Ayn Rand: just a hot mess of emotions

 So yesterday I talked about Dr Sue Johnson's theory about love attachment, and said I'd talk about Ayn Rand. Joseph Campbell warned that if you believe the brain is running everything, and ignore the emotions, you get Darth Vader, and Rand is a perfect example. Sorry if this looks long, but it's a damn good story I promise. Rand's life was way more interesting than her books!

Ayn (rhymes with pine) was a woman who valued thought and intellect and logic above everything else, and believed real emotion flowed out of perfect logic. You loved a great work of music because it elevated Man, so art could be objectively judged by what it said about human beings. Ridiculous even by her own standard, of course. For example, she disliked jazz--she had some "reason" but of course she just disliked it for aesthetic reasons she didn't admit to. Because logically she *should* have loved it since jazz is independence personified, and she valued independence above all else. This was the mind of Ayn Rand.

Since she was such a logical person, if she felt something, it must be based on logic! (As opposed to other people's messy feelings.) So as far as I can tell she built an entire philosophy based on her own personal preferences. When she laid eyes on her husband, she knew he was the perfect logical hero of her girlish dreams. Really because he looked the way she imagined her perfect hero should look. Sort of like Gary Cooper, who ended up playing the hero of Rand's Fountainhead (one of the great Mary Sue's of all time)

 (Gary above, Frank below)

Not that Frank was a bad choice of husband--he was a beta male, and she an ambitious woman. But she talked about him like he was one of the cool, masterly heroes of her novels, whereas he seems to have been a quiet, unassuming man, happy to sit in her shadow and support her. So when the real alpha male came along she fell for him like a brick through a soufflé.

Nathaniel Branden--future father of the self help movement--was part of her inner circle, along with a woman named Barbara, and let's-ruin-the-economy Alan Greenspan. Her inner circle would gather at her apartment to read her works and debate her ideas, but not really because she could demolish any argument with one simple trick which forms the backbone of The Fountainhead: If you don't agree with my ideas then you're still in The Matrix, and you wouldn't want that! (These kind of arguments work on modern day teenagers, which is why she's considered one of the most influential authors to this day.) If you still disagreed then you were kicked out of the Ayny Rand Club. They jokingly called themselves The Collective. Jokingly.

"Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs."

Nathaniel was the intellectual equal Ayn hadn't actually found in Frank, so of course she couldn't (a) divorce Frank, cause that would admit she'd made a mistake in Frank, or (b) just have a crush and eventually get over it and be friends with the guy, cause actually she was a pretty passionate woman. So she decided it was logically imperative that they have an affair--they were intellectual soul mates, and therefore should be physical soul mates (you gotta read the sex scenes in Fountainhead, my days.)

I seem to recall in all this that she even convinced Nathaniel and Barbara to marry each other though their feelings for each other weren't sure, or weren't mutual. I don't even remember why.

Then she logically argued Nathaniel into having the affair with her. Though blown away by her mind, he wasn't able to sustain hotness for her for long. I don't think men develop the same Hot for My Older Mentor Professor thing like young women do. Less so in the 1950s.

Then she logically argued Frank and Barbara to agree. Nathaniel and Barbara both felt sorry for Frank. The affair went on for awhile, but Nathaniel eventually broke it off. He met another woman and fell in love. He and Barbara hid it from Ayn, but when she found out she kicked them both out of the collective. They (or at least Nathaniel) were prevented from going to her funeral. Meanwhile Ayn's poor Frank locked himself in his studio and drank himself into a stupor throughout the whole thing.

It was the biggest, saddest fiasco you can imagine. She broke Frank's heart, broke her own heart, made Barbara miserable, lost two of her best friends, and though Nathaniel wasn't an innocent pawn, I think she took advantage of him as much as we'd say that of any male professor-mentor figure having an affair with a young student who looks up to him. All because she couldn't admit to herself one little crush.*

When you ignore your feelings, they don't go away, the opposite happens--they become more powerful and out of control. I know most people who read my blog are women and most women don't usually need to learn this. But I've known some guys, usually young idealistic guys in their 20s, who didn't. There are probably some perfectly innocent geeks (think Big Bang Theory) who don't either. Ayn Rand's love life is a good morality play--tuck it away in case you need it one day.

If you don't want your emotions to rule you, 

the worst thing you can do is deny having any.

Ooh! Tomorrow I have a little example from Dr Johnson's book that shows this too. It's very sweet. :-)

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* Just reading an interview with a new biographer of Rand, and her account is just the way I remember it being in Barbara and Nathaniel's books: In my view, Rand engineered the Brandens' disastrous marriage so that she could safely take Nathaniel, then 24, as her lover. She was 49. She browbeat Barbara and her own husband, Frank O'Connor, a passive, gentle man, into agreeing to the affair and keeping it a secret. It lasted 14 years. And when finally, at 38, Nathaniel fell in love with a 23-year-old artists' model and Rand devotee, Rand ousted him, the model, and Barbara from her Objectivist cult and tried to sabotage his career. The Brandens, now divorced and living in L.A., argued to me that her moral absolutism, her appetite for admiration, and her strong cruel streak had damaged them and ruined many others' lives.

Romance Novels: on the cutting edge of science

I've just started a book called Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr Sue Johnson. Already the introduction and the first few chapters are fascinating.

She's a clinical psychologist and has made adult love--specifically between couples--the focus of her research, pretty much her entire career. She gives a long description of John Bowlby, the main psychiatrist who pioneered the idea that children have an actual physical, survival need to be held and cuddled and cared for, back when it was believed that this would make them weaklings and sick adults. It took him years of experiments to convince his colleagues that when parents are emotionally and physically close to their children it results in happier, more well-adjusted children, which of course revolutionized how we see child-rearing.

Johnson and her colleagues believe the same thing about adults and love relationships. She cites all the studies that show how emotionally close relationships make you less sick, lower stress, help you face challenges, and so forth--that's the part I'm on. I'm sure you've heard many of those studies, as I have. But I've never seen them framed quite this way--as being part of a wave of revolution in the field of relationship studies, as big as what took place in child-rearing studies. The child-parent bonding is called "attachment theory" and that's the term she uses for her theory as well:

"when I tried to get my views published, most of my colleagues did not agree at all. First they said that emotion was something that adults should control. ... But most important, they argues, healthy adults are self-sufficient. Only dysfunctional people need or depend on others. We had names for these people: they were enmeshed, codependent, merged, fused. In other words, they were messed up. Spouses depending on each other too much was what wrecked marriages!"

I find this all veddy fascinating. I'm not someone who's naturally physically affectionate, or very emotional (except when pumped up on Topomax) but that doesn't mean I approve of myself, or am not making efforts to change. There are two stories that always come to my mind when I think about the importance of physical affection and emotion. The first is the Romanian orphanages.

It must have been in 1990, I was 17 years old, that I read a magazine story about them. That's when I learned that when babies aren't held and interacted with, they just tune of this world--they don't become social. It was one of the saddest but also most horrifying things I'd ever heard of (and it applies to animals too.) It's just a fact--living beings beings need other beings to interact with them, and touch them and I don't see why that would change in adulthood.

Which is why we all loved this photo, right?

The second is the story of Ayn Rand, but it's so good let's talk about it tomorrow. The point I wanted to make today is that allll of this reminded me, once more, of just how annoying it is that people make fun of romance novels.*

Because one of the ideas you find in good romance novels is that a relationship can be a soft place to fall, and a springboard from which to jump and take chances, and a safe place to rediscover yourself, a mirror in which to see yourself better, and a firm hand to hold onto when you take the plunge. Romance novels these days walk a really fine balance between independence and dependence.

In novels by people like Jennifer Crusie and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the women are very strong, but they still reach out and ask for help from their friends, and family, and from the hero, and it doesn't make them weak. They're learning to be vulnerable, they're learning to be trusting, but like in those child-rearing studies, being dependent on someone doesn't make you a weakling. And the good romance novels--of which there are many these days--show that.

Romance novels spend all their time exploring the science of love, and how it helps us survive. Which kind of makes it science fiction. ;-)

"We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence. ... We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy--to survive." Dr Sue Johnson

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*I consider it all the more important for me to defend romance novels because I don't exclusively read them, so no one can say, "Ohh she's just being defensive cause she's a junky." I've read just as many books in the mystery genre as I have in the romance genre. And again in science fiction, and again in teen fiction. And certainly more general and "literary" fiction. ;-)

     

Barbie's got back

In re. my posting about the Nicki Minaj video--that her backup dancers were surprisingly perhaps less conventionally hot than the usual backup dancers in pop videos, and less skinny--

 

a male heterosexual (I think!) friend said he usually finds backup dancers of female pop singers are generally not supa hot, presumably because it's part of the "gimmick." The entourage can't be prettier than the star.

This is a good point actually, which must work in inverse for the boys. I'm now about to launch into some theorizing. If it doesn't interest you, just scroll to the pictures! :-D

The attractiveness of the female backup dancers add to the virility of a male star. He doesn't want the men watching him to think, at least subconsciously: What's wrong with him, can't he get hotter chicks than this? The members of Metallica have commented that they could tell when their fan base expanded--they were "making it--because more women were turning up at their concerts, and the women in their showers after the concert (where they liked to have their groupies placed) were more attractive. 

And it will tell you the status of the newest member of the band, bassist Jason Newsted, that they made sure he got the "least pretty" groupie. Hey... no one's consciously mating here, but that doesn't mean your genes ever stop trying to find the best waist to hip ratio, or symmetrical features, or maybe just the features that you believe confer you power amongst the males in your social group. Who knows.

So. The women in men's videos have to be hot so that male fans will enjoy the videos, and so that male fans will perceive the pop singer to be virile, and in some cases to bolster the ego of the pop singer since artists can be a very insecure bunch, in a very superficial and fickle head-case industry.

Similarly the status of a female pop star might depend upon her being the most attractive woman in "the room" (the video, the stage). In this fickle and superficial business, there is no one more subjected to the superficiality than a female pop star. Given how many people will be watching her weight and criticizing and commenting on her appearance--everyone from her management to the media to strangers on the net--it's in her best interest to not be outshone by her dancers. She can't have people thinking "what a cow" every time her video comes on.

But I don't know that dancers need to be picked out specifically for their plainness--you certainly don't want "ugly" dancers, cause that's distracting. The pop star will not be judged by male or female fans by her dancers' looks, the way a male pop singer will be--her dancers actually need to be nondescript. So if there is a higher incidence of "less attractive" backup dancers in female singers' videos (and that's hard to judge, but let's assume), then it's probably not because they're chosen for this quality (if you can call it that) but because the "really hot" women are not chosen.

If I'm casting for a video or a tour, I now have the luxury to look for dance skill, for body types that suit a particular show style, without also having to vet for hotness. If I think someone is "too pretty" that's probably easier to filter out than it is to choose for. It's also controllable through makeup. Conclusion: If backup dancers is women's videos are less pretty, it's because the attractiveness standard is lower than for men's videos.

But the one bar that's rarely lowered is that of body weight/size. And yet here, I think it's been lowered.

I still maintain that the women in Minaj's dance team are a little on the heavier side than usual; their choreography in this video is a lot less sexualized than we usually see; and it's possibly less sexualized over all, in her concerts. The "weight" factor could be imagined on my part; or it could be coincidental; or it could be because she has a crappy person casting her dancers; or it could be because of an intense insecurity on Minaj's part; or it could be an interesting "casting" choice based on Minaj's female-centered focus, which you can see throughout her work.

I also think Minaj's artistic sensibility in her videos and shows in party hiphop, and part theatrical like Gaga and Katy Perry. And as I'll show in the photos below, theatrical backup dancers are not definitely not chosen based on a narrow idea of beauty or body type. I don't think she's made a full crossover to the theatrical, but instead draws inspiration from it, and infuses it into her rap and hiphop sensibilities, and that's what causes the interesting cognitive dissonance in this video: the ice motorcycle, the boy eye candy, the not-really-sexy backup chicks. It has hiphop video elements, with a Katy Perry patina.

A final note: I don't inherently have a problem with women dancers being sexy or sexualized. It's just pretty ubiquitous at this point... it'll be a nice change when the pendulum swings.

Without more ado...

The Thin and Sexualized

Beyoncé

Rihanna & Friends' bottoms

Rihanna

 Brit's infamous comeback

Dancers thinner than her that day

Britney Spears

Old Britney (same as the new, as were her dancers)

Janet Jackson

Christina Aguilera's attempt at an S&M comeback

Ciara (weird jeans, but you can see the dancer's six packs)

A backup dance group that's worked for women as well as men

Exceptions

These days Aguilera's doing a burleque thing (maybe because she's a little weightier herself?) So some of her dancers look a curvier to me.

 

 

Not in the below photo, though.

 

Katy Perry belongs to the Theatrical Set

There's sexy schoolgirl here, but no denying the dancer on the right has Thighs

Gaga's dancers are all skinny, but they look like ballet dancers to me--flat all over. And definitely not sexualized in the traditional sense. It's theatah dahling!

 

And of course, the original Queen of Pop Theatre. Her backup crew has always been more than just eye candy.

Two Interesting Asides

You can really see the change in aesthetic when you come across 90s videos. I don't think the bondage aesthetic is necessarily bad for women, I've just had my fill.

Check out these two images of Mariah and Janet! There's even a dance number with the fully uniformed unsexy female cinema employees.

 

 

I do not know what to make of Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls)" video. It's definitely... what's the African equivalent of Orientalist? The backup dancer army women aren't stick thin but... their battle gear of choice, for facing down a menacing group of riot geared men, is Appolonia's outfit from Purple Rain.

Including the cape.

They crawl in the sand like kittehs.

Perform menacing aerobics!

So I don't know if this video is another example of an exception to the cliché Sex Backup Dancer look. But it's definitely telling me...

Love is a sex shooter kitteh battlefield.