Blame Men First

Yesterday I wrote about Showtime’s favorite couples counselor Orna Guralnik. I did not took at all of what she wrote for the New York Times, because it was mostly not worth the effort.

Guralnik is a conventional leftist who saw the Black Lives Matter movement as an occasion to help her white patients to get in touch with their white guilt. Not once does she show any awareness of the amount of black on black violence that exists in this country. She would do well to read Heather Mac Donald on the prevalence of black crime, too.

Since she is a perfectly conventional and vapid thinker, Guralnik failed, as I noted yesterday, to mention that Black Lives Matter and the radical leftist movement that it has joined, teaches people to hate their country. Losing pride in your country will cause you to be depressed. To imagine, as Guralnik does, that this is therapeutic is absurd. It’s what happens when you cannot think beyond the conventional leftist dogma. 

When you take BLM dogma for reality, you are simply exposing your cowardice. You lack the courage necessary to question the prevailing dogma. Nothing about it inspires confidence in your judgment or your character.

Guralnik wants her patients to apply the BLM dogmas to personal relationships. 

Allow me to quote her:

The lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement initially can provoke such paralyzing guilt and shame that people become defensive and stop fully thinking. Yet over time, I’ve found, the ideas can inspire deep psychological work, pushing people to reckon with the harm that has been done, the question of whom should be implicated, and the difference between virtue signaling and deeper concerns. These are tough and important lessons that can carry over into intimate relationships. In this case, the husband described a new understanding about the ways he exercised power at work: “Hold on. Have I been an ally? Has it just been optics?” These insights extended even to his way of speaking about his transgression. He had been rationalizing his behavior by saying that his wife was not giving him the attention he needed. But moving beyond what the couple called “optics,” now he was asking himself for a more thorough accounting of what his cheating was really about, and how it affected his wife. He explained how lonely he was if she traveled; he felt left behind and discarded, a feeling deeply familiar to him from early childhood. Acknowledging his vulnerability was hard for him, but it opened up a series of honest conversations between them. “I convinced myself she does not desire me,” he said. “I’m not the popular guy. I’m not the strong guy.” He linked those feelings to insecurities he felt as a teenager, when he suffered chronic teasing from kids at school for being perceived as effeminate.

Naturally, applying a distorted view of race relations to everyday relationships produces very little of real interest. A man felt lonely when his wife traveled, but he does not have a right to feel abandoned when she abandons him. So, he apparently has something of a role-reversal marriage, and is not entirely happy with it. But, Guralnik never asks about whether perhaps  he is right to feel diminished and perhaps that his wife should modify her travel schedule. Or perhaps he should simply get used to it. 

In reality, according to the research studies, when women are breadwinners men are more likely to cheat. Again, the therapist sees the problem in terms of the husband’s faults, flaws and transgressions. Not once does she suggest that the wife in question, or, to extend the point, inner city blacks, might be expected to change their behavior. For her it’s all about defective white males. 

In a cultural aberration like BLM, blame is effectively being shifted to white males. A black commits a crime and the fault lies with the white police officer who arrests him. A culture that propagates such thoughts is on its way to oblivion.

BLM was a con. It was designed to gin up voter turnout for the 2020 elections. It was designed to blame Donal Trump for everything that was going wrong in the country. And yet, the anti-Trump rhetoric that had flooded the airways during the Trump presidency seems to have been translated into action by the BLM protesters. 

Guralnik has tuned into the movement. She quotes a man gaining insight into how his words had caused other people pain. Again, the fault lies with males, especially white males, and therapy teaches them to feel the requisite white guilt. Thereby we can happily absolve everyone who is neither white nor a male of any responsibility for his or her behavior.

As an exercise in moral depravity, this one ranks high on the list. Consider this:

He realized that he stopped skimming over ways he caused others pain: “I actually was just thinking therapy and the Black Lives Matter movement have made me keenly aware of the words that just came out of my mouth, and the understanding that she reacted adversely to that, instead of me just going, ‘We move on, because that’s awkward.’ There’s a need now to address it.” He continued: “ ‘Did I just upset you? What did I do to just upset you?’”

As I said, this version of therapy is seriously involved in bashing males. The man closes by suggesting that if she is upset he must have said something to upset her. Assigning fault and blame and guilt are the only arrows in her quiver. But, given BLM dogma and the current political climate, the fault seems always to implicate white males.

And you were thinking that there was something scientific about the procedure. Silly you. Surely, you do not need a licence to traffic in leftist drivel.

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