El Camino College English 1A Grading Rubric
Essay 2 Options: 1,400 words typed and 3 sources: turnitin upload due September 29
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity.
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion Debra J. Dickerson, who wrote the “The Great White Way,” would find Michael Eric Dyson's essay "Understanding Black Patriotism" a complement to Dickerson's ideas about race, power, and hierarchy.
Support, refute, or complicate Debra J. Dickerson's argument that race in America is more of a social fantasy than a reflection of objective reality.
“Green Guilt” by Stephen Asma
Two Key Paragraphs:
All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well-organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain daily from our natural instincts. We have to repress our own selfish, aggressive urges all the time, and we are so accustomed to it as adults that we don't always notice it. But if I was in the habit of acting on my impulses, I would regularly kill people in front of me at coffee shops who order elaborate whipped-cream mocha concoctions. In fact, I wouldn't bother to line up in a queue, but would just storm the counter (as I regularly witnessed people doing when I lived in China) and muscle people out of my way. But there is a small wrestling match that happens inside my psyche that keeps me from such natural aggression. And that's just morning coffee—think about how many times you'd like to strangle somebody on public transportation.
When aggression can't go out, then it has to go inward. So we engage in a kind of self-denial, or self-cruelty. Ultimately this self-cruelty is necessary and good for society—I cannot unleash my murderous tendencies on the whipped-cream-mocha-half-decaf latte drinkers. But my aggression doesn't disappear, it just gets beat down by my own discipline. Subsequently, I feel bad about myself, and I'm supposed to. Magnify all those internal daily struggles by a hundred and you begin to see why Nietzsche thought we were always feeling a little guilty. But historically speaking we didn't really understand this complex psychology—it was, and still is, invisible to us. We just felt bad about ourselves, and slowly developed a theology that made sense out of it. God is perfect and pristine and pure, and we are sinful, unworthy maggots who defile the creation by our very presence. According to Nietzsche, we have historically needed an ideal God because we've needed to be cruel to ourselves, we've needed to feel guilty. And we've needed to feel guilty because we have instincts that cannot be discharged externally—we have to bottle them up.
Revised Essay Option:
In a typed essay with a Works Cited page, support, refute, or complicate Asma's assertion that "self-cruelty is necessary and good for society."
One. What kind of outrage does the author’s son express in the first paragraph?
“Don’t you love the earth?” becomes a way of making two statements: One’s allegiance to a cause or a special tribe and self-righteous scolding of someone whose behavior doesn’t conform to the tribe.
These scoldings or admonishments reinforce group cohesion and tribal identity.
Two. What does our need for guilt say about us?
We seem to have some neurosis that makes us feel empty unless we’re on a “guilt trip.”
Guilt seems to be the glue that tells people we’re “fighting on the same team” and if you deviate from the game plan you’re a reprobate, a sinner, an outcast, or even a pariah.
We also love to shame others as we feel elevated, intoxicated, and aggrandized by our self-righteous posturing.
Three. The author writes that behind our guilt is a pervading sense of worthlessness and shame? What is behind these feelings?
He writes that “internalized self-loathing” is a mechanism designed to help us be more civilized. Otherwise we’d live in a Hobbesian nightmare (anarchy).
Self-loathing helps us repress our Id (raw, uncontrollable desire) or our tendencies for self-abandonment and indulgence. By repressing our desires collectively, we protect the interest of the many.
How big of a blanket do I spread out on the beach? How loud do I play my boombox while I'm slopping coconut tanning butter on my tanned torso. How reckless do I fling the Frisbee to my beach buddy, allowing the Frisbee to hit nearby beach visitors? Do I pick up my dog's mess at the dog beach? Do I control my dog's incessant barking? How loud do I laugh at the movie theater? How loud is my eating and slurping while watching the movie?
Self-loathing also represses our aggression.
For example, I loathe myself when I’m driving and I lose my temper. Self-loathing represses my road rage temper tantrums. But that repression requires energy, so that when I’m a “nice and courteous drive” I come home exhausted; after all, for a guy like me being nice requires enormous amounts of energy (repression requires energy after all).
Not eating all the food I want—burgers, pizzas, cakes, pies, etc.—requires even more self-loathing that results in repression and of course the end effect is exhaustion.
“Being me is a full-time job.”
Adding to our neurosis, when we suppress our aggression, as evidenced in the road rage example above, we turn our aggression inward, Asma writes, and this results in “self-cruelty."
Rather than hate the world, we hate ourselves. And this self-hatred serves civilization, that is, until some of us blow up, as we read about all too often in the news.
Four. According to Asma, how did our psychology create a guilt-infused religion?
Asma writes we have always used guilt, repression, and self-loathing as ways to live and cooperate in a civilized society. Rather than psychoanalyze ourselves, we poured out our unconscious guilt and other toxic emotions into religious doctrines that would externalize that guilt and shame by calling us “sinners.” Religion, according to Nietzsche, allows us to be cruel to ourselves.
We can infer from this essay that according to Asma religion is a whip that we use to exact cruelty upon ourselves.
Five. Do guilt and self-loathing exist in secular, urban hipster cultures?
Yes, they do, but they take another form of religion: environmentalism: Asma writes that now “we have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper.”
Asma adds, brilliantly I might say, that we have other secular avenues for self-inflicted cruelty and guilt: We punish our indulgent eating habits with crazy diets and cleanses and running on treadmills for hours upon hours until we want to die.
Here's a blog The Emptiness featuring a post titled "Green guilt and slave morality."
Essay Option
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us.”
Support, refute, or complicate Nicholas Kristof’s assertion that slashing food stamps is morally indefensible.
Addressing at least two essays we've covered in class, support, refute, or complicate the argument that overeating, anorexia, and other eating disorders are not the result of a disease but are habits of individual circumstance and economics.
For essay 1, you need 3 credible sources. One of those sources has to come from the El Camino library database. You can use all 3 if you like. The database provides your MLA Works Cited format. You need to simply copy and paste it on your Works Cited page.
Writing a thesis for the above option:
A thesis is a central argument that can be demonstrated with logic, facts, and research.
If you're a beginning writer, it is often a good idea to give a thesis mapping components, which outline your body paragraphs.
Sample Thesis Against Stephen Asma's Argument
While it's true we must use our conscience to restrain our base impulses so we can get along in a healthy civilization, Asma takes the idea of individual conscience too far, creating a Gospel of Necessary Guilt, which is harmful to human development. For one, excessive guilt disconnects us from ourselves and creates self-medicating, addictive behavior. Second, guilt doesn't accomplish productive goals. Third, guilt is a tool that mainstream society uses to manipulate us and make us conform to their ways.
Sample Thesis That Supports Stephen Asma's Argument
While guilt can be excessive, it is a necessary part of the human conscience. When used correctly, guilt is an effective tool for helping us consider others rather than our own selfish needs, guilt makes us hesitate wisely when we're tempted to fulfill our individual desires over our familial and societal duties, and guilt can be used to pry us out of our self-contented mediocrity.
Summarizing Asma's Major Ideas
Asma’s idea is that people need guilt in order to restrain themselves from attacking others. He claims that without his own residual “self-loathing” he would not hesitate to attack people at Starbucks that annoy him by ordering pretentious sounding drinks. This reveals far more about Asma’s personal psychology than it does about the tendency of people in western cultures to be violent and anti-social. Internally western countries are remarkably peaceful and orderly by global standards.
So why do people cling to these guilt based moral systems? Well, how are people raised? If almost everyone in a culture exhibits a certain trait in common, is it because that trait is “natural”? Is it “natural” to be a Muslim, and that is why everyone in Muslim countries grows up to be a Muslim? Or is it that children in these countries learn very young that they must conform to the beliefs and prejudices of the adults that control society? The same principle is at work in our culture. Even if we think the modern West is secular and progressive, it is still built on a foundation of shared Judeo-Christian slave morality that persists even as the modern man can no longer bring himself to believe in invisible men in the clouds. Environmentalism is just Christianity 2.0.
Slave morality has always been a power strategy for the priestly class. But the old priestly class has been ebbing in power for centuries now, and the field is open for new players to enter the game. Environmentalists, Climate scientists, diet puritans and other lifestyle scolds are all vying to take their place and be the ones to save your soul by selling you indulgences in the form of carbon credits and raw food shakes. As long as our society is built on a foundation of slave morals people will continue to go for it.
According to Asma, what are the key differences between the "religious sins"of the past and the "transgressions" that characterize everyday life today?
And what larger point is he trying to make here about the way our understanding of "sin" has changed?
He seems to be saying that now that we have a psychological understanding of sin, we are less reliant on religion to provide guilt, shame, and repression; however, because we still depend on these forms of self-cruelty to cooperate in a society we create secular religions to do shame's bidding.
Then take a closer look at each of the "transgressions" he lists here. To what extent, in your view, is it valid to feel "guilty" about each?
You're either arguing that guilt is a helpful behavior tool or a slave tool for the "power priests," secular or otherwise.
Or to complicate the matter, you might argue that guilt is both good and bad as a behavior tool.
Is it helpful, necessary, and/or right for these oversights to "plague our conscience"? Why or why not?
"Green Guilt" Essay Option
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Sample Thesis Statements
"Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that sin be religious or secular, in order that we get along in a cooperative society.
We must conclude after reading Stephen Asma's brilliant "Green Guilt" that human happiness must be compromised in the service of guilt and self-induced "sin" in order that we suppress our selfish drives, cooperate with one another, and hone our conscience in a constantly Darwinian universe.
Stephen Asma's cogent and insightful "Green Guilt" delivers a bombshell to the human race: Absolute happiness is a farce that must take back seat to guilt and misery in order to promote a cooperative society.
Even though it appears Stephen Asma is not religious in any orthodox sense, it is of note that his secular explanation of sin does not conflict at all with my religious sense of it. In fact, my religious sense of sin is compatible with Stephen Asma's secular version when we consider __________, _____________, ____________, and _____________.
"Green Guilt" is just a pathetic excuse for the "slave morality" that allows the power brokers or One Percent to exact control upon the rest of us.
Stephen Asma's attempt to universalize sin as a secular affliction collapses when we consider the affliction he refers to is not universal at all but rather confined to privileged liberals who have created a code of behavior that requires shaming in order to make others conform to their ways.
Sample Outline for Essay
Paragraph One: Introduction: Summarize essay. This could take you 200 words.
Paragraph Two: Define "green guilt" based on your understanding of the essay. This definition could very well be about 200 words.
Paragraph Three: Your thesis that agrees or disagrees with the author; include your reasons in clauses or separate sentences. These are called mapping components. They map your body paragraphs.
Paragraphs Four through Seven are your supporting paragraphs. They would be about 150 words each.
Paragraph Eight is your counterargument-rebuttal. This could be up to 200 words.
Paragraph Nine would be your conclusion. It would probably be 100-150 words.
On a separate page is your Works Cited.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
Harvard Writing Center on Writing Conclusions
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for successful marriage, glom on to the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that they as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break-up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and woman alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's passivity and his aversion to argument insure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a trouble maker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sports writer Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
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