AGREE:

My one ex-girlfriend was also my most problematic girlfriend, and I should have known that from her appraisal of the play The Taming of the Shrew. For those of you who overlooked one of the Bard’s weakest comedies: the play centers around two women: a haughty, defiant woman named Katherine and a relatively upstanding, compliant one named Bianca. My ex identified more so with Katherine, and had I known more about personality disorders at the time I first read the play I might have seen the red flag.

Mainstream psychology has finally gone beyond Jungian Anima Projection in regarding the preference for compliant women. Jung had posited that hypermasculine men prefer hyperfeminine women because the latter represents the former’s repressed and disowned femininity; arguably, women who are hyperfeminine seek hypermasculine men by the same token, though Jung indicated that, since women are “more psychological” beings, they are less prone to this neurosis, and Jungians in general tend to regard the feminine ideal as their chief goal for collective reform, since it has largely been suppressed in Western Society, as have its biological advocates. In this sense, Jungianism achieves more for women than feminism, the latter of which, ironically, denounces femininity.

It’s only very recently that an Israeli clinic published a study which effectively concluded that men in general prefer highly agreeable women as romantic partners. This publication was, on the one hand, a testament to the time-honoured rationality of men, since such a preference emanates from rational and Universal principles: one OUGHT to prefer AGREEABLE partners, for a(ny) number of ethical and practical factors. Agreeability, of all Five of the Big Five Personality Traits, it perhaps the most salient. The premise for any relationship is the attainment of collective goals which the individual constituents cannot attain individually, achieved by a synthesis of wills which is greater than the sum of its parts, predicated upon the conception of a Common Vision which, like the conception of a Child, immediately takes precedence over any Individual Vision on the part of its conspirators.

When my ex broke up with me ten years ago, I became fixated upon something she had said about the adolescent director Quentin Tarantino: that she admired his Vision, his violent tendencies notwithstanding. This concept captivated my mind as I aspired to “win her back” over the following Summer. As it would turn out: one will was just not enough.

Relationship is a function of Agreement, and the swifter that a compromise is reached the more successful is the relationship. While it is not impossible to be aesthetically captivated by a willful and uncompromising individual, it is impossible to maintain a longstanding relationship with such an individual AS A PERSON. Those of us who grew up with rather egocentric parents know the inestimable shock and damage that befalls the developing, innocent mind of the child who is the product of competing egos, and this trauma is one which haunts the child well into adulthood, when a dysfunctional social order, regarding the child as an adult, holds the child responsible for having internalized tendencies and forms of communication which were inappropriate all along but which the child was powerless to assuage, forced to conclude that Society agreed to these dysfunctional tendencies.

At the Heart of Agreeability rests this: the genuine desire for “win-win relationships”. Technically, ALL relationships must be win-win relationships; the alternative is sheer parasitism. People who are agreeable strive towards collective goals, only the likes of which can produce Net Benefits on an impersonal, collective scale. Agreeableness must therefore go hand-in-hand with conscientiousness, since impersonal, collective goods are imperative. An individual lacking in Agreeableness tends to produce meaningless competitions which upset social progress; such an individual is also inclined towards duplicity and malice, since any “ethic” to which he or she subscribes is NOT a vertical ethic of collective upward striving by altruistic people, but rather a HORIZONTAL BALANCING between self-interested individuals, any one of which might see fit at any moment to tip the scales in his or her own favour whilst blaming the Other for the transgression.

In the realm of sexuality and relationships especially, the virtues of kindness, compromise, and compliance are essential morally and aesthetically.

So: why does that same study, which redeemed the rationality of men in seeking compliant women, so shamelessly deny women the same dignity? If women are ALSO rational beings, as feminism set out to DEMONSTRATE, and as Jung conceived of as an attainable goal, then wouldn’t it follow LOGICALLY that women would prefer agreeable MEN?

Unfortunately, even contemporary “Jungians” such as Jordan Peterson, who outwardly profess the virtues of agreeableness, insist that this is categorically not so. That same Israeli study, for instance, seeks to hide its blatantly sexist implications by attacking the “arrogant masculinism” (or whatever the word was) of the presumption that women WOULD want what men want. Yet if what women SHOULD want of men is no different, a priori, than what men SHOULD want from women, then what right do we have to assume any sort of moral high ground by publishing their discrepancy a posteriori? Would that same clinic not become party then to proto-Fascism?

Clearly, the more psychologically MATURE choice, in any case, is that which favours the moral high road. Yet, as we learned from the history of Kohlberg’s Moral Stages, the mainstream media does not take kindly to the suggestion of elitism. It has been proven, repeatedly throughout the course of human history, that MOST people are not worth your time ethically, rationally, or romantically. Only the minute few actually attain any sort of genuine, morally informed happiness in Life, and this is often by departing from conventions by such a margin that they risk any semblance of well-being in the process. As the tendency for common people to gain influence over Social Order is aggravated in the New Millennium, we see a marked departure from the virtues of agreeableness and femininity. Let us hope that there remain a few TRULY courageous men and women who will continue to try to live decent lives, even if it means that all the nice girls and nice guys out there have now to do what they want least: to compete, deriving their advantage only from those qualities which dysfunctional people feel entitled to exploit.

[({DM.A.A.)}]