The Manipulated Man

Excerpt from “The Manipulated Man” by Esther Vilar

breaking them in

“To ensure that the happiness of man in subjugation is brought about by a woman and not by other men or some sort of animal, or even by one of the above-mentioned- social systems, a series of training exercises are built into man’s life, beginning at a very early age. It is fortunate for woman that the male infant is under her close jurisdiction as it is easiest to train him then. And by the natural process of selection, the very women who are best suited to training men are the ones who reproduce themselves; the others are incapable of reproducing themselves anyways.

The mere fact that a man is accustomed from his earliest years to have women around, to find their presence ‘normal,’ their absence ‘abnormal,’ tends to make him dependent on women in later life. But this dependency would not be serious, for a life without women would in that case mean nothing more than a change of scenery, just as someone born in the mountains might go and live in the plains: although he might long nostalgically for his mountain home, he is unlikely to go back. Other things become more important in his life.

It would hardly be in the best interests of women if they only inspired in men a vague romantic nostalgia, felt only on Sundays or when away from home, having no direct consequences. She takes care that man is directly trained for a particular purpose: he must work and put the fruits of his labor at her disposal. Woman has had this aim in view throughout the upbringing of her child and she engenders in him a series of conditioned reflexes which cause him to produce everything to satisfy her material needs. She does this by manipulating him from his first year of life. Consequently, by the time his education is complete, man will judge his own value by woman’s estimation of his usefulness. He will be happy only when he has won her praise and produced something of value to her.

One might well say that woman becomes a kind of value scale. At any given moment, a man can refer back to it and judge the value or futility of his actions. If he spends any time on something which has no value in terms of this chart, football, for example, he will do his best to compensate quickly for this minus point by increasing his activity on the plus side of the scale – which explains why women do not object too strongly to football or other types of spectator sports.

One of the most useful factors in the conditioning of a man is praise. Its effect is better and much more lasting than say, sex, as it may be continued throughout a man’s life. Furthermore, if praise is applied in the correct dosage, a woman will never need to scold. Any man who is accustomed to a conditional dosage of praise will interpret its absence as displeasure.

Training by means of praise has the following advantages: it makes the object of praise dependent (for praise to be worth something, it has to come from a higher source, thus the object of praise lifts the praise-giver to a superior level); it creates an addict (without praise, he soon no longer knows whether or not he is worth something and forgets the ability to identify with himself); it increases his productivity (praise is most effectively meted out not for the same achievements, but for increasingly higher ones).

The moment a male child has been rewarded by a warm smile and by the customary inane kind of encouraging adult baby talk for using his pot and not wetting his bed, or for drinking the last drop in his bottle, he is caught up in a vicious circle. He will repeat the actions which called forth praise and endearments and, if at any time recognition is not granted, he will do everything in his power to regain it. The happiness he feels when praise is restored will already have assumed the proportions of an addiction.

During the first two years of life, a mother does not discriminate between boys and girls. The female infant is submitted to the same form of manipulation until the principles of hygiene are absorbed, but from that moment on, the education of the two sexes follows very different paths. The older the girl grows, the more highly conditioned she becomes in the art of exploiting others, while a boy is increasingly manipulated into becoming an object of exploitation.

Toys play an important part in this early manipulation. The mother will first stimulate the playfulness of her children, and then she will exploit it. The girl child will be given dolls with all the necessary paraphernalia – prams, dolls’ beds, and miniature tea-sets. The boy will be given everything a girl never has – Meccano sets, electric trains, miniature race cars, and airplanes. Thus the girl is conditioned right from the start to identify with her mother, to fit herself into the role of woman. Dolls are praised or scolded as mother praises and scolds. It is child’s play to her to absorb the principles of leadership; a girl’s education, like a boy’s, is based on praise, meted out to her, however, only when she identifies with the female role, so that she will never want to be anything but ‘feminine.’ The standard set of values will inevitably be woman’s forever, since only women can judge how good their own role is (men are taught that woman’s role is inferior; hence there is no cause to praise women).

A male child is constantly praised for everything, except for playing with miniature humans. He builds model dams, bridges, and canals, takes toy cars apart to see how they work, shoots toy pistols, and practices on a small scale all the things he will need later in life when he is providing for a woman. By the time he reaches school age, the average boy is already well versed in the basic principles of mechanics, biology, and electrical engineering, all learned from personal experience. He can build wooden huts and defend them in make-believe wars. The more initiative he shows, the more he is praised. Woman wants him to develop to the point where he knows more than she does. His knowledge must be superior to hers in everything concerning work, for woman cannot survive without man.

For woman, man is really a kind of machine, if rather an unusual one. Her ideal, if she could define it, would be a robot capable of thought, of programming itself, of continuing to develop and produce an ideal set of functions to meet each new situation. (Scientists, too, are working on the development of such robots, who will work for them, make decisions for them, think for them, and put the results of their labor at their disposal; but these robots will be constructed from non-living matter.)

Long before man is in a position to choose his own way of life, he will have formed the necessary addiction to praise. He will be happy only when his work brings him praise and, because he is an addict, his need will increase – and with it the type of achievement so much praised by his woman. This male need could, of course, be satisfied by another man, but as each man is working feverishly in the interest of his own addiction, he has no time to help others. Indeed man exists, as it were, in a state of constant antagonistic competition with other men. It is one of the reasons why he loses no time in getting his own private panegyrist, one whose praise will be his exclusive right, someone who will always be at home waiting to tell him when he has been good and just how good he has been. It is apparently only by chance that woman is best suited to this role: but in fact, she has been preparing all her life for it, waiting to assume it.

It is rare for a man, a successful artist or scientist for instance, to be able to conquer his addiction to the extent that he is satisfied by another man’s praise. If he does, it is really only women he has managed to escape – never the craving itself. Once a particular field of work has brought a man success and financial security, it is rare for him to test his abilities in another sphere, attempting to satisfy his curiosity. His supply of praise may be dangerously reduced. Like Miro with his dots-and-lines technique, Johann Strauss with his waltzes, and Tennessee Williams with his plays about psychotic women, he will stick firmly to his successful technique. The risk of attempting to be the measure of his own success is too great for him to take.

One is even tempted to think that there can be nothing very positive about an artist’s personal style. Take a man like Samuel Beckett. For twenty years he has produced a series of Godot replicas – and surely not for pleasure. After all, he is an intelligent man. He avoids risk the way an alcoholic avoids a cure. Yet if only he could free himself from his conditioned behavior, he would probably do something quite different. Perhaps he might design planes – the reliable construction of his plays hints at a scientific talent – or grow rare plants. He might even, perhaps, just once, write a comedy. Surely so much success is bound to drive away the depths of despair. It might even turn out to be a success with the public. But no, the risk is too great for a carefully manipulated man. Better go on writing plays about the absurdity of the vital instinct – then, at least, he can be certain of praise.”

Esther Vilar