“Sincerity, writes Patterson, “requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.””
The Orlando Patterson Times column that Dan quoted the other day really clarified a lot for me about what I’ve been trying to write about masculinity and about my own zany version of it as spewed, in “Close,” in “Peep Show,” and most recently in “After.”
Throughout most of my life, I’ve been, in terms of my interactions with women, if I understand Patterson’s distinction correctly, “sincere,” that is, trying to behave in a way that respects women equally as people before all else, regardless of secret, tortured, conflicted desires and biases, things that I thought were WRONG, but that were, at their core, my “authentic” feelings that I felt ran counter to my sincere efforts to treat women as equals.
I think a lot of my outing myself, of my revealing my shameful secret “real” self, in “Peep” and “After” came out of living in San Francisco, which, compared with the "repressed" East Coast, certainly lays big claims to valuing the authentic, the discovery and expression of one’s truest self, especially in terms of sexuality and gender issues. (Authenticity could arguably be called the authentic core of the New Age movement, which still flourishes in the Bay Area, although one might argue that New Yorkers, in their brusqueness, are more authentic than the touchy-feely and “nice” Northern Californians. And who is more sincere? This confuses me because I don’t think of your stereotypical Bay Arean as terribly sincere either compared to them straightshooting NYers). But I digress. My point is that, while I agree with Patterson that (as Dan quoted),
“I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it.”
and that
“Sincerity rests in reconciling our performance of tolerance with the people we become. And what it means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.”
. . . I think there’s something Patterson’s not addressing, which is that one can be, (or, rather, that, I would argue, that everyone is) within, one’s deepest, truest authenticity, be absolutely conflicted. I, as a man, authentically respect women and authentically have sexual fantasies that would certainly be classified, by many, even by me, as disrespectful to them, at the same time. I can objectify a woman standing in front of me even as I take her every bit as seriously as a thinker and an actor in the world as – if not more seriously than – a man; I can look at and enjoy images that unarguably debase women and authentically berate myself for doing so. These and so many more contrary authenticities exist at my core, or at least as close to a core as my superego lets me get anywhere near. But I try to behave more in league with my respectful self than my lusty self – I guess, to be more sincere than authentic.
In a letter to the editor of the Times in response to Patterson’s column, Ginger Nathanson made a point that I think is worth noting:
“I agree that what sincerity “means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.”
But is it not possible that by being civil and sincere, we one day also become “authentic”? Doing changes to being.”
I think Patterson would at least hope that doing might indeed change to being, and, I would add, that questioning authentic feelings that don’t match one’s values might lead to remaking those feelings. This strikes me as something that could be extended into an anti-porn statement a subject which I vacillate on daily (gosh, vacillate sounds kinda dirty in that context), but I’ll save that for another post.
On an etymological note, I was also a little perplexed, after referring to Merriam-Webster, as to how Patterson came up with his distinction between sincerity and authenticity, because, in the definitions that apply to this discussion, sincere is:
1: free of dissimulation b : free from adulteration
2 : marked by genuineness
and authentic is
3 : not false or imitation
5 : true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character
Pretty synonymous, as far as I can tell, though authentic does lean a bit more toward those deepest beliefs to which Patterson refers. Still confused, (all the more so more so after googling and finding, among other things, that "sincere" is a very common word in urls for sites offering Asian or Russian mail-order brides) though, I went to the Times and read the entire Patterson column and, while all wasn’t made clear in terms of dictionary definitions and word origins, I did then understand Patterson’s usage and I think you might want to too, so, here, in summation the tantalizingly omitted first sentence of the column:
“In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.”
True that.
