (seriously, as a former bartender, how in the hell do you dance holding onto a cosmo or an appletini? I can’t even carry one of those things without spilling it all over me), linking rap music with sagging jeans, linking snowboarding with silly hats… and those aren’t even hypothetical examples, they’re real ones…. Anyway, spread the idea that thing X is intimately associated with thing Y, and everyone whose identity is solely and obsessively fused to one of them will ravenously snap up the other. 

I don’t often quote psychologists – indeed, I don’t often even acknowledge them – but I do have a few favorites, including the abovementioned Jung. Another of my favorites is A. H. Maslow. Known principally for his “hierarchy of needs,” Maslow was also the first prominent psychologist to make the seemingly heretical claim that pleasure might not be a mere by-product of gratified biological urges and may be an end in itself. Being happy for the sake of being happy, instead of as a reward for good works – imagine such a thing! Another of his contributions was the notion that personal identity is real, or that it can be real, but that it’s often hidden under a rolling snowball’s worth of accumulated bullshit. Said Maslow of finding one’s identity:

The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

Yes, it’s painful to cease being the center of your own attention, the precisely-crafted model of a comfortingly narrow role within a comfortingly narrow subset of the larger and more impersonal culture that surrounds it. You will no longer be an Alpha Nerd if you admit that while you like The Big Bang Theory you don’t like the original Star Trek; no longer be an Alpha Bro if you admit that while you think Axe Body Spray smells okay you also think wearing a ball cap at a 45-degree angle looks ridiculous; no longer be an Alpha Hippie if you admit that while you think getting stoned is fun you also find that eating organic burritos all the time gives you painful gas; no longer be an Alpha Hipster if you admit that while you genuinely enjoy American Spirits you have always thought Pabst Blue Ribbon tastes like someone wrung a gym sock into a can… No, I’m sorry to say, once you start letting go of some of the prescriptive baubles of your selected subculture you can no longer sneer at everyone else like they just limped onto the field, but at least you’ll be one step farther from obviously and overtly fake. Mix it up enough and you might just pass as no more fake than the rest of us.  

Online Dating: A Short Treatise on a Target-Rich Environment

Online dating has evolved from an esoteric practice to a social phenomenon, a cash cow, and, as more and more people turn to it, a legitimate way to find romance (if such a thing exists). Internet-based dating services pop up at over 100 per year, catering to every niche and nod that tickles peoples’ fancies along the way. Yet among a goodly amount of people the whole idea of online dating still shoulders an unpleasant stigma, conjuring images of pudgy shut-ins with no redeeming physical qualities and no social skills, because – let’s be honest, here – that’s how it all began and – let’s be more honest – in a lot of ways that’s still the case. But that isn’t the case exclusively, and it’s becoming less so with each new year and new flock of people willing to give online dating a try. My purpose in this article is to explore why and how that works.

For anyone who has deigned to try online dating, its appeals are fairly straightforward and obvious. For one thing, in the real-world world you never know if that person you’re eyeballing from across the room is single or taken, and in fact in most cases (not because of luck but as a consequence of that ultimate buzzkiller: statistics) it’s the latter. On a dating website you have only to read a person’s status. Moreover, because everyone’s there for a stated purpose, there’s no need for awkward fumbling-with-the-laces questioning. The ice, if you will, comes pre-broken.

Accessibility is another boon of online dating. Not only do you not have to squeeze a night at the bar into what for many Americans is already a hectic schedule, you don’t even have to be in the same place. I’ve pre-emptively set up dates in places where I was either moving or planning to spend a period on an archaeological project (what I do when I’m not writing), and with no more or less success than normal. I don’t care how smooth you are, you can’t astral-ly project smoothness over state lines. I personally didn't find this to be the shiningest of appeals when I tried online dating because I'm often recklessly confident and a pretty shameless flirt, i.e., I met my second-to last girlfriend standing in a crowded city bus. But for some people it's a godsend.

And then there’s what social scientists call the “Simon Effect” (after the character Simon from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies), whereby a measure of distance between a oneself and one’s audience – in the case of Golding’s Simon, this was accomplished by makeup – makes a person less inhibited. This is probably also the case with the popularity of texting; if people can’t hear your voice they can’t hear your hesitance, your nervousness, or your lisp (nor can you hear their boredom or reproach). Behind the safety glass of the internet you can really cut loose, freely admit to being a cat-lover or a pervert or a vegan or a religious fanatic or whatever, without having to meet anyone’s critical gaze. Some people are born with the ability to be wholly socially confident right out of the gate; others, like myself, possess it now but had really to work at it; and for everyone else there’s online dating.

Finally, there’s the geography of the dating game: the internet broadens one’s range. This is in direct (I should say an indirect) correlation with a person’s confidence, i.e., the more cripplingly insecure a person is the better his or her chances of meeting a potential mate online – having nowhere to go from zero but up. But even for the measurably confident it can buffer the stakes. Take me: I’ve got about a 20% success rate in the world of face-to-face dating, “success” here meaning one responds to another’s advances and at least one decent date ensues; and about a 3-7% success rate online (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). That’s about a 25% combined success rate overall if I’m hitting both avenues. The only sure-fire way for me to get more dates is to either a) take a college course in my subject, where I tend to stand out as "that motherfucker who always talks in class;" or b) lower my standards.

Naysayers will balk, of course, and rightly so. Dating profiles can at times be so informative they take away all chance of surprise. Part of the adventure of romance is getting to know somebody new. Then there’s the amount of time it often takes to “feel each other out” – without the benefit of in-person contact it can be very difficult to satisfactorily express oneself and one’s desires, particularly for those who aren’t professional writers (yep - sorry). And of course there are online dating’s biggest and most obvious problems, the participants themselves, the worst of whom summarily fit into one of three separate and discrete groups:

1.      Liars – that is, people who lie about their weight, age, and/or other physical attributes. Beyond the obvious “you don’t look anything like your pictures” that resounds in the online dating world like a tolling bell, I have an especially ugly tale of this sort to tell. When I was 22 I checked out Yahoo’s fledging Personals service (probably my first mistake) and immediately hit it off with a cute, heavily-tattoed 21 year-old – or so her ID said – skate punk I'll call Hailey, although Pinnochiette The Whore would work just as well. Everything was fun and exciting for about a month, until one day we were in the mall for some reason when we ran into some pimply-faced teenager at the food court. Hailey showed him her newest tattoo, an enormous piece on her upper back, and he exclaimed, “Wow Hailey, I can’t believe you’ve got so many tattoos already and you’re only 16!” So watch out for that.

2.      Liars – that is, people who misrepresent their personalities or character traits. This is more common than you’d think, even more so than people misrepresenting their looks, and it has to do with our magnificent culture and its tendency to teach people that “putting your best foot forward” means “making up a bunch of fake shit about yourself as if you were bait on a hook.” I can’t think of how I could limit myself to just one specific example of this, so I’ll provide a broad one: while attempting to find dates online I’ve gone on dates with something like 30 women who described themselves as “adventurous,” exactly one of whom owned so much as a pair of boots. One of them called herself "athletic" and was in fact obese, like morbidly obese; she's athletic in that she's "going to the gym every day trying to get in shape." I can only imagine it’s just as bad with guys.

3.      Liars – that is, people who lie about their non-physical, non-psychological facets, the most common of which are men or women who lie about their relationship status. Nobody likes to be someone’s “other” man or woman (well, okay, some people do, but they prefer to know it), and it’s murderously infuriating to find out that a potential lover is actually married and trolling for an affair. I’ve never had this happen to me, personally, but it has happened to a few of my female friends and they were insensed. Luckily, because all things on the internet tend to move ahead apace, there is a handy workaround for this last one that works about 25% of the time (which is enough): grab a few photos and plug them into Google’s Image Search. If those same images appear on a social networking site, it’ll pop up. Incidentally, this is also a handy way to see if a potential date has gained 50 pounds since that photo was taken, and/or is or isn’t really a billionaire astronaut with an Olympic medal in sex.

Of course, honesty in its own right doesn’t always count for much if it’s poorly packaged and presented, and because of the aforementioned Simon Effect of online dating you see that rather a lot. One woman who contacted me had this as the opening line of her dating profile:

First off, I am a heavier person, and if you’re so shallow that you can’t see past that then don’t even bother contacting me!

Ignoring the obvious (e.g., that is isn’t a case of “see” so much as “feel,” and that anyone who couldn’t see that she was overweight hadn’t bothered to look at her photos), this is an upfront assertion of prejudice. How does not being attracted to overweight people make someone shallow? Being curvaceous or slightly overweight is one thing, but this woman was positively rotund and that isn’t a matter of shallowness – it’s a serious health risk. Had she instead opened with “I know I’m overweight but I’m working on it” or “I know I’m overweight but I’m totally okay with myself” – that is, had she spun the argument around so that it celebrated her rather than made her seem judgmental – then... well... more likely someone else would have been willing to date her. Someone not me. 

And it isn’t just women; I knew a guy in Oregon who pulled a similar stunt. His line was this:

I am a no-nonsense badass looking to get the most out of life. I’m not interested in censoring myself or dividing my time between my passions and some chick. Hit me up if you want to come along for the ride!

He thought it made him come across as a tough guy. It didn’t. It made him come across as the last person in the world any sane-minded woman would want to date.

Anyway, the bottom line is that dating – every form of dating – is a numbers game. You will never meet all of the single people in a given region, city, or even neighborhood, and if you’re serious about wanting to find romance you do well to bolster your chances by broadening your range to include online venues. Online dating sites are, after all, places where people go for almost no other reason; they represent what ecologists would call a “target-rich environment.” Sure, there are risks, but they’re mostly - mostly - harmless and usually easy to evade. Besides, if you aren’t willing to take a few risks then your love life is probably doomed already.