I friended somebody the other day on the basic principle that you can't have too many friends. Since anybody's capacity is limited by Dunbar's Number, I don't mind adding a bunch, except perhaps over at Orkut which has the problem of a language and real distance barrier. I mean, if I can't sit down and eat with you, what's the point of being an irregularly communicating associate? I hate losing people anyway so I'm going to friend even the vaguely familiar folks - the woman who gave me PT in 1998, the guy who opened up my bank account in NYC in 1992. My rolodex is full of such folks.
So he accepted and sent me an odd note that I might not want to be associated with someone of his repute. I had no idea what he was talking about until a few hours later when I checked out his profile which shows him living in Scandinavia married to another dude. Ohh, so that's what he meant. No biggie, really. It turns out that he's something of an activist, so we probably have some interesting disagreements.
Of course I had no idea he was gay. I'm notoriously bad at figuring out who's sexy and in which way and who's not at work. I have such incredibly difficult standards for myself, that I don't pay any attention to what other people say they see. At work I just work. Then again there's no telling what kind of gossip I am excluded from by dint of me being who I appear to be. Certainly I signal that I don't care anyway.
Be all that as it may, it gave me a chuckle to see Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden at the bottom of the masculinity chart.
Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women’s values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women’s values on the other. The assertive pole has been called ‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole ‘feminine’.For example, Germany has a masculine culture with a 66 on the scale of Hofstede (Netherlands 14). Masculine traits include assertiveness, materialism/material success, self-centeredness, power, strength, and individual achievements. The United States scored a 62 on Hofstede’s scale. So these two cultures share, in terms of masculinity, similar values.
Obviously these are cultural means. It's impossible for me to make any judgment on my new friend based on these criteria. I simply remember him as a top sales dog from back in the day. But I do hear a lot of comparison between the US and Scandinavia when it comes to wonkery about gay marriage. This is an interesting tidbit to squirrel away.
I very much like the idea of cross cultural psychology aside from this particular metric. That is because I started out many years ago as a multiculturalist. Remember that real-time high quality language translation is going to be available within a decade or two, and that will have profound implications around the world. As I move forward in my understanding of Western philosophy and traditions, the power relationships between us and them - well, there's a lot of 'splaining to do, and I am very curious to understand the particular choices implied in global social mobility. I wouldn't suggest that America be quite an empire - I'm not convinced we have a strong enough core in our leadership. Clearly my friend had the wherewithal to find his spot on the globe where he's evidently not restrained - where will a global bourgeois choose to live in a profoundly networked planet?
I believe that American psychoanalysis is something of a scam - that if people could find, as Ernst Bloch said,...
Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one... if human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and where no one has yet been -- home."
It just may be that your home isn't here, but there, wherever there may be. Obviously I take issue, though I keep the quote, with the political idea of reinventing mankind and the assumption of a futuristic evolution of the human spirit. People are who they are and psychology is just so much grease for social friction, except that it mills the rough edges off of people and turns them into ball bearings, or so I believe. Still, there is a time and a place for everything, and I believe that people deserve sanctuary if they can be self-sustaining. There's plenty of room on the planet.
I've taken the tangent off masculinity, but that's how I situate the entire matter of cross cultural psychology. Know your culture and its history, assimilate or migrate - because change is very slow.
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