#16: Roles & Types
Or, Why "Talking To Women" Is Hard.
Hi everyone! Been a while. I’ve been taking a bit of a break from blogging. Frankly, I’ve been trying to figure out “the point” of writing. I’ve come to the conclusion that writing is mainly a way for me to dig more deeply into whatever I’m thinking about, and the point of thinking is that it’s a fun thing to do. I’ve been spending a lot of time in SoHo, now that my company has an office there, and I’ve been thinking about this question a lot as I stroll down Broadway. I can’t offer any solid conclusions or advice, but I don’t want to do that anyway—I’m no guru, or anything of that sort. I prefer instead to offer some ideas, meant for lateral thought and exploration. So, I hope you enjoy what follows, and I hope to have more stuff to share soon.
I. Identities & Roles
Let's say you're taking a stroll on Bleecker St. If you're not familiar, in NYC there's always a guy with a lanyard and clipboard, standing at the corner of intersections, asking anyone who walks by if they have time to chat for a minute about whatever thing he’s selling. He'll ask 20 people and get 20 rejections, but he keeps pushing on as if nothing happened. How can he do this? And why is the seemingly comparable action, of trying to talk to the cute girl outside the store, so difficult?
Could it be that the salesman’s identity is mediated, so rejections don't matter to him? In other words, that it doesn't matter whether he gets rejected, because it doesn't affect who he is on some fundamental level? Even if he takes pride in his job as annoying corner guy, it's still a numbers game. On the other hand, asking a woman on a date is threatening somehow, the rejection feels meaningful. It feels somehow unmediated, somehow not at all like a numbers game.
Of course, all interactions are mediated, so we have to ask, what kind of identity is it that you're using when talking to a girl, perhaps with the intention of flirting or expressing sexual desire? We can at least say it is of the form "I am the sort of person who women are interested in talking to." The problem is that this identity has a feedback loop, where getting rejected destabilizes the identity. Rather than thinking "it's a numbers game, and my ability to continue asking is based on my attachment to a third party, the company telling me to annoy random people", it instead creates a feedback loop "maybe I'm not the sort of person they want to talk to", which makes the identity harder to sustain for repeated interactions. …
The complexity is getting out of hand. It feels like we're barking up the wrong tree. What if we conceive of the interaction not in terms of identity, but in terms of role? First we must ask: what is, ultimately, the difference between an identity and a role?
What even is an identity? Identity implies "sameness", mathematically x = x. Framed in terms of language, a statement of identity is of the form "I am an x", I am a man, I am an engineer, whatever. We can condense this statement to "I = x", but what is it that makes this a meaningful statement? Why is "I" such a weird term to deal with?
Ever looked up the definition of "I"? "I. pronoun. Used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself." The key term in this definition is "refer". The "I" is a reference, all it can do is point to something else. If we take "point" literally, we can imagine how a child might wield similar logic: points to self "snav" (translation: "I am snav").
But there's another term in the "I am snav": "am", or "to be". We can play the definitions game again and look it up: “be. verb. Exist." Useless. We've been dropped into a philosophical hole. What is the meaning of existence? Hoo boy. Okay, what about this one? "Having the state, quality, identity, nature, role, etc., specified". A bit circular, but takes us closer. It opens the right kind of question: what's the difference between declaring an identity, like "I am a man", vs. declaring a role, like "I am an engineer"? The two feel different; it's considered normal to say "I identify as a man", but it would be hilarious to say "I identify as an engineer", or perhaps insulting, depending who you ask.
The difference seems to be one of quality versus action. Let me put it in different terms: what is the "I" when I say "I am a man" versus saying "I am an engineer"? In the former case, it's as if we're attributing "man" to some kind of continuous "essence", something that seems to stand outside time and pervade my "being", whereas "engineer" is not an essential quality at all. Rather, it's a quality based on something I do. We can flip it around, it would be quite normal to say "I do engineering", but we don't have the same form for "man". What can I possibly say, "I do man-ing"?
Gender theorists like Butler would disagree with the above. She might say that we should reject any such claims about gender ("man") being "essential", and that instead gender should be thought of as purely a verb, an act, a "performance which is repeated"1, a role, but not an existential ("essential") role (i.e. an "identity") so much as a theatrical role.
This distinction cuts to the heart of what I was grasping for above. An identity (as I use the term above and onward) is an existential role, and a role (as I use the term above and onward) is a "performance which is repeated", akin to a theatrical role. In condensed form, the difference between identity and role is the difference between "being" and "doing". An identity is something you "are", but a role is something you "do".2
So, a "role" is a repeated performance, but every performance has a script, or at least a directive. This is how the "bare" definition of role locks into society. We might even conceive of "society" in the broadest sense as a nexus of available roles, or scripts, which one can take up, so long as they're ready to act the part.3
Thinking about our intrepid sidewalk salesman, his role is clear: he's a salesman! He's repeating his little performance, where he tries to sell his conversational partner the object. His role is common knowledge. Everyone has dealt with salesmen before. The constraints of the interaction are already presupposed by both sides, at least once the mark becomes aware that they're in a conversation with a salesman. But what about the "man" who wants to talk to a woman that he's interested in? What's his role? How can both parties know what's going on, and act out their scripts effectively? Because nothing is more terrifying than being caught in a situation without any idea how to act.
If our hypothetical man wants to talk to woman, he needs to take on a role. The most obvious choice is "seducer", a man whose role is to "win" the seduction game through making himself seem desirable, interesting, etc. But those qualities don't really matter so much as the style of performance, which emerges from an only partly idiosyncratic corpus of media and life experience. Most women have considerable experience dealing with seducers. Some women even have complicated protocols for escaping uncomfortable situations, decision trees for evaluating suitors (red/green flags), etc. But a significant number of men have zero experience playing the role of "seducer". It's like going on stage having never rehearsed for the performance. No wonder it’s so nerve-wracking.
"But I don't want to play a seducer!" One might think. "I just want to talk to her and see what happens." Okay, but what will you talk about? Remember that all social interaction, all of society, works through roles. Some might even say that intimacy is itself still a role, albeit a vulnerable one. Entering a situation sans role is a recipe for awkwardness. It might even be the definition of "awkwardness", that to be awkward is to fail to adequately perform a social role. The "awkward autist" acts out the role they're familiar with: the teacher, the author of a Wikipedia page, etc, without regard for adequacy or appropriateness. Adequacy in this case means the role performance is known to all parties and is acted convincingly.4
In sum, a "role" is a way of "using society" to do something. We draw our language from society by way of roles. I am doing some sort of role while writing this. But I am not just "in the role" on its own, I am performing a sort of mediated action, where I also have some kind of audience I am addressing. Hence our judgment of "which role am I?" must also take the other into account. We can frame a question in terms of audience, rather than in terms of self: "who am I, to them?"5
To the salesman, you're a potential customer, regardless of gender, age, etc. But to the man who wants to talk to women? The question that blocks him from taking on a role is "who am I in relation to this woman?" Key here being that he first thinks of her as a woman, and then attempts to find a role that relates specifically to "woman" in the desired way. This quality of desire may even be projected onto the other herself, him thinking "who am I in relation to this desirable woman?". This is where we need to move away from roles for a bit, and instead discuss types.
II. Types & Roles
A type, based on the description put forward by Alfred Schütz (who I've mentioned on other occasions), is an abstract category we use to relate to other human beings.
When I relate to someone totally on the basis of their type, I'm engaging in what Schütz calls a "They-relationship". In other words, I am relying totally on the programmatic nexus of society to tell me who they are; the other becomes a representative of their overarching type, with no subjective or idiosyncratic qualities. The interaction can become totally automatic, like interacting with the cashier at a store, at least when you're not thinking about it. Each person has their own, specialized knowledge of which types exist, and what to do in response (i.e. your role), but at least some types are commonly known by the majority of people within a given culture.
On the other side is what Schütz calls the "We-relationship", where the interaction has no such type constraint. You are, in Schütz’s words, "growing older together", the two streams of consciousness melding into a single space of togetherness. Schütz believed a "pure" We-relationship was impossible, a limit, but that we can approach the limit as we become more and more intimate with someone. The We-relationship typically takes time to develop, so for the time being I will focus on the They-relationship.
The question most directly related to our inquiry (“why is it hard to talk to women?”) is: what does it means to "talk to women" in terms of types? The question betrays its own answer: the person who wants to "talk to woman" attempts to act based on some conception of "woman-type", by which they likely mean "sexually desirable woman-type", and it is on the basis of that type-judgment that they decide whether or not to say hello, what to say or whether to abstain from conversation altogether.
The issue here is that the "woman-type" is not any particular woman, or any group of women, but a weird abstraction, that others get slotted into when they meet the constraints involved. x = 5. I have nothing to say about 5, but now we know something about x. To put it in more human language, the problem is treating "women" as an undifferentiated whole (the metonymic operation I mentioned in previous posts), rather than realizing that each person is different, and that "woman" is perhaps one of the least useful types in orienting one's role selection.6
The reason "just talk to her bro" works is because it breaks down the "bro"'s hardened knowledge of types. It's not that he somehow gets experience "talking to women", but he realizes that even if x can equal 5 and x can equal 4, the numbers themselves are not the same. He learns to figure out different roles, different types, when confronted with the immediate situation of having another person in front of him.
Where does this "type" come from? Few children interact with others on the basis of type. Instead, types are learned, often through parents, media, etc. "Desirable woman" is a particularly pervasive type, and a man's ability to successfully talk to (and ideally sleep with) desirable women is rooted in culture as a symbol of personal value. The feminists understood this back in the 70s, and were rightfully upset about it, because it has the effect of reducing individual, actual women to objects, to pure representatives of the type, which is fundamentally what "objectification" is about.
In tying one's ability to interact with "women" to personal or cultural value, it comes to bear on self-judgment, which is how you get incels, the manosphere, etc. One's ability to "talk to woman" becomes, through culture, something one reflects on and a place where they may find themselves lacking. This is why the problem of "talking to women" relates to insecurity: once it starts to feel like an obligation, a duty rather than a choice, it feels as if one must succeed, or else. It’s also a game with real, financial stakes (how do you think Tinder makes money?), and many institutions (and men themselves) are quite invested in perpetuating "woman" qua type.
Maybe the answer to "why is it hard to talk to women" is because, in order to do so, one must take on a role that's appropriate to the type, in this case "woman". There are not many such roles. Seducer is the one I mentioned earlier. "Talking to People" is much easier, because you can pick whatever type you choose, and some of the chosen type may happen to be women. Whether that performance is good or authentic is a matter for another post. At the end of the day, maybe it's better to be the guy on Bleecker St. with the clipboard, playing the salesman for potential customers, whomever they may be.
Miscellania
Phew, thanks for reading! As far as twitter threads and things of that sort go, the most interesting thing I’ve written has been an attempt to orient myself toward a “metaphysics of attention”, if you want to call it that. Here’s a long first-philosophy-style twitter thread on the topic:
I always find something surprising when I start thinking in terms of “attention”, or about the nature of experience as it relates to a specific phenomenological conception of attentional orientation. It’s something I want to dig into more deeply over the next few months.
Similarly, I’ve been thinking about “choice” and “judgment” as they apply to everyday life, but also psychoanalytically and philosophically. Here’s a somewhat shorter thread about that:
And lastly, here’s some fake Žižek quotes I came up with as a joke:
And now, seeya later, time for some gaming (I’m playing Megaman Battle Network, if you remember that!).
Song of the week:
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. p. 526. http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/TimarAndrea/17a.Butler,performative%5B1%5D.pdf
If we take up Butler's view on things, it begs the question of "what existential roles can we claim?" I think it is inarguable that we can all claim to be "human", at the very least. And as we age, perhaps we might reach a point where we come to embody some sort of institution, where the performative "I" lurches into the existential "I", like a titan of industry who has devoted his life, his being into his company. He might be said to truly "be" the founder of Evil Corp or whatever. But we may instead find ourselves tempted to reject the existential perspective entirely, and claim "there is no existential I", or as TLP would put it, "you are what you do". Whether this feels freeing or terrifying depends on... well, what I describe in the rest of this little essay.
This definition of "society" as a nexus of roles needs to be distinguished from the Foucaultian idea of society as a message-passing graph. The distinction here is based on perspective: a message-passing graph is what appears to a hypothetical observer external to society, whereas someone standing in the midst of society instead conceives of various social affordances, or possible things they can say to certain people, or on certain platforms. The notion of social affordance reveals the essence of role when conceived of reflexively (i.e. in relation to self) and on the basis of repetition (i.e. not as a singular social act, but as a singular move in a series of social acts, structured by a singular conceptual object—a role).
From this definition of awkwardness, we see the value of small-talk, especially when two people don't know each other: it is the jumping-off point, a common baseline past which role negotiation can begin, which is a topic a little too fine-grained for me to discuss in this essay. Suffice to say, small talk "sets the tone" for the rest of the interaction.
Note that this question of "who am I to you?" works on both sides of any interaction, and is ultimately rooted in individual fantasy. As Žižek famously put it, "if the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike, and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike… With a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?" From Žižek, Slavoj. “A&F Quarterly: Back to School, 2003”. pp. 25-28. https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/A_and_F_Quarterly_Back_to_School_2003_The_Sex_Ed_Issue.pdf
Much misogyny descends from the typification operation: once "women" is treated as a whole, one can project the entirety of their experience with women onto everyone who fits into that category. The same goes for other negative "isms", although ironically talking about how "Xism" is bad and then prescribing ways that one should treat Xs often has the opposite impact intended, in that it serves to reinforce the strength of the type rather than weaken the type’s grasp on the reader's behavior.
Just this spring I realized that exactly this structure was causing me unnecessary suffering. I started thinking in terms of "the male gaze", i.e., the quality of attention through which women are presented primarily as potential lovers who you must be ready (and worthy) to seduce, on pain of self-esteem damage. I have been trying, with some success, to re-wire my brain so that the type I am primarily presented with when I look at women is "neighbour", or "distant cousin". My practice has just involved noting: every time I notice myself noticing a woman *as a woman*, I think "hey, it's my neighbour/cousin" and wish them well (usually just in my head).
Great to see you're back!! This was a good read!!