On GUILT

 

 

In “My Very First Blog” I touched briefly on the subject of guilt and I got an interesting response from one of my readers—”Disgruntled” by name, who left the comment, “Oh, boo hoo—you felt guilty.”

 

Not to be sexist, but I just have a hunch “Disgruntled” is a man and if I’m right, more likely he’s a man over the age of forty.

 

The reason I think this, is that the male of the species does not feel guilt unless he’s six years old. Before that he’s too busy drinking breast milk, being proud of his potty training successes, feeling in charge of his parents and environment, learning his alphabet and emulating the Ninja Turtles (or their 2007 equivalent,) to feel any guilt.

 

But around age six, someone—mom or teacher, perhaps, tells him he’s a ’bad boy’ for reasons like breaking a school window with a baseball, or poking the family dog in the eye with a pencil, or some such.

 

And so he feels GUILT in all its intensity for the first time in his young life. And he decides right then, he doesn’t like the feeling.

 

So after that, in ever-lessening increments, he loses the tendency, until by the time he’s forty, guilt is a long-forgotten sensation. For example, he might instead feel confusion, annoyance or perhaps even anger that he has upset his wife by forgetting their tenth wedding anniversary or not noticing that her haircolour’s gone from blonde to brunette. But not guilt. …No way.

 

Guilt is much more inconvenient than any of those other feelings. Guilt implies self-blame. Guilt requires the self-examination of “What did I do wrong?” which translates into a personal failing of some sort. And no male in his right mind, over the age of forty, would admit to FAILURE of any kind.

 

George W. Bush is a perfect example. Throughout the entire Iraq fiasco created solely by him, his cohorts and two Congresses now, who are badly in need of advanced geography and anthropology courses (not to mention accounting 101) we have seen him go through all three of the aforementioned emotions. He’s been confused, he’s been annoyed, he’s been angry. But has he felt GUILT translated into SELF-BLAME?

Nope. Not good ol’ George.

 

Women, on the other hand, make a meal of guilt and here’s my totally unbiased, totally without proof, scientific theory about that:

 

GUILT is not an emotion. GUILT is actually a secondary hormone, a by- product of ESTROGEN. The more estrogen in the human system, the more GUILT secreted. The less estrogen and the more testosterone in the human system, the less GUILT secreted.

 

It’s been a long-held supposition that the reason men and women think so differently is because the one sex (male) went out to fight dinosaurs and the other sex (female) stayed behind in the cave, since one of the two had to nurse the children and the female came readily-equipped for the task.

But that’s not correct. Here’s what actually happened:

 

PREHISTORIC MALE: There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping about outside the cave, growling. Before it knows we’re in here, let’s take it by surprise and bash it to death with our wooden clubs.

 

PREHISTORIC FEMALE OF REPRODUCTIVE AGE AND FLOODED WITH ESTROGEN: Wait!—Let’s think about this for a minute…. Are you sure we didn’t do something to make it feel bad? …Maybe it’s jealous because we have a cave and it doesn’t? Maybe he’s just insecure and trying to make up for a bad childhood. What if he’s just sad and not really hungry? What if he’s misunderstood? ….Shouldn’t we try to talk to him first?

 

PREHISTORIC MALE (AFTER STARING AT PREHISTORIC FEMALE IN DISBELIEF FOR A FEW MOMENTS) Look—I’ll go by myself. Why don’t you just stay here and feed the kids?

 

I know this to be true, because by the time the human female has reached the age of 50 and she’s been drained of most of her estrogen, her breasts devoid of milk, her womb empty of child and her upper lip covered with hair, you know what? She feels a lot less guilt.

In fact, the thought of running out of the cave, reason and empathy out before her and wooden club poised at the ready, sounds like a damn fine idea.

 

 

 

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