won’t be going away because we need her around so much, just like the abusive family needs a misbehaving child, reacting to their dysfunction, to scapegoat and pathologize, and to distract attention from their weakness and failures.

Amanda got it right over at Pandagon. Whatever consequences Paris has earned, and however well or poorly she accepts them, doesn’t explain our fixation, anger and projection.

What we can’t stand is that she’s sexually free and unapologetic about it, and instead of finding the courage to ask ourselves why we can’t be as free as Paris, we punish her for reminding us that we aren’t. That’s a need that will keep her around indefinitely.

The comfortably distracting red herrings here are law, guilt, evidence, legal system, prosecution, etc., which have nothing to do with what drove the antisocial and damaging behaviors in this or the Duke case or with what we need to do about them.

The behaviors result from the pathological introjects we provide young males from infancy about sex, gender, use of mood-altering substances, and aggression, and from the cowardice that keeps us from changing that.

is always afraid

Interesting column, and interesting and provocative formulation and comparison by Heather of Mr. Soprano with Dr. Kupferberg. Esteemed, helping professional on no higher moral ground than homicidal mobster? It’s true that therapy can be absurd and countertherapeutic, and not due to lack of effective interventions, but because those drawn to the field are often themselves disordered and driven by their own needs.

Apart from environment and development, there isn’t so much that differentiates the narcissist from the antisocial type. Both are driven largely by deep-seated fears related to status and safety and by underdeveloped capacity for empathy. Both are acutely aware of status, and they aggress in order to lower the status of others. Individuals with narcissistic/antisocial traits and who are helped along by post-secondary education, class, and social connections are able to aggress, command resources, and lower the status of others by virtue of credential, of conferred and inscrutable expertise, of title, etc. while those without similar social capital are left to aggress by means which tend to be criminalized and result in stays at correctional facilities, rather than positions at Fortune 500 firms. I have bemusedly thought about incarcerated males I have known: “If only they had ended up CEOs or with a Ph.D. or MBA, or had the breaks a Cowell or a Trump got, they could lower and use others and aggress in ways that entertain and impress us, and be admired and successful narcissists instead of ending up felons and “sociopaths”. What a difference opportunity makes!”

But those are crazy thoughts, because we all know that in life, just like on TV, there are losers and then there are winners; there are criminals, and then the decent, law-abiding citizens like our community, business, religious, and political leaders, like us. Part of the educational value of TV is that it teaches and instills these needed moral distinctions in us, as long as we stay plugged in.

Is a book and discussion on the appropriate cost of a wedding helpful in distracting attention from marriage as a form of prostitution and marriage as a representation of the failure of love and escape from adulthood ? Just wonderin.

Paternity and maternity as identified by contribution of gametes evolved because, under certain environmental conditions, juveniles whose care was more assured by certain designated adults driven to identify with and care for them had higher survival rates to reproductive age than juveniles whose care was not as assured by such biologically-driven identification and commitment of caretakers. Likewise, under certain evolutionary contexts, survival and selective advantage of progeny has been conferred on individuals who are driven toward other behaviors, like use of aggression and violence to gain resources, siblicide, infanticide, and rape. The fact that natural selection formed traits, or tendencies, over past millennia and ancient environmental contexts carries no normative or adaptive mandates for autonomous humans in contemporary conditions.

Except, of course, by virtue of the stories and fears we carry in our minds. Those stories and fears – about “mothers” and “fathers”, fears of change and of authenticity, fears carried by adults of displeasing mommy and daddy – are what keep us from facing barriers to real parenthood, which is impaired by kinship identification. To the extent that individuals are normatively constructed as caretakers of biologically related children, those children’s development will be impaired precisely because a “parent” thus constructed and granted ownership of offspring is invested (as we consistently observe) less in the growth, self-actualization and autonomy (i.e. well being) of the child as individual than in some idealized and normative model of how “my son” or “my daughter” contributes to the parent’s own attempt to validate self, family name, and social standing as prescribed by pathological social expectations for “success”.

This pathology of kinship, enforced and celebrated by patriarchy as “family”, “motherhood” and “fatherhood”, is the single greatest barrier to the loving and competent care of children and is represented by a culture of “adults” functioning as frightened, dependent children afraid of the disapproval of fictionally constructed “mothers” and “fathers” and afraid of shaming their “families”, rather than as autonomous beings free to choose relationships and to construct themselves.

“Biological roots” and longing for a “biological relationship” (whatever that could conceivably mean) matter to children and create anxiety only because of the maladaptive fictions we perpetuate and ingrain in them, fictions which would not be needed apart from maladaptive drives toward monogamy and identification of a male and female “parent” who somehow have rights to them.