I was talking with a friend about a puzzling reply i got on my childbirth post:
“This guy refuses to care about me or any of his previous gfs and prioritises having sex in the exact way he prefers over our health and life plans and worries about pregnancy, I will reward him with a relationship and orgasms.”
I was just really floored about this and my friend told me that this woman’s reasoning (”he’s awful in X way but wonderful in Y way and I want to focus on the latter”) is a type of compartmentalised thinking that het-partnered women very often choose to adopt, and also that “There’s more to him than his dick” was eerily reminiscent of the line of reasoning that trans activists try to force on lesbians—”Transwomen are male but they can be wonderful people in X and Y ways, there’s more to them than their genitals”. Men seem to have convinced straight (and bi) women that this form of thinking is good and healthy and the only way to make a relationship last, and they are now trying to make lesbians adopt it as well. Men are adept at compartmentalising (see last paragraph) and want all women to become better at it, because it benefits them. (See also: Polanski / Woody Allen is a paedo but he’s a good director, separate the artist from the man, etc.) I could immediately think of several other examples I had seen in feminist spaces recently, like this woman saying her male friend likes to go to strip clubs but is a cool dude “outside of that”:
He’s a nice person outside of the fact that he enjoys paying to make poor women strip for him! Notice how defensive this woman gets when someone points out her compartmentalised thinking and tries to get her to think of her friend as a whole person, whose behaviour in one area of his life informs his values in all others.
Or this other woman on my childbirth post:
“I love him, but thats pretty fucked up” is something a lot of women end up thinking about their male relatives / friends / partners. It’s compartmentalising.
Men really want you to compartmentalise your thinking so you won’t slide down the dangerous slippery slope of thinking that their behaviour in one area reveals their values in all others; so you won’t give them any consequences for that one bad facet of their character or their continued bad behaviour on one particular matter. Just put the bad stuff in a little box and focus on the good. They even like to turn it around and pretend it is holistic thinking—”Don’t focus on the bad, see the person as a whole” (or in the case of transwomen, “Don’t focus on the genitals, you vagina fetishist, see the person as a whole”)—but ignoring and pushing aside what you don’t like to focus only on the good is the opposite of seeing someone as a whole. Choosing to see a person from a carefully selected angle that doesn’t conflict with your values and doesn’t force you to reconsider your opinion of them is the exact opposite of seeing this person as a whole. Men don’t want you to see them as a whole because that involves being constantly aware of the bad parts and what they reveal about the whole; it means not being able to comfortably ignore the dealbreakers, which might lead to consequences that they would rather avoid.
I remember this post about how good men are at compartmentalising and maintaining different personas—decent guy persona around his girlfriend or female relatives; macho dude persona contemptuous of women around his male friends; anything-goes persona on the internet, sending rape threats to women and watching hardcore porn. Compartmentalising is men’s favourite strategy and they would really prefer for women to adopt it as well. Holistic thinking is discouraged in our society and this is why we should actively try to learn it and nurture it. Think of the psyche in the same way you would think of the body; if someone kicks you, his foot didn’t move on its own without the rest of his body going along with it. If someone expresses reprehensible values in one aspect, it is not somehow disconnected from the whole of who this person is. When you see someone as a whole, there are no uncomfortable truths inside little boxes, so there can be no “outside” of that. There is no “apart from that” when you don’t cut up a person into parts. Be really suspicious when a man is trying to force compartmentalised thinking on you, and remember that you are not seeing a person as a whole if you are ignoring the parts that would make them unacceptable to you.
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