Behavior versus inner
I’m reading an article in the NY Times about the malleability or not of gender identification, and my attention snagged on something tangential.
Is it really so surprising that gender identity might, like sexual orientation, be on a spectrum? After all, one can be exclusively straight or exclusively gay — or anything in between. But variability in a behavior shouldn’t be confused with its malleability. There is little evidence, for example, that you really can change your sexual orientation. Sure, you can change your sexual behavior, but your inner sexual fantasies endure.
What snagged my attention was the contrast between behavior and inner fantasies.
I think maybe calling it “inner sexual fantasies” is what did the snagging – that’s not the usual counterpart to behavior. More usual would be inner self, or internal identity, or self-image, or sense of self. Boiling that down to sexual fantasies seems pretty reductive, because there’s usually more to being gay or straight than which genitalia appear in your sexual fantasies –
– but that “more” is really what snagged my attention, not the reductiveness of the comparison. It’s the moreness of the inner life, and how important that is or isn’t compared to behavior, and whether or not I’m some kind of accidental dualist, because I do think the inner life is important, and also more “real” than behavior, at least when that behavior is constrained and shaped by social pressure.
Is that dualism? Or is it just being a nerd?
Do very gregarious people feel that their behavior is more “real” – a more authentic part of them – than nerds do? That’s what I’m wondering.
Honestly, I think that this is simply an inadequacy of language and logical systems. And, as a nerd, I always fall to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and conclude no definitions or linguistic usage will every be completely adequate and accurate. Being will always be a contextual compromise of behavior and inner self. That’s neither “materialist” nor “dualist”. It’s merely “inadequist”.
The inner life, too, may be constrained and shaped by social pressure. Less so than the outer, to be sure, but still.
With so many fears and taboos around sexual behavior in particular, fantasies could be stunted–or, contrariwise, exaggerated in compensation.
I have no idea how hypotheses along these lines could be confirmed or disconfirmed, though.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, I too think of my inner life as more authentically “me” than my behavior. The social me is a sort of awkward, shambling hulk that often has trouble recalling words. Of course I’d rather deny her–the “real” me is so much more interesting and articulate! :P
Re:
That’s a really interesting possibility.
Me, I sometimes think my rationalization circuits are defective. I’m told I’m supposed to make the decision then construct a narrative later to explain why I did…
This sounds nice. But in all of that inner vs. outer life stuff, I seem to be continually at war, never even certain why I did what I did, or if it was a good reason, or the right decision. It would be so nice to say right, I did that because X, but me it’s always ‘Maybe that was just easier… Maybe I should have fought harder… Maybe I’m a coward… Maybe that was too conciliatory… Maybe I’m just selfish… Maybe I’m being played… Maybe I should have just fucking did what I wanted; would it really have turned out worse? Maybe this is what I really want…’ And so on.
It’s the compromises (and life always seems so full of these) that always make the cacophony the worst. And I dunno about dualist. The number in the root just seems too low. What’s the word for an inner leglislature continually negotiating imperfectly and noisily and unhappily both within itself and with a million contradictory pressures from without?
But okay. I guess I’m pretty much nerd, at least, if the conjecture is correct, as I guess I do think of that continually disappointed and fractious inner legislature as more ‘me’ than the ugly, messy compromises it’s always coming out with…
Or maybe it’s that I could barely stand to think of those as me.
I think it’s just a poor language choice. I’d have gone with “inner desires” (or just “desires”) rather than fantasies as a contrast to behavior.
We all have desires we don’t act on, and we all do things we don’t really want to do.
It’s when desires and behavior are in sync that “doing” makes up happy/fulfilled.
If you are restricting yourself to “public behavior” then maybe? But if you broaden it to all behavior, then it may feel “inauthentic” for an extrovert to go to the library and work on their dissertation, or work late at the office when no one’s around, or have a quiet afternoon and just read a good book, or dine alone, or go to the symphony and sit quietly for a couple of hours. It’s the tension between what we do and what we would like to be doing instead that creates that feeling that we are out of step with everyone else, I think.
That question makes me think of how a gregarious person might experience authenticity differently, but about *locus*.
As long as I can remember I have thought of my body and the stuff it does in the world as a lunky inconvenient carrier for the real me.
Me too.
And then, my weird taste for solitude tends to make the real me feel solitary as opposed to social.
I think I must be very dualist in my thinking, even though I know dualism is an error…
I love that, Andrew.
Thanks Ophelia.