[“… attachment theories like the kind that undergird parenting advice still categorize people who did not receive attentive, loving parenting into a range of attachment styles, including “avoidant” and “anxious.” Such theories, though, are a bit like a personality test: these categorizations mirror our internal realities back at us and give us a comforting set of classifications through which we might understand tendencies that previously felt confusing or deviant. They provide recognition, a way of making sense. But that doesn’t mean they provide us with the original image of what they reflect. Theories of how human relationships evolve and take shape may give us language to describe our experiences, but they can also trap us in cultural attitudes that are neither fixed nor liberatory. What may be more valuable is recognizing how we turn to certain disciplines—for instance, psychology—to confirm the status quo rather than to offer us tools to challenge what we consider to be “normal.”
In an essay for Gawker on how Americans grew so attached to attachment theory, Danielle Carr, a scholar who studies capitalism and neuroscience, writes that “attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic, a kind of rough-draft outline for a larger essay on our internal life. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts.” Attachment theory is nevertheless used to explain both parenting (usually relying on the mother-child dyad) and romance (usually relying on the man-woman dyad), which furthers the theory’s hetero-patriarchal feel and allows us to blame even our sexual and romantic relationship problems on our mothers.
At best, however, attachment theory is merely a tool for explaining how growing up in a hetero-patriarchal culture tends to create certain personality types, outcomes that are loosely linked to how our caregivers behaved when we were kids, or how we perceive them to have behaved years later, when we grow into adults and consult the attachment playbooks. At worst, attachment theory can be used to reify bad behavior that emerges from living in a sexist society, tracing it all back to Mom and Dad—but usually Mom. “What are the odds that the vast majority of heterosexuals would sort so neatly into what look like gender-coded slots—the women frantic for explanations for their romantic woes self-identifying as ‘anxious’ and slapping the ‘avoidant’ label on guys who seem to be just not that into them? Does this remind you of anything?” Carr asks. “The whole thing smacks of gender.”
Not surprising, given that the theories we have available on how human development, psychology, and relationships both form and function are all inherited from white men. “I think a lot of that science is bad science,” Kate Manne has said about the sexism that continues to plague contemporary studies on how men and women supposedly perceive the world differently because of biological difference. “There’s no control group in a patriarchal culture,” Manne points out. “There’s no group of women raised such as not to have sexist theories and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms operating on them. Of course some differences will show up. But it doesn’t lead to an enhanced kind of epistemic state, where we know something interesting and new about two different groups.” The same is true for how we interpret the science that says secure attachments with our mothers makes us well-adjusted later in life. Who is to say this is not the result of growing up living in a family that felt “normal,” judged by standards that relegate women to positions of inferiority in motherhood?”]
amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023
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