Harriet Lerner - The Dance of Deception
Review by Lindsay Throm While lying is socially taboo, pretending things are other than they are is not only sometimes acceptable but often encouraged and rewarded. Patriarchal culture teaches women to pretend and sometimes deceive, Lerner says, and in her study of the role this dissembling plays in women's lives, she shows how "pretending reflects deep prohibitions, real and imagined, against a more direct and forthright assertion of self." Lerner uses anecdotal examples to illustrate how and why women show the false and hide the real. Her examples and accompanying discussions cover self-deception, protection of others from painful truths, privacy, and family secrets, and each section clearly points out how deception is incorporated into women's lives and how they can learn to purge it from their behavior. She acknowledges that truth telling is not easy, yet her discussion of the many ways women lie and how lying affects them clearly shows the benefits of honesty and makes her prescription appealing.
On Deception and Truth-Telling -> part of everyday life in all species throughout nature
Pretending and Truth-Telling are not always opposites. Pretending for example my be an indirect move towards truth. In pretending love or courage for example we may discover that it really does exist or that we can enhance our capacity for it. Sometimes pretending is a form of experimentation or imitation that widens our experience and our sense of possibility. It reflects a wish to find ourselves in order to be ourselves.
Aim of this book: Examine how all of us engage with deception and approach truth-telling. A subject that is at the heart of who we are in the world. And what kind of world this is.
What is the right thing?
Book: "The right to lie" Dr. Robert Walk 1970 -> examples of lies that in their view strengthen intimate relationships eg fertility. These lies are born out of necessity and kindness and serve the loving bond.
People justify lying when they think it serves a protective or greater good. But cultural norms have changed.
When it comes to interpreting the motivation of others we can never know the whole story. People might think of their lies as noble lies, as protecting someone etc
How do we know when deception is right, harmless, justified or good for someone in our lives? We differ in our responses to the many way in which people deliberately distort or conceal the truth or how they reveal it. All our experiences and circumstances shape our philosophy of what is and is not the truth and when and how to tell it.
He deserving the facts / He should be protected from the truth / I don't really wanna know if he is sleeping around
Example: Telling a person on a plane when asked if married telling her that she lives with a woman.
Responses of friends (all gay and committed to fight homophobia) differ a lot: 1) honest and brave, if all were like her it would be the greatest weapon against homophobia, she creates the world she wants to live in 2) no telling strangers: need for privacy, she does it for shock value 3) it's not honesty but failure to protect herself, it's crazy 4) no approval, it doesn't do any good, people have to like you first before I open up, just telling them is not strategic
-> Honesty (Whom, What, When and How to tell) is a complex business
In the name of privacy (45min)
Example: Uneasiness about large breasts. Keeping them in shape while sex. Not telling husband.
One view: It's keeping a secret from husband / Other view: It's a private thing
"Privacy is a human right. My right to privacy includes my right to control access to a certain amount of emotional and physical space that I take to be mine. I require periods of time each day when I'm not spoken to, looked at or focused on. I don't seek privacy in order to fool others or to engage in acts of deception rather I seek privacy primarily to protect my integrity and ultimate separateness as a human being. Thus I publically defend my right to privacy and in contrast I don't ever recall using the phrase my right to secrecy. ... Also my right to privacy includes the right to protect my body and any decisions concerning it from unwanted control by others."
Alita Brill, book on privacy, reminds us that privacy relies on the acceptance by others. Vulnerable groups (poor, homeless, elderly, gays, sick, disabled, children, women...) are in most need of privacy and are in most danger of having their privacy invaded. Disempowered groups can't count on having privacy unless those in power (that is not of their kind) will grant it to them. For example the most crucial decisions about what should and should not be private in the lives of women is ultimately decided in legal and political arenas that include few if any women as decision makers. Because I regard privacy my right I'm neither secretive nor guarded about requesting or defending it. In contrast I guard not only my secrets and also the fact that I'm keeping them.
Philosopher Sissela Bok in her book Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation refines the distinction between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy always involves the intention to hide or conceal information from another person just as lying always involves the intention to convince another of what we ourselves do not believe to be true.
As Harriet Lerner sees it privacy shifts into secrecy when an act of deliberate concealment or hiding has a significant impact on a relationship process. Secrecy is deliberate concealment that makes a difference. Breast example: not telling a neighbor is being private, not telling your husband is secretive.
Why should she tell him? Secrecy protects oneself to being open to the full range of another ones reactions and responses to the real self (purpose of secrecy). But it compounds the painful feelings its meant to deflect. At the very least it blocks possibility. If you can't bring your feelings out the open there is no potential for healing and resolution, for self acceptance and deeper intimacy. With secrecy there is no chance of receiving comfort, understanding and wisdom. Looking it into the eye, cutting it down to size, neutralizing it and drain it of its destructive power. Keeping secrets involves self-deception because we are only aware of the positive functions it serves. We usually keep secrets with the intention to preserve, not fracture, what's precious to us. We keep a secret for a reason but we don't know the emotional cause until after we tell it.
Privacy too may involve concealment that makes a difference. In fact we may invoke the concept of privacy to justify concealment and to pretend that it makes no difference. In the name of privacy we withhold from each other our honest experience. We fail to know each other and be known. We fail individually and collectively to scrutinize the personal or private in ways that would challenge us to seek new truths and revise the old ones. Under patriarchy, which is all that we've known, privacy is for women both necessary and dangerous. Privacy is necessary not only because it's a human need but because speaking out and being out can play some of us emotionally and physically at risk. Privacy is dangerous because the failure to share whats most private and personal isolates us, shames us and keeps us trapped in narrow and false myths about female experience. Feminism taught us that when we share what is most shameful and private we learn that it is most universal and shared. The communality of female experience allows us to challenge old lies and create the space for truth.
-> By having the private made public the personal becomes political. The lessening of shame which often accompanies shared experiences can lead to talking more openly. Those steps widen the context and help us to stop pathologizing ourselves. Instead of asking the question whats wrong with me we can begin to ask other questions like who says what group of people has created this reality for us? How does it serve them? What would be different if we would stop believing it? Questions like this create new context where each woman can discover whats true about herself and say it out loud. As one woman speaks the truth she widens the space for more truth around her.
-> In pre-Feminist time women were supposed to be smart enough to catch a man but never outsmart him. There were encouraged to pretend to strengthen men by relinquishing her owns strengths pretending weakness, helplessness and dependency. Everything else was unfeminine, unlovable, castrating sometimes even life-threatening to men. Women are female impersonators instead of authentic selves - Carolin Halbren(?).
Case: Cristas shame on clitoral stimulation Importance of correct language - what's not named does not exist.
We are the stories we tell
Harriet: Exaggerating (how many people came to reading) vs Su: downplaying (working with kids in hospital instead of being a surgeon)
Exaggeration = Lie and Downplaying = Virtue???
Work (like love) at the center of human existence. Women seldom tell the truth even to themselves about the meaning of work in women's lives. An patriarchal definition of what it means to be a woman, to have womanly desires and hopes and ambitions haven't till recently made truth telling virtually impossible. Before modern feminism stories of female ambition were silenced or erased. Even now they are told with apology. Harriet wanted Su to tell her story in contrast to the false and narrow scrips of society for women's stories (attributing things to luck for example) Su disagreed. She felt that an exaggerated story feeds the false notion of individual superstars