Dietrich Schwanitz: “Männer – Eine Spezies wird

besichtigt” (Men – the Sighting of a Species)

Chapter Three
Translation from German
by Irma Walter

III. The Inner Numbness

The Silence of Men

As we have dealt with the results of man's fragile
identity, let's emerge from the depths of analysis
and return to the surface of experience. The female
reader will be familiar with many of these things, but
it is only against the background of in-depth analysis
that they make sense.
First consequence: A man cannot talk about his inner
being, his feelings and mental states.
Let's perform a minor thought loop in order to
understand. The deliberation is such: to be exact, we
always talk about inner states, even when we
describe the “sunset out there”. Actually, we are
evaluating our own perception, the “sunset in here”.
Perception doesn't proceed directly, but undergoes
several stages. In principle, the brain works like an
impressionist painter: Like Degas dissolved the visual impression into thousands of coloured dots,
so does the brain. It breaks the sunset down into millions of nerve impulses and observes them on
a higher level, groups them and arranges them into a picture. A mere two percent of the brain's
activities are devoted to importing outer stimuli and 98 percent are dedicated to the self-
evaluation of the brain. It's like a government agency: very little time is devoted to the actual
person Andrea Abromeit. Ms Abromeit is immediately translated into a file. And the agency will
hereafter exclusively perceive her existence in terms of what is present in the files: applications,
processing, decisions, notes, denials, rejections, appeals, revisions, approvals, etc. These are all
official forms, developed by the agency, determining its own states which it has to undergo as a
result of Andrea Abromeit's visit. It will only be a third-level observance that will make the agency
distinguish once more between inside and outside processes, by assigning the living Ms Abromeit
to the outside world and her files to the agency's own internal processing. In a similar manner we
assign the sunset to the outer world, the emotions, however, which it evokes in us to our inner
world. We say it turns us melancholic or makes us yearn for faraway places.
The main point is that assigning things to the inner and outer world is a subsequent process. We
decide as a final act what should figure on the inside or on the outside. And a large part of inner
processes eludes us. The neuro-chemical processes supporting our perception have to remain
hidden in order to enable us to distinguish between “real things” and perception processes.
Additionally, the fine line between the inner and the outer world is quite often shifted in some way.
When we say “the sunset is beautiful”, we project a personal emotion to the outside and perceive
it as the sunset's property: “beautiful”. Here our thought loop has come to an end and we
continue in our previous line of thought.
The final conclusion shows that men and women distinguish between the inner and the outer
world in different ways. Women have a choice to attribute their own states to themselves or the
outer world. Most personal states are attributed to the outer world, of course, because humans
are programmed to perceive the outside world. On the outside, perception works in a much more
differentiated and sharper way than on the inside. The outside world supports the brain in
evaluating its states: this is blue, that is green and another thing is red. A cow is perceived much
more distinctly than an emotion. It is only the conciseness of language that enables us at all to
perceive our inner states, much like files enable an agency to evaluate its inner processing.
Besides the outer world, women know an inner world, which is perceived separately. Several
different states take place there called “emotions”. Women are often preoccupied with these.
They describe them, name them, talk about them and share this inner world with others. The
outer world seems to be of interest only in terms of the effects it has on women's inner worlds.
Thus they are interested in beauty, drama, art and love. Women love to be stirred, they enjoy the
changes in weather and often give a running forecast, including predictions and reports about
past catastrophes. In short, women are interested in the inner states of others, because nothing
stirs their own inner world as much as do the upheavals in other folks' inner worlds. And as they
take equal charge over an inner and an outer world, women assume that men do the same. But –
as incredulous as this may sound – here they are mistaken.

The male fear of the inner world

By now we have understood the process that makes a man a man: the initiation rite. It teaches
the young man to overcome feelings of fear, desperation and fright, which are incompatible with a
man's identity. For this purpose he's got to de-sensitise himself in some respect. He's got to ignore
his feelings and emotions and succeeds best by blending out the perception of his inner world
entirely. He focuses all his attention on the outer world. It is well defined. Modifying Friedrich
Schiller, one could say: “Closely together live the feelings, yet things meet head on in space.”
From this point onward men love clarity. The washed-up outlines of inner states are irritating. They
are too fluid and unstable. He's got to raise a dam to keep them away and this dam encloses his
world for ever more. Men forget that there is an inner world beyond. If he were to have a look at
it, he'd run the risk of breaking the dam and be flooded by feelings. He would return to the state
of a woman or a child. He'd be a sissy. Thus he gets used to ignoring his inner world.
Henceforth he shows a certain disdain towards those who get involved with their feelings. He
loses the skills that he might have had once, to describe his feelings. Questions concerning this
matter are considered indecent. They force him to look inside where the monster of identity loss is
lurking, always ready to jump and devour him. Looking at his emotions renders a man incapable
of communication and women become increasingly convinced of his Neanderthal nature.
They are convinced that men are lacking an entire dimension. But as men see it, this lack is a
virtue. Concerning his feelings, a man's got to be tight-lipped, as the typical Western hero shows.
He doesn't talk, he acts. And come the scene where he is supposed to confess his love to the
woman he saved from evil, he doesn't talk but shuffles his hooves. He clears his throat, acts as if
he was close to suffocation and in the end he comes up with something so trite that it could mean
everything and anything.
Bringing it down to a simple formula, to a man, his inner world is off-limits. He loathes to enter it,
it's a mine field to him and at any moment he might step on an emotional mine blowing his male
identity to bits and pieces. So he fiercely resents anyone forcing him to enter this death zone.

Preference for the outer world

Man's natural clime is the outer world where he feels at home. Therefore he is a fan of anything
matter-of-fact, yielding to boundaries: measurements, weights, figures, facts, files, laws, rules,
things, instruments, tools, machines and pieces, in short, anything that can be distinguished well,
showing form, clarity and structure. Anything that has defined contours, can be assessed into an
inventory, can be collected or brought into a system. Men soothe their fear of the fluid outlines of
the subjective by sticking with the objective world. In comparison to the nebulous inner world, the
outer world is an Eldorado of order and can be controlled so much more easily.
As mentioned before, the concept of the outer world is produced within a human as well. The
brain itself, in observing its inner states, decides what is to be counted as the outer and the inner
world. If it notices a horse-like shape with sharp black and white lines, it decides that this is a
zebra and associates it with the outer world. Crisp contours in themselves are a criterion for
associating a perceived thing with the outer world. Therefore we conclude: Men prefer the outer
world, because they present the inner states in orderly fashion. Outer things help him control his
inner states. Men don't think about their mental states, they don't sort out his feelings analysing
them with their friends. Instead they clothe them into the forms of the outer world to handle them
better. For a man, the outer world is simply a way of ordering his inner world. All he wants is
control, he is always afraid of losing control.
In this respect, men are like paranoid neurotics who are constantly in fear of losing control and
therefore develop a thousand strategies to combat this fear. They mainly suffer from the fear of
losing control over the borderline between inside and outside. They are utterly tortured by
phenomena which cannot be attributed clearly: substances penetrating the physical boundaries
induce panic. They live in constant fear of bacterial invasions, infections, viruses, all sorts of
pathogenic agents penetrating them. In extreme cases, there is a fear that their brains are being
occupied by foreign ideas, such as the reader experiences at this moment of reading. They feel
controlled from outside.
The neurotic mobilises every helpful technique of control. He counts money, plans his time,
enslaves his fellow human beings, he decides what they may think and say, he forbids whatever
bothers him, constantly fighting against the surrounding chaos, which – in reality – is the chaos
within himself.
For masking their inner world with the outer world, men have no experience in structuring their
inner worlds. Handling ambiguous outlines is foreign to them. Exact descriptions of the inexact,
displaying such cloudy matters as feelings, is not their thing. The inability to describe their inner
worlds makes it all the more diffuse. The structure of language, which women use to access their
inner worlds, is not at men's disposal for lack of practise. Should a man be forced against his will
to sight his inner world, he sees nothing but chaos. He either panics fleeing to the outer world's
clarity or falls into brooding, a dull stupor. Just like the Spirit before the creation of the world, he
floats motionless above the waters and is not approachable.
Men haven't got a choice to inform others of either their inner or their outer world. Mostly they
haven't got access to their inner world. If they have, they don't talk about it. Their inner world
seems to be Pandora's Box. Once unlocked, it unleashes all the plagues of mankind.
Therefore, women asking men about their feelings, usually run into a brick wall. Men can't
entertain these questions. Should they be willing to talk about their feelings for once, they need
preparation time and still tend to voice policy statements which they memorised beforehand.
These, however, are as realistic portrayals of emotions as are government declarations valid
evaluations of the president's mental state.

Men and their hobbies

If you want to get to know the emotions of a man, you'll have to observe what he's busy with, not
what he says of himself. And you will notice that in flight of his inner world he ventures to the
most abstruse activities. You will find him building cathedrals from matches, dive to long-sunk
Dutch vessels at the bottom of the ocean in search of ancient bone china or collect footstools from
the early baroque era. Men are hobby people. Stamp collecting or building airplane models reflect
order, with every man having his own little realm. Here everyone can rule or play engineer,
captain or astronaut, i.e. be in control. In other words, hobbies compensate for the silent inner
world of men, giving it words, the language of tinkering. A man's subconscious articulates in his
hobby.
The hobby's origin affirms this thought. As we know the word hobby originates from the hobby-
horse. The first man with a hobby was the character of Uncle Toby from “Tristram Shandy” by
Laurence Sterne, written 1759 to 1767. Uncle Toby was an officer in the army of the Earl of
Marlborough, Winston Churchill's ancestor and took part in the siege of Namur in the War of the
Spanish Succession. A shell splinter hit his loins and – yes, this is the problem – unmanned him.
Thus Uncle Toby was as good as turned into a woman and as custom had it in those days that a
woman was not to talk about sexual things. So Uncle Toby turned so reserved that he couldn't
describe the nature of his injury – it would have forced him to utter the unspeakable. As he was
being asked again and again where exactly he had been injured, he found an escape in building a
model of Namur. If someone asked him the named question he pointed to the exact place along
the city walls of Namur where his castration had taken place.
Occupying himself with the model of Namur took on a form of obsession with Uncle Toby. He
became an expert in siege methods until this obsession far outgrew all his other interests. Uncle
Toby brought the inner wound of being unmanned under control by projecting it onto an outer
problem and developed a hobby at the same time. The siege is really a metaphor for conquering a
woman. So it's all about sex, merely covered up with the word “hobby”. In “Tristram Shandy” the
word “ass” is used as a codeword for sexuality, so the horse stands for sublimate sexuality. The
hobby horse is a pseudo-sublimate projection into the absurd. Freud constructed neurotic
behavior in a similar fashion.
As a surrogate inner world, the hobby is a purely male domain. Women don't have hobbies; they
have their inner worlds, catered to by conversations, reading, film consumption and imagination.
If women maintain hobbies, then they rarely do so for the hobby's sake, but to meet men or as an
excuse for social contacts, talk and general mental exchange. So women can conclude from all
this that it is futile to interview the man of their interest concerning his own mental states. At
times of excitement he may get carried away to say “I love you”, because he knows that he is
expected to say that. But adding any further details to this basic statement seems inappropriate.
He feels cornered if he is questioned any further. He expects the woman to understand that this
statement has cost him enough effort. He can't understand that she can't understand that. He
thinks her request to tell her more about his love to be indecent and strange, having no clue of
the richness of her inner world. Being let in on it leaves him confused and lost. He has no way to
react to these complicated descriptions. To him, her mood differentiations are more subtle than
the stock news. He can't match them.
Of course, there are the subtleties of building model airplanes. But she has no ear for that
although in this area he could muster a much more detailed articulation than for describing his
moods. She just won't understand that he achieves highest articulation in a different field, not the
self-depiction of the soul. So the relationship between a man and a woman resembles the one
between a dog and his mistress: he can't talk, so he brings his bone and puts it on her bedside
rug. That is the language of his soul. But Mum doesn't understand him and complains that he
messes up her carpet. So the dog takes to the basement, with his tail tucked in and there chews
on the bone of his hobby.
A hobby tends to sprawl and as it grows, so does the man. If he's talented he outgrows himself
and turns into the constructor of worlds.

Men's coolness
The numbness of the inner world brings on unpleasant side effects with men. You can't conclude
from a man's outer presentation to his inner state of being. His mental state cannot be read from
the outside. Men always pretend to be indifferent and stoic. They are cool. And while the stoic
front is maintained with increasing efforts, an enormous amount of pressure can build up behind
it. Should the pressure go above a certain limit, a man becomes an explosive device. There are
two types of explosions: the aggressive one, directed towards the outside and the auto-aggressive
one, turning inside. In the first case a man turns angry or even violent, in the latter, he takes to
flight.
While women achieve a constant pressure balance by maintaining an unchanging level of
disapproval, formerly called nagging, men accumulate pressure to large degrees: after all they
want to ignore their inner world. Until finally there is no more way of overlooking the boiling within
and the inside pressure makes its way to the outside in a violent manner.
One could be tempted to see a parallel to the two arousal curves during the sexual act. While the
male curve shows an explosively dramatic rise and consequent fall, the female one is more
constant and uniform and lasts longer, with her lusty noises sounding like constant protesting and
his like a short fit of anger.
Because men don't carry their insides on their sleeves, they can change without notice. This
makes them ticking time bombs, ready to explode at any moment. Women, used to identifying
“weather changes” from unmistakable signs in other women, are surprised by their husbands'
sudden eruptions. They forget that men always carry invisible bundles of straw and just one more
can break their backs. It even surprises the men themselves.
It is unwise to unwittingly put pressure on a man from outside. The woman who teases her partner
to draw a reaction from him, is often dumbfounded by the sudden eruption that may follow a long
time of increasing lack of reaction. And then she wonders helplessly how a harmless irritation on
her part could excite such an intense volcano eruption. And she deems her partner to be slightly
off his rocker.
Actually, her question is wrongly put. She assumes that there is a direct link between her irritation
and his reaction, as is typical for women. And she isn't aware that he is not reacting to her minor
irritation but to the anger he's held in for the last three weeks. Because he won't complain and
nag, no, not for trifles, no, not him.
All of this results in misunderstandings between the sexes that can turn into a curse. Women
believe that men can't talk about their feelings which they aren't able to communicate. So she
asks him, trying to help him, trying to facilitate his expressions – because she wants nothing more
than to look into his soul, in order to see if she has a place there. When men always want to see
women's naked bodies, women always want to see men's naked souls.
But men keep silence. By choice. They even make a never-ending effort to ignore their inner
world, to play down their suffering and emotions. If they were to take seriously all that hurts and
puts them down, they would break out in tears at it all. Isn't it already enough work to put it all
out of his mind? And women make it all the harder by asking: “How do you feel? How much do
you love me? Do you like me, a little or a lot? Do you like my mother? Admit that you envy your
brother....” These questions are like the song of the sirens when Odysseus passed the island. They
constantly tempted him to give up the armour of male identity, to abandon himself to a blissful
dissolution, to melt into the world and find relief from the constant pressures of his efforts.
Because actually, men resemble women quite a bit more than they'd like to think. They have
weaknesses and emotions. They are happy or moody, they've got their periods and phases just
like women, but they have to deny it all. They have to move it to where passion mates with order:
into the outer world. So they remove their inner worlds from their perception and make their
feelings act incognito – until they find them again in the outer world masked as features of outside
interests.