'Love Thyself'

What French girls know. Young girls in France learn early in life that happiness is not as important as passion. [Salon.com]

According to Christophe, a French journalist with a seriously lush history of romance on both sides of the Atlantic: "Everything in [American] culture is defined like a contract, even the business of love. That's precisely the opposite in France. I've dated French women for months before I ever really knew who they were or what they wanted from me. After the first or second date, the American woman wants everything spelled out: 'Are we dating? Are you my boyfriend or just a friend?' A French woman doesn't do that. She doesn't give much away. She's comfortable letting things evolve naturally, but the ball's almost always in her court."

Poor heterosexual French men. Poor heterosexual men, period, the General says. At some point, the healthy liberation of women from certain social stigma and economic chains turned into a very unhealthy celebration of pure, unadulterated narcissism. What the article above is describing as French women's desire for passion, potentially at the expense of love or security, is really the ascendence of narcissism in the definition of womanhood. The French may call it "passion" and say that it doesn't exist in the same way in the contractual relationships of North American women, but in reality North American women live the same way, and call it "ambition" or "self-fulfillment" or something like that.

Whether you call it "passion" or "self-fulfillment," you are describing the belief in the myth of the individual for the purpose of consummately narcissistic behavior.

The woman at the centre of this article continues:

"We learn that we have more power when we keep things to ourselves than when we give things away. We learn that the art of seduction is based on innuendo and silences."

No, what you're talking about, Natalie, is the art of neurosis. Of course women have more power when they "keep things" to themselves; business people just use the poker metaphor, and call it "playing it close to the vest." This isn't seduction; this is deception, and it has become the hallmark of interpersonal relationships now that middle class women have as much opportunity to make money as middle class men. (After all, let's not kid ourselves into believing that these rules of "seduction" apply to rich people, or matter as much to poor people; feminism and its cultural residue are middle class phenomena.)

Feminism didn't make women better people by creating a semblance of economic and social equality with men; feminism made women better consumers, just like men. Now we can both treat each other like objects in a self-absorbed game to satisfy our overdeveloped sense of entitlement. I'm not suggesting some nutty conservative idea about barefoot and pregnant is the answer. I'm simply describing a generation of narcissistic women.

Think about what is really being said by the French woman in the article above from Salon. Passion is more important than happiness. It is better to be wildly inconsistent, but to enjoy sporadic moments of "passion," than to know what you want in a mate and to look for it. In other words, the "belief" in passion, the dogma of passion espoused here, is really saying: It's not important that you declare your intentions to the other person, or even that you know your intentions; instead, what matters is satisfying yourself at the other person's expense. Always serve yourself. Passion is like the high one gets after purchasing a new stereo or a new dress. Forget about the human price of that object (landfills or sweatshops); just consider your own "passion" satisfied by it.

Men had their millennia of selfish indulgence. Even now, most narcissists, according to the clinical definition, are men. The difference in the last 20 or 30 years in North America has been the emergence of a larger portion of middle class women who now carry themselves like men have for so long. The new narcissism is based on the success of capitalism, which breeds in its patrons a sense that self-love is the remedy for self-loathing; however, the more one indulges the self-love (and finds it wanting), the more one feels the self-loathing. I'm reminded of an old dance song by The Tamperer featuring Maya Days called "If you buy this record your life will be better." We approach all commodities with this mentality. We approach people with this mentality. But of course The X-Files was wrong: The answer is not "out there."

And because there is no answer to your unhappiness, dear seductress, your passion-seeking neurosis never satisfies, and in your wake is a swath of distraught, or embittered, or simply confused men. But don't worry about other people: You don't need them except for the random pursuit of passion.

Postanarchist Hakim Bey summarizes the capitalist production of alienation:

Capitalism, which claims to produce Order by means of the reproduction of desire, in fact originates in the production of scarcity, and can only reproduce itself in unfulfillment, negation, and alienation. As the Spectacle disintegrates... it reveals the fleshless bones of the Commodity. Like those tranced travelers in Irish fairy tales who visit the Otherworld and seem to dine on supernatural delicacies, we wake in a bleary dawn with ashes in our mouths.

That is, capitalism only works if it breeds self-loathing (after all, isn't the message of every advertisement, "You're not good enough") with the promise of self-fulfillment. The passionate French woman of the Salon article reminds me of the prototypical consumer: aimless, self-indulgent, incapable of empathy because it would destroy the rush of narcissistic abandon.

The belief in passion -- the central mythology of celebrity culture -- is precisely the problem, not the cure. And I don't mean this in a prudish sense: pleasure is a good thing. I mean passion as it functions in a "delusory" sense, in the way it deludes, covers up, represses.

Passion fuels the culture industry. Passion breeds fascism of the body. The fat person is the new communist, the new drug cartel, the new terrorist: the person against whom hate is permitted, about whom no joke is too cruel. Why? Because body fascists employ the mathematics of narcissism, in which beauty is a zero-sum game: To gain weight is to lose everything. If other people do not desire you, you are nothing. No value is generated internally. Let the markets decide.

The article in Salon maligns North Americans for being too direct and businesslike in their relationships, but the problem is that the desire of the modern consumer of "love" is undirected, it has no goal but desire itself. The desire of the modern woman is directed at herself: she fetishes every inch of fat, she obsesses over the "success" of her girlfriends, she has no room for a mate because ultimately her true love is herself. The desire for passion simply creates a pathological being who is in love with love. This type of woman is no different than any other kind of addict, and the detriment to others is the same.

General Stuff