That Thing That Guys Do…
From the editor….
A few years back, when I was working part time as a bartender, one of the young cooks at the establishment would occasionally come in for a drink after his shift.
He was a scrappy little county guy, always in a bit of trouble. He liked the ladies, and when he encountered an attractive female he’d attempt to impress her with hair raising tales of his drinking exploits, brushes with the law and bar brawls.
He told these tales in an offhand, slightly bored manner, as if these were simply the things that real guys did. He would also be sure to let the girl know that he could handle himself in a fight….”I gave him four quick kidney punches, bam bam bam bam” and here he’d re-enact the scene, complete with sound effects.
Well, this didn’t do much for me personally, but it was always kind of fun to watch him in action….especially when he was waaay out of his league but the object of his pursuit was too polite or nice to brush him off. This kind of gal would get a kind of glazed look in her eyes as his stories got wilder by the minute….
So anyway, he came into the bar one night. He was going on about something or other, which I was tuning out until he said, laughing quite uproariously, “Then he did that thing that guys do.”
This caught my attention. He wasn’t talking about sex, by the way. But, was he spilling some secret guy stuff? Curious minds want to know, and I’m always interested in hearing about the mysterious workings of the male mind….
What was he talking about, I asked.
He launched into his story again, about some friend of his whose girlfriend had done the “We have to talk” routine and had begun nagging his friend about the rent, food for the kids, the car needed to be fixed, when are you going to get a job and so on until he got tired of listening to her so….He did that things that guy do.
I was utterly fascinated. Go on, I said. He looked at me like I was an idiot (maybe I was!) and said, again, you know….that thing that guys do.
I said he had to explain himself and so he did. When his buddy had finally got an earful of his girlfriend’s complaints he simply and totally derailed her by going on the offensive. Out of the blue, and completely off the subject, he began yelling at her about some long forgotten insult, her shortcomings as a mother and girlfriend and suddenly, the conversation was completely reversed and it put her on the defensive.
Then his buddy self -righteously stormed out of the house, which the little cook found completely hilarious….his friend had clearly won that round of the battle.
Well, now that he’d explained it so clearly of course I knew what he was talking about….that thing that guys do. I’d experienced it myself many times! In fact, I can only shake my head at how damned effective it is… you need to “have a talk” and it blows up into something else, and whatever the original subject was, it’s now lost in the heat of the new battle…
But what amazed me was that this young guy, with no intellectual aspirations whatsoever, had the psychological insight to understand this strategy and to deliberately employ it when needed. When confronted with some unpleasant truth or need or whatever, just start screeching loudly about something else!
And then, I thought about how we see this same strategy in action every day from our governments… political leaders are masters of this technique. When the public has specific questions and needs, they get sidelined in a flurry of drama about some other issue.
It is misdirection at its finest. Instead of being about government shortcomings, duplicity, waste, stupidity or outright criminality it becomes all about the public, and how we, the public, are actually the problem. Hmmm.
In fact, it’s a version of the Hegelian Dialect: Problem, Reaction, Solution.
The government creates the problem to distract us from some pressing social issue….we react to this problem instead of the initial concern….and then the government rolls out a solution to the problem they themselves created!
It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad and destructive.
Stephanie Kelley
