SENSE AND SENSITIVITY...
...Common and Over, to be specific.
Thinking today about sensitivity, instigated by the newly minted entertainment business career choice of sensitivity reader, brought back a memory. Decades ago, a woman I knew, not well but well enough, pulled a geographic to escape an abusive relationship with a guy, again, someone I knew not well but well enough to know I didn’t want to get to know him any better than I had to.
Despite her having to leave town to get away from this man, she was apparently forgiving, at least back then, justifying his awful behavior, his dreadful treatment of her, because he was, and I quote, “so sensitive.”
This game people played back then, along with “consciousness raising” and so many other banalities bandied about in those suddenly and dubiously enlightened times, were among the buzzwords used to manipulate the more fatuous in my younger days.
This deflective nonsense finds its place in all too much of current culture as well, jerked around as we often are by the latest iteration of ever changing obfuscatory bullshit jargon masquerading as secret and endowed wisdom, the best to divide, confuse and conquer—that last mostly aimed at complex allies as opposed to actual enemies.
The perfect response and best example of the way sensitivity as presentation played out back then might be John Belushi reducing Stephen Bishop’s guitar to splinters in ANIMAL HOUSE, a movie that these days is likely to be preceded by warnings to the sensitive among you. And, of course, the conman Jack Rosenberg changed his name to Werner Erhardt, likely because Rosenberg Sensitivity Training just lacked that certain Viennese zing.
Never having played the sensitivity card in my pursuit of romance in those days when such things mattered, I had only the most abstract understanding of this woman’s take on the issue with her shitty boyfriend. And believe you me, this isn’t self congratulation. I could never have played the Byronic poet, tormented by my art, had I ever even wanted to. Such a performance wasn’t among my skillsets in my toolkit.
As I’ll be pointing out in an upcoming piece, I could never pass for nice.
At best, from all available evidence, this guy from whom she escaped was no more than a run of the mill condescending and contemptuous cad with a well developed line of self serving bullshit. At worst, he reportedly got physically violent. So much for sensitivity, by any definition of my understanding.
To my eyes, what she read as his sensitive, deeply vulnerable soul struck me as guilelessly self regarding narcissism, romanticizing the sublime difficulty of living with his own self obsession into a seducer’s poetry, the better to rope in the credulous. The mythologizing of the wounded tormented artist has always carried a lot of water for a certain type of woman or man. Various fandoms and social enthusiasms are also awash with fall guys and gals for this nakedly dishonest bullshit, too.
Trust me on this.
This was my real first time experience with this timeless primal dance, but certainly not the last. I’ve seen it played out in endless variations in romance, in professions, in craft. And lately, the wary and suspicious nature with which I’m both burdened and blessed sees this game being played out in the culture itself. The drama attached to personal offense, the conflation of verbal insult with bodily harm, and of course the implicit overvaluing of one’s own sensitivity in relationship to that of others is endemic of late.
Or, as we should call that last thing by its true name, guileless self regarding narcissism.
Just to be clear, I have a deep well of self awareness. I have an enlightened self regard. I have a healthy self esteem. I have an ego, and yet remain humble. I have confidence, yet always maintain room for doubt. A healthy skepticism in regard to both flattery and criticism keeps me right sized.
All this notwithstanding, insult me, and I will push back. Insult me enough and you’re dead to me. Life is too short for bullshit, and in my case, at my age, I’m playing the endgame as I type.
But I am apparently an anomaly, because I am difficult to offend. And on those exceedingly rare occasions when I am offended, and trust me, they are rare, it never occurs to me that my being offended entitles me to some sort of badge of misbegotten honor. I have no expectation, nor do I deserve the equivalent of an I VOTED sticker to confirm what I know all too well is the delusional virtue of playing the victim.
And yes, before you rush in to explain the error of my ways, I know all too well that the implicit meaning of sensitivity and the use of the word in its various manipulative iterations has evolved, or perhaps better metastasized, from those long ago days to now.
The bottom line is it’s all about entitlement, about personal and group identity, whether motivated by an overweaning guilt or an overwhelming lack of shame.
That said, we are engaged in a number of conflicts, among them a cultural war, a conflict to define our culture. Their side fetishizes comically obvious performances of moral rectitude, deploys low ball cruelty misrepresenting itself as courageous satire, and tosses off smug insularity disguised as Christian piety.
All this, while a discomfiting clamor of voices on my side have apparently opted to preemptively surrender in this conflict of culture, to nobly lose this war on the mistaken belief that there is a broad appeal attached to the moral clarity of near weepy pearl clutching vulnerability.
It’s worth noting that whatever virtue may be attached to victimhood, no matter how tragically noble and exquisite it may feel in its identification, for all its delicious sense of moral superiority, victims remain martyrs, and martyrdom remains the province of the defeated.
It’s Eloi versus Morlock, and we all know how that equation works out for the sensitive side.