I had heard of Carol Gilligan, but didn't know much about her until I ran across this interesting article in The New Republic. I had figured Gilligan was a by-the-numbers pioneering feminist railing against the patriarchy blah blah blah. According to the article's author, Margaret Talbot, her theories actually transcend base gender and pull more heavily from childhood development and psychological theory.

In Gilligan's world, we are all born innately in touch with our feelings. It is only as the Patriarchy takes ahold of us that we begin to sacrifice ourselves bit at a time, and become their tools. For boys, this happens at the very early age of five or six. It takes longer to get to girls and they are affected at around ten or twelve. The boys burst in an emotionless fit of developing masculinity while the girls "wilt into diffidence." Gilligan's concern for girls isn't favoritism, of course, but that they are at least salvageable since their transformation occurs later and they are not as destined to grow into the patriarchy as men are. There is a hint of concern for boys, but mostly in the form of "testosterone poisoning" that Alan Alda once spoke of.

What struck me about the explanation of Gilligan's work is how familiar it sounded. Not just because Gilligan and her views are well known, but the overall feel of the idea was familiar in a broader context. It's the inverted Christian idea that we are all born of sin and only cleansed by God strangely inverted. We are all born authentic and sinless and corrupted by the world. It was familiar to me because I have recently read a book with a similar view by clinical psychology pioneer Carl Rogers. It is also discussed as one of the four doiminant philosophy's in David Keirsey's brand of Jungian Typology. For those of you unfamiliar with Typology, it's the division of personality into four keys, E or I, S or N, T or F, and P or J that make each person's "type" (INTJ, ESFP, ISTP, etc). Keirsey took Typology and subdivided the sixteen categories into four: SP, SJ, NT, and NF. Rogers, and indeed the entire school of thought that Gilligan is also a part of, would clearly be in the NF category.

NF stands for iNtuititive ("I" was taken by Introverted) Feeler. The NF's iNtuition is important because because the opposing force is Sensation. Sensation refers to the senses and our interaction with what is real and concrete. Intuition is defined more as the underlying themes of reality. For most N's, the them or idea trumps reality. For most types, it means they get lost in their own ideas from time to time. For extreme types, it means they can turn a cold eye to the world around them in favor of the way that they believe things should be. One reason why The Patriarchy is so ill-defined is that it transcends any specific people, but instead refers to the overall thrust of society that feminists argue is oppressing women. The NF's "F" is important because it elevates the importance of how we feel about something in comparison to what exactly it is from an pragmatic, morally neutral standpoint.

When combined, the NF "Idealist" (as Keirsey calls them) is most fixated on remaining true to our emotions and sense of authenticity. Our job is to be true to ourselves, true to others, and remain open and authentic at all costs. Therefore, the NF's are the type that most adores the innocence of childhood. Gilligan's fixation on young girls is based on the fact that they are so free with their emotions and the expression of them. While Carl Rogers is not so fundamentally simple, it could be argued that he is one of the forefathers of the "inner child" dogma of yesteryear (he denies it, but the shoe at least partially fits). In his book On Becoming Human, he pushes for psychologists to get people to unwrap the world around their patient to see the emotions that truly reside inside of us. He advocates interacting on a pure and simple level, dealing with one another honestly and entirely from our hearts. Any sacrifices we make to our feelings is ultimately a betrayal of ourselves. Rogers believes that we all do it (betray ourselves) and that one of the goals of the psychologists is to undo that as much as possible.

Gilligan's philosophy follows along similar philosophy, except that she sees a pattern to when this is happening and she attributes The Patriarchy as the cause. Boys sacrifice their authentic selves young because the Patriarchy demands their future membership. Girls sacrifice theirs when they are older and aware that they will never be a part of the Patriarchy. They accept their fates and wild. Gilligan's work is apparently long on diagnosis and short on prognosis because even by trying to get the young girls to hold on to their authenticity, they are only delaying the inevitable. The world will eat away at them until they submit. That's because part of the problem is a misdiagnosis of sorts.

My father, presumably a Patriarch, never walked up to me when I was five years old and said "Alex, you are too emotional. One day, you will have to join us and in order to prepare you for that, we must cut you off from your friends and emotionally isolate you." Instead, some boys said some mean things to me. When I cried, they did not react favorably. Therefore I learned that expressing myself came with a cost. When I was a chubby fifth grader, I asked a very beautiful and popular girl if she would "go with me" [go where? Dunno. It was the slang of the age]. She was nice about the rejection and all, but I also learned that I didn't like that feeling much so whenever I liked a girl I weighed the likelihood that she would like me up against how much I liked her. My measurements were off, but I learned. You just don't ask some girls out. You just don't tell some people that you like them. It wasn't part of a grand sacrifice that I was making. I just knew there were experiences that I didn't want to repeat.

It becomes a tradeoff. When I am in a room full of people with a dominant political philosophy that I don't share, I don't make it a point to register my protest and point out the many, many ways that they are dead wrong. There is a time and place for my opinion, and when I keep quiet I am not betraying my self of silencing my voice in a meaningful way. I'm just avoiding a tense discussion where at an inappropriate venue. It's called tact. One guy I knew quit a job because his boss yelled at him and it made him feel bad. You can only do that sort of thing so many times. Then you have to find ways to deal with it. Sometimes when you are angry with your significant other, it's best not to say anything if you know it's going to blow over. Sometimes you had better say something because it will bother you until you do. These are legitimate decisions that we make. They are value-based and therefore do not always have a clear "right thing to do" and "wrong answer." In the simplified Gilligan perspective, any denial of what we feel and how we think is automatically a betrayal of ourselves.

An a former job, I came in and worked on a holiday to finish up some chores that had to be done. Since it was a holiday, I would not get paid for it and was doing it as a benevolent gesture. Unfortunately, I forgot to clean my desk when I left so when I got in the next morning I got chewed out for having a messy desk. I told him that I had come in to work the previous day and he was unmoved by my benevolence. I could have screamed to the high heavens that he should have appreciate what I did, that I was underpaid, and that his priorities were messed up. Then I could have gone on the unemployment line. Instead, I ended up getting a raise a couple months later. You choose your battles. You don't pick every last one because you want to be true to yourself.

On a more personal and emotional level, I wrote Sunday night about a song in which a grown man cries on his daughters shoulder about his deceased wife. There are times when you need to be supportive and when being supportive means, at least temporarily, denying what you feel. Carl Rogers advocates psychiatrists telling their patients exactly what they are feeling. In some cases, that's probably helpful. In others, it's only going to make them feel worse. If young Johnny is seeing a psychiatrist because my mommy and daddy never stop yelling at him, the last thing he wants is the doc yelling under any circumstances. Some people don't deal well with anger and even if you're angry, it's better to let it go because it will make them feel a lot worse than it will make you feel better.

That's the way life works. I understand that in the NF Idealist world none of the "sacrifices" would be necessary, but that's not a product of any Patriarchial conspiracy or any other aspect of our specific culture. In fact, as cultures go, we are one of the more extroverted ones. Take a look at our television for a wide gamut of emotions expressed for the entire world to see. If you want to see expressed anger, tune in Jerry Springer. If you want to see gushy self-help TV, check out Oprah. It's no accident that both Gilligan and Rogers are American. It's unlikely that they would have risen to stardom anywhere else but the Patriarchial West.

Maybe boys do lose their childhood pluckiness at six and girls at twelve. Maybe they learn that it's not always okay to say exactly what's on your mind and how you feel. That's not a sacrifice at the Altar of the Patriarchy, though, it's called growing up.