Sexy Power
Why is power so attractive? What is it about power that is so attractive to us?
Many attracted to powerful figures are women. But men are very much drawn to power, too, usually in other men, however. Men following powerful men has its own mythology, for loyalty to a system in which men follow their powerful leaders into hell is the penultimate in manhood—or so it would seem.
Regardless of whether or not the attraction to power ends up in a sexual encounter, power still has an amazing draw.
This author claims power and powerlessness define us. As children we grew up knowing that some people had power and others didn’t. Those who had a knack for getting us to behave had power and those who didn’t didn’t’. Those who spoke with a certain authority were believed, while those who said the same words, yet without that authority just didn’t have the same power. And as we watched and looked at these people as mirrors we either identified with power, powerlessness or some gradation in between. We began to see ourselves relative to power.
All authority is figured. We project our power onto others, and then we call them authority figures. We are constantly choosing to either own our own power or project onto others.
But that is not what we believe. We believe that there are some people who have power and others who don’t. And it’s apparent that we wish to continue to believe that, because we still arrange our entire political, legal, social, religious and cultural systems around that belief.
Because we believe that we have no choice, those who activate choice as a constant in their lives are either very threatening to us, or very attractive to us. And those who are attracted to those powerful people, are quite often people who believe that by being close to the powerful person, they will somehow absorb that power so that they will, albeit secretly, attain that same power. Having sex with a powerful person is tantamount to vampiring the power itself.
If we owned our own power, we would no longer be attracted to powerful persons. We would know that they are just people, just like us, who have the same complexes, spiritual issues, and the same biological, mental, emotional needs as the rest of us.
So, if that’s true, how did they get so much power over others? A bunch of us decided to allow them to carry our power for us.
Once we’ve given them that power, then we can be either very attracted to it, repulsed by it, or critical of it. Either way, they only have the power that we’ve projected onto them. Projection defined we repress some aspect of ourselves, housing it in the unconscious. Then when the time, place and person seems just right to the unconscious urges wandering around inside of us, we project them outward. Once they are visible in the external world, we can do whatever we want with them. But activating them internally is just way too scary. So, we repress and project instead.
If I project my power onto you then I can admire it from afar, or I can try to get in bed with it. If I get in bed with it, most often in secret, I’ll have a secret way of owning my own power without having to take responsibility for it. If it ever gets exposed, then I’ll carry that power with me into the external world.
Is it power, or scandal, the story?
Psychology Today
No comments:
Post a Comment