Understanding everyday communications is an arduous responsibility, especially when intentions are not easy to read. The most popular forms of communication, such as cellphones and social media, disconnect the intimacy in the usual emotions conveyed in normal forms of communicating. In corelation, identity also is affected by the miscommunications of everyday interactions. Psychologist Martha Stout’s “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday” notes the difficulties that dissociated individuals express trying to find their identity through their own narrative sense.
In “Selections From Hard to Get”, Leslie Bell shares the interdependent issues in sexual identity that women in their twenties face while growing in the societal realm. Journalist Susan Faludi writes about the male dominance in society along with the cultivation of cognitive development in the “The Naked Citadel”. Collectively, the three writings exemplify the pressures that society places on the identity of individuals. The aspect of cognition of self throttles at the hand of both societal influence and communications.
By limiting the conditions that society forces upon individuals such as labeling, natural conversation can retain the intimate intentions that better express identity as well as relationships. Naturally conversing with individuals often brings about the cordial senses that engage personality but society often covers the portrayal of emotion which disrupts the convention of communication that fuels relationships as well as one’s own identity. Simple discussion allows for exchange of thoughts along with affable companionship.
Human categorization such as gender and race separate and classify individuals, making it easier to not only presume one’s identity but also damage it. Stout’s patient, Seth, is separated from others due to his dissociation while searching for his identity. Stout explains her patient Seth’s narrative, “then with more emotion in his voice than he was usually able to show, he said ‘It’s so hard, because so much of the time when I’m here, what you’re seeing is not what I’m seeing. I feel like such an imposter’,”(436).
Seth gives his full self to Stout through his vulnerability in his conversation with her. His acknowledgement of his identity put emphasis on his relation to Stout as a psychologist but also creates opportunity to discover his cognitive self. Similarly, the role of identity is affected by the categorized “Citadel Men” through their “fourth-class system”. Using the comradery and the traditions of The Citadel, cadets are conformed to a certain identity to strengthen the relations of the males but the system also hinders their perspective of women.
Faludi displays the complications of gender among the cadets, “Cadets site a number of reasons that women would have a deleterious effect on the Corps of Cadets… ‘studies show that malese learn better when females aren’t there’ one explained to me ‘lf a girl was here, I’d be concerned not to look foolish. If you’re a shy student, you won’t be as inhibited’,”(Faludi 78). The fourth-class system causes the cadets to be less intimate with women due to the established bond they have with the other males.
Though the cadets retain a pre-established identity, gender should not change the aspect of intimacy. By communicating with nonCitadel individuals, these cadets would be able to form their own opinions and perspectives towards women rather than have the pressures of older generation cadets dictate their behavior. For most individuals like the cadets, intimacy in communication carries over as well into relationships. In most relationships, despite sexual identity, communication is vital from both sides in order for equal intimacy and caring.
Throughout recent generations, society has adapted a tendency to compete for carelessness. Nowadays, young adults care less about their relationships both intimately and mentally. Splitting, a psychoanalytical term describing dualistic thinking, often gives individuals purpose for their careless communications. Like Bell’s character, Jayanthi, young men and women stray away from serious relationships by limiting their intimate communication with their partner.
While struggling to find her sexual identity, Jayanthi had possibilities of avoiding the troubles she faced if she were to communicate her emotions with anyone leading to her own self realization, as she does eventually with Bell. She states “Over the course of the interviews, she reflected that perhaps she reacted against such experience of exploitation by later using men as sex objects and playing with them”(Bell 36).
Though Jayanthi was able to discover her own identity by playing with men, a more careful solution would have been to have conversation with her partners or her parents who pressured her to have a concise relationship. Even if the results from speaking to someone were not in her favor, Jayanthi would have displayed that she cared enough to speak to them as well as understood the perspective of another individual giving her knowledge that she can apply to her identity. This careless mentality differs greatly for the men at The Citadel. These men are changed simply have no interest in the intimacy for women.
In the academy, students limit their interactions with the female faculty and murder female animals. Behavior that results from the fourth-class system causes the cadets to act similarly defensive Faludi shares an observation of Linda Ross, author of “The Art of Good Taste”, that “when the gentlemanly approach fails them, cadets seem to have only one fallback -aggression”(88). Men in The Citadel lack communication with individuals other than peer cadets who have the same mentality therefore they limit their identity and relationship with women.
With the only interaction of annual “dates”, Citadel Men gain no experience nor intimacy from women, making them reluctant to welcoming one into their academy. Evidently, the cadets would have no need to result in aggressive behavior if their communications branched out to more than just those in the academy. By having conversation with anyone, restrictions such as labeling and dualistic thinking can free individuals to expand their identity and relationships.
When uncompromised by the repercussions of society, general intimacy through normal forms of communicating help the cognitive development of individuals and in addition create a unconscious sense of caring in the extension of ordinary conversation. Depending on intimacy, speaking with anyone creates a unique relationship. Opportunely, the relationship can lead to possibilities of caring such as introduction to new people, mutual interests, and just general actions of kindness.
As these relational modes of caring continue, the coherence of one’s identity becomes closely adjacent to those modes revealing one’s cognition of self. Women around the age of twenty experience such modes which Bell “describe(s) this time in their lives as one in which they were relatively free from social restrictions and proscriptions on sexuality and relationships”(26). Women are given the freedom to discover their identity during this time all while forming relationships through modes of caring expressible in their unique methods of communicating.
It is around this age when women are vulnerable to committing to marriage, as well as when they are most fertile to give birth. Being a woman around this age, Shannon Faulkner, the first female accepted into The Citadel, exemplifies the notions of being free from society’s restrictions. She refrains from both being labeled a feminist and from being told what she can and cannot do. Though she was disliked in the academy, Shannon kept a professional yet cordial attitude towards everyone. Faludi shares Shannon’s narrative of her encounter with a Citadel Man at her business.
Faludi states “Her manner of dealing with the Citadel crowd was more goodhumored. One day at the bar, she recalled a guy came up to me’… Shannon saw him a few times in the bar after that, scowling at her from a far table. To lighten the mood, she once had the bartender send him a beer. He wouldn’t drink it. “(92). Although Faulkner was ostracized by The Citadel member, her composure led her to an act of kindness so that she can create a relationship with this individual even tho he did not accept her offering.
The fact that she listened to what the man had to express was enough to show Shannon’s compassionate personality. Communicating can vary through different forms nevertheless it should convey a sense of intimacy that are uninfluenced by societal pressures. In doing so, one can benefit from their identity, relationships, as well as their self cognition. Humanity’s compassion towards one another has alternated due to the societal competence in which intimacy in everyday communications are concealed. Areas such as social media, modern television, and education have raised generations to become less intimate.
This can only lead to greater separation amongst individuals which is why communication is key. The more communication there is the deeper understanding between areas such as culture, race, religion, and many more differences will be. With the convention of intimate conversations individual relationships are essentially fortified and unestablished ones will be formed. With those relationships, one’s identity is given purposeful recognition in return of modest behavior that results from the benefits of regular communications.
