Since my bash to the brain, nearly four weeks ago, I have been especially preoccupied with the physiological construction of our own individual personalities. After a hefty whack to the temporal lobe, I’m lucky to be alive and even luckier to be much the same person I was before the accident. An unfortunate gent featured in BBC4’s “The Brain: A Secret History” wasn’t so lucky, having lost the ability to feel emotion or empathise with others through brain damage. Through good fortune or bad, faced with affection or anger, this man now felt nothing. Compared to Kenneth Tong, however, he could be considered a warm-hearted romantic.
Yes, I mean that Kenneth Tong. For those who don’t know who Kenneth Tong is (as I didn’t until a couple of hours ago) he is the chap currently at the centre of a Twitter row about anorexia. Having been a short-lived Big Brother housemate during one of the seasons I clearly missed, this self-proclaimed “playboy” has crept back up onto the Z-list this week by displaying the trademark aggressive-consumerism and misogyny that once caused Big Brother’s resident psychologist to label him “a textbook sociopath”.
Sociopathy is a concept that I’ve prodded and poked at on this blog from time to time. People outside (and often inside) the BDSM world like to imagine Dominatrices and our male counterparts as mindless, heartless creatures, towering mercilessly over our prey. As fantasy figures, we’re cartoonish villains.
However, in real life, we’re human beings, as complex and multifaceted as anyone else. Although the idea of sociopathy can be sexy when confined to imagination and consensual role-play – much like fantasies involving Nazis, rape and all sorts of other horrors – its reality is, at best, a disappointing turn-off.
Kenneth Tong expresses opinions I’ve heard all too often, both from men who seek only to be rich and have sex with frighteningly thin girls, and from girls who seek only to be thin and have sex with frighteningly rich men. The “A Very Public Sociologist” blog quotes a few choice Tweets from Tong on women, weight and money. Yet when quizzed about his misogyny by the wonderful Johann Hari, he responds in a way similar to that of many chaps I have encountered, including those who profess to be gentlemen, submissives and woman-worshippers. Take note:
“…I ask Tong if he knows what the word ‘misogyny’ means. He says no, and when I explain, he shakes his head and insists he “loves” women because “a beautiful girl could be the most picture-perfect thing I’ve ever seen” – which seems to capture it: he loves women, inanimate, in pictures. Real and eating and in the flesh? Not so much. Whether of not he was hoaxing, this is the psychology of the men who demand women become anorexic distilled. It sees women not as self-determining individuals but as objects who must be prodded and starved and drained of personality to fit a template of the man’s choosing…”
I’d recommend that everyone read Johann Hari’s full interview with Kenneth Tong here and learn as much as possible from it.
(Skeletal Mona Lisa picture yoinked from costumeshopper.com)