Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Personal freedom, autonomy, scriptlessness cannot be achieved in the midst of oppressive circumstances. We are not able to raise our children without scripts unless we deliver them into a social situation in which they can make free choices.

  When parents have to work excessively hard or do not have the means to provide reasonable environments for their children, when families live in isolated, competitive units, each fending for its own, each desperately struggling to eat, sleep, and stay alive from day to day, there is very little room for awareness, spontaneity or intimacy.

  But let us imagine now a home situation which has a certain measure of ease. The parents are not overworked and underpaid. The schools are reasonable. There is enough room, food, and leisure, so that cooperation and child-rearing for autonomy can be given a try.

  In such a situation the parents can work cooperatively with the children. Children can be raised reasonably free of injunctions and attributions. That is to say, they will not be prevented from doing things they want to do, nor will they be induced into doing things they don’t want to do. They will regulate their behavior according to what they want and their desire to cooperate with what others want. Thus, if they want to do something and it is not wanted by someone else they love, they may choose not to do it of their own free will. Children will, to a large extent, conform to the wishes of their parents. They will do this out of a wish to cooperate with them because they love them rather than out of a wish to avoid punishment or to obtain reinforcement. They will not always conform to their parents’ wishes and, at times, they will choose to do or not do what they, rather than their parents, want; but this will be accepted and understood by the parents as a reasonable price to pay for the fact that these children will be autonomous and self-sufficient rather than dependent, passive, and powerless.

  One thing is very clear, however. In a situation of this sort, children will definitely not do things that they experience as painful, obnoxious, or holding no benefit for them. Under such circumstances, children will refuse to go to bad schools, they will refuse to follow oppressive rules, they will demand to be heard when they speak, they will ask for everything that they want 100% of the time and demand that their wishes be considered on an equal footing with the grownups in the household. Difficult as this may sound, the parents of such children have a number of rewards. First of all, they will be living not with Victims that need to be Rescued at every turn, but with fully participating human beings. They will see the results of this in the way in which children will use their capacities to the fullest extent as they express their innate wish to cooperate. When these children grow up they will be truly self-sufficient and autonomous and much more likely to fend for themselves and to do a good job of it; they will not tolerate injustice, oppression, lies, and exploitation. Finally, parents who choose this child-rearing approach will know that their children are shaping their own destinies and following their O.K. constructive nature, provided as they are with the freedom to choose and the tools to choose wisely. Children raised in this manner, because they are not subjected to long years of Rescues and Persecutions as powerless Victims, are very likely to grow up to be loving children, respectful of their parents and appreciative of what they’ve done for them rather than turning on them after years of sacrifice only to accuse them of in some way having harmed them. I say this with a conviction which is strengthened by my experience with my own two children, Mimi and Eric, now thirteen and ten years old.

  Raising children for autonomy is a project that cannot be done in isolation of a larger community which is supportive and understanding of the process. When everything in the community is decided on the basis of competitiveness, individualism, discounts, Rescues, and Persecution, it is very difficult for a specific household in that community to operate on a totally different basis. It is therefore important that people congregate in larger numbers, teach each other the principle of cooperation, start alternative schools for their children if necessary, and support each other in their struggles to achieve the good life. No one can enjoy the benefits of the above lessons while everyone else is oppressed and defeated. One person can only rise a few inches above the rest; and in order for one person to be liberated completely everyone else around him has to be traveling the same path and achieving the same benefits.

  Raising Children for Autonomy: Ten Rules

  1. Do not have a child to whom you can’t extend an eighteen-year guarantee of Nurturing and Protection. Once you have the child, endeavor to shorten the years during which it needs you by allowing it to achieve autonomy as soon as it can.

  2. The principal aim of child-rearing for autonomy is to provide the child with freedom to fully exercise the faculties of intimacy, awareness, and spontaneity. No other goal (discipline, good manners, self-control, etc.) is put above autonomy, although it may be desired and pursued by the parents, but never if it contradicts the main goal: autonomy.

  3. Intimacy is defeated through the Stroke Economy. Do not prevent children from fully and honestly expressing their love or lack of it. Do encourage them to give, ask, accept and reject strokes, and to brag.

  4. Awareness is defeated through Discounts. Do not Discount your children’s rationality, feelings, or intuition. Do teach children how to Account and do respond to their demands for accounting when addressed at you.

  5. Do not lie to your children ever, either by omission or by commission. If you choose to hide the truth from them, say so and say why, truthfully.

  6. Spontaneity is defeated by arbitrary rules applying to the use of the body. Do not regulate the moving, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting of children except when it clearly interferes with you own well-being or puts them in clear and present danger—and then only in a cooperative manner. Do remember that the wisdom of your child’s body about itself is surpassed by yours in almost every case. Don’t take the advice of “experts” (educators, physicians) too seriously either; they have been wrong before and will be again. Never physically assault, attack, or trespass the sanctity of your child’s body. If you do, apologize, fully, immediately; but do not compound the error by proceeding to Rescue out of guilt. Take responsibility for your actions and do not repeat those that you disapprove of.

  7. Do not Rescue and then Persecute your child. Do not do what you would prefer not to do for your children. If you do, don’t compound the error by Persecuting them later. Give your child a chance to fend for itself before you “help.”

  8. Do not teach children competition. They’ll learn enough of it from watching TV and reading the newspapers. Do teach them, by example, how to cooperate.

  9. Do not allow your children to oppress you. You have the right to time, space, and a love life of your own separate from them. Demand that your needs be taken into consideration; they will do so out of love for you.

  10. Trust human nature and believe in your children. They will reward this trust by growing up to love you for it.

  27

  Men’s and Women’s

  Liberation

  The oppressive exaggeration of differences between men and women into banal sex role scripts described by Wyckoff in Chapter 13 has been under attack on a different front by the Women’s Liberation Movement. American women are afraid of “Women’s Lib” as it is called by the media. In the early phases of the Movement the press managed to make it the laughingstock of the nation by its portrayal, out of context, of the actions of some of its most radical members.

  But the Women’s Liberation Movement (as opposed to the media’s Women’s Lib) has a steadily growing following of American women, half of whom now support “organized efforts to improve women’s status.”1 My experience is that when the aims of women’s liberation are explained in their everyday, bread-and-butter, birds-and-bees, sex-role scripting aspects, only a minority of women disagree with it.

  I am personally a committed feminist and in working for the liberation of women (mostly by not interfering with women and their work), I have c
ome to see how men are privileged with respect to women and how they use this privilege to their advantage and to women’s disadvantage. But, looking further, I also see how most men are being damaged as human beings by taking advantage of their privilege. Men need women for companionship, friendship, strokes, love, and work partnerships; and these needs cannot be enduringly met by one-down, passive, slavish, or angry women. Being the master in a master/slave relationship takes its toll in the hardening of feelings, lovelessness, and guilt which accompany it. The Women’s Liberation Movement speaks loudly and well for itself; in this chapter I wish to speak for the Liberation of Men, my brothers who stand to gain in happiness what they may lose in privilege if they join women in their struggle for freedom.

  Men’s interest in working against sexism has very murky and unclear motivations. Unlike the Women’s Liberation Movement, which is obviously a thrust out from under and which has clearcut logic both for the mind and the gut, the men’s struggle against sexism does not understand itself nearly as well.

  If we participate in the movement to help women find freedom or, worse, to give it to them, then we are patronizing them and are rightly told to mind our own business. If we become a sort of one-down men’s auxiliary to the women’s movement, we take on a role reversal which is humiliating and unproductive. We have trouble knowing what is in it for us, though we can head-trip for hours on the subject, and we have real trouble feeling any need for it. We know we like women to be free, mostly because when they are free they don’t hang on us and are more sexually responsible. But we don’t like it so well when, once free, women look at us and say, “Buzz off brother, come back when you grow up!” or when we find that women prefer each other to us and leave us out in the cold.

  So why should we struggle against sexism? Why should we give up our power to take what we want and need from women? Why should we yield our one-up to women who are often hostile to us and no longer appreciate our manhood?

  I think it is useful to divide men into several types. There are male chauvinist pigs and there are male chauvinists. Male chauvinist pigs can be crude or subtle. Crude male chauvinist pigs know that they are male supremacists and are proud of it; they are honest bigots and Norman Mailer is their king and Bobby Riggs their court buffoon.

  Subtle male chauvinist pigs usually give lip-service to the women’s liberation movement with respect, say, to wages, especially if they are not employers. But they also make a point of calling women “girls” once in a while, always with a grin on their face, and of drawing women into debates in which they will rib them about “women’s lib.” Because they mystify their chauvinism they are even more oppressive than their crude brothers. Either way, whether crude or subtle, male chauvinist pigs hang on to their privilege as men and get the best of it while the getting is good. A man who wants to shed his pig status can do it by being concerned with and admitting to the facts of his and other men’s oppression of women and deciding to earnestly struggle against it.

  All of us have undergone thorough training in male supremacy from the day we were born, and it is not very likely that any of us, our most militant sisters included, have escaped or undone the indoctrination completely. The problem with most (51 % or more) men is not that they are chauvinist pigs since they are willing, as sincerely as they know how, to struggle against their chauvinism and give up their male privilege. Rather, most men are unaware of their chauvinism and where it has its impact, and also unaware of how they would benefit by ridding themselves of it.

  I feel that we men have difficulty seeing this struggle as a struggle for our own freedom. We don’t feel oppressed, even if we know we are; we are not only being robbed of our freedom, but robbed of our awareness of the robbery and being given the illusion that we benefit from it. Our mystification is buttressed by the petty (wearing the pants, sitting at the head of the table) privileges that accompany our oppressed lives. While we have no awareness of what we would gain in the way of well-being when we overthrow our chauvinism, we very clearly see what we would have to give up in the way of privileges: the privilege of first and last choice, our one-up to women.

  So what is in it for us? How does one explain a brotherly glance to the blind? How does one translate the sounds of love-making to the deaf? One hopes that words will suffice; that they will evoke from the forgotten memories of childhood and occasional accidents of freedom the understanding, however misty, of what liberation can mean to a man, of what the reclaiming of our full human potential signifies for us.

  Does freedom to love fully without fear of being trapped strike a cord? Does ease and comfort without backbreaking, life-shortening work, ring a bell? Does full awareness of love, hate, fear, joy without shame sound good to you? Does relating to a woman as an equal partner in a cooperative relationship in which you get as much as you give turn you on? Would you like not having to take care of every problem that comes up? Can you dig giggling, tears streaming down your cheeks, trembling loins? Would you enjoy the weight on your shoulders being lifted? Would you like to rage without fear of hurting or killing, or the freedom to feel all your power without oppressing anyone with it? Can you dig it, brother?

  I assume that I am not speaking to anyone so crude in his chauvinism that he still has beliefs such as that women are by their nature unable to think as logically as men; or are inherently more emotional and therefore more unstable than men, or more likely to be satisfied doing domestic chores than men; happy only when being dependent and submissive while raising children and “making a home.” If you fit into this category we live in different worlds; we must part company in this chapter.

  Our real problem lies in subtle chauvinism. Subtle chauvinism is usually held by a man or a woman who believes in the equality of the sexes but who, nevertheless, in many subtle ways, acts in a manner which systematically oppresses the woman.

  Men who are subtle chauvinists usually believe in the liberation of women. Often a woman who is in a relationship with such a man is puzzled by the fact that, even though he protests that he is in favor of her liberation and gives effusive lip-service to it, he ultimately and irrevocably winds up in a one-up rather than equal position with respect to her. How and why does this happen?

  Sex Role Oppression

  None of us are given the choice to develop fully, and there are a number of human capacities which are badly diminished in men due specifically to sex role training or scripting. A lesser number of different capacities are equally taken away from women.

  When human beings are born they are divided into two groups. One group is told: “When you grow up you will be a girl. A good woman should be a very nurturing, supportive person; so much so that every time someone in her family needs something, she can provide it. In order to be truly good at it, it is useful for her to be very intuitive and capable of reading people’s minds so that if a person around her needs something, it would be ideal, especially if it’s a man, if she could figure it out before he even said anything. Since your major task will be to be nurturing, you won’t need to be very rational; you don’t need rationality in order to be supportive and nurturing; in fact, rationality might interfere with nurturing. It is best not to try to understand certain things.”

  By contrast, children of the male sex are told: “When you grow up you will be a man. A good man should be able to work hard at making things. He must be able to think clearly and logically and understand the laws of nature since his main task is to solve problems, especially problems related to power and its accumulation. On the other hand, the function of being tuned-in and sensitive to yourself or other human beings is one that you should not make use of, because it is difficult to think logically when you are aware of how you or other people feel. The accumulation of power will be interfered with if you become aware of the emotions of the people with whom you are dealing, nor will it be valuable or advisable for you to be nurturing since, once again, the world of men and power does not allow for the considerations of needs and emotions. Leav
e emotionality and sensitivity to women; they are better at it than you.”

  These banal script injunctions and attributions insure that women will apply their energies to nurture men while men will apply their energies to external reality and the accumulation of power. Men and women are alienated from their full human potential by the oppression of these various functions and the justification of this oppression under the guise of “proper” masculinity and femininity.

  As has been pointed out by Wyckoff (see Chapter 13), men’s scripted incapacity for being loving prevents the equitable exchange of strokes, thus creating a stroke deficit for women in the long run.

  On the other hand, men’s training in the uses of power makes it easier for them to get what they want in the world than it is for women. And it makes it easier for men to get what they want from women than for women to get what they want from men.

  The above two inequities express themselves in the relationships between men and women in subtle but powerfully erosive ways which ultimately defeat at least every other serious effort at heterosexual relationships.

  Thus, to rectify the distorting effect of sexist scripting, men need to work on two areas:

  1. Men need to learn to be loving. This is done by developing intuition and nurturing.

  2. Men need to learn to use their power without abusing it. This is done by learning to be cooperative and by giving up competitiveness and individualism.

  The reclaiming of the human potentialities that men are oppressed away from is an arduous process which requires energy and struggle. The process is similar to teaching Johnny how to read. Children, if left alone in a literate world, will learn to read, quite easily and without difficulty. The same process applies to men relearning their human potentialities.