The Truth about Lying Read online

  We speak the words we think the other wants to hear. But people hear what they want to hear. You lie because you don’t want to tell them what they need to hear. With drink, we relish the truth more.

  ‘Carlyle said “a lie cannot live”. It shows that he did not know how to tell them.’ – Mark Twain

  Lies, Drink and Guilt

  We tell less lies with drink on us. But lying, as Steven Soderbergh, the screenwriter of Sex, Lies and Videotape, tells us, ‘is like alcoholism – you are always recovering’. I am a recovering liar. Jokes, like alcohol, excuse and encourage the lie and mitigate the guilt so the unsaid may be spoken.

  Lying brings about its own punishment – the punishment of guilt. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’ (Shakespeare). Also this:

  ‘The liar’s punishment is that they cannot believe anybody else.’ – George Bernard Shaw

  His punishment perhaps, but also his pleasure. (Some people will only commit a crime provided they get punished.) But between men and women, who lies best?

  The Best Liar

  In a sentence: the best liar is the one who has nothing to lose. ‘No one lies so boldly as the man who is indifferent’ (Nietzsche). On one interpretation, freedom is just another word for having nothing left to lose – at least that’s what Kris Kristofferson tells us.

  ‘I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.’ ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

  Lying in Bed

  Men and women both lie in bed and, as I have said in another book, there’s always at least four lovers/liars in every bed, four-poster or otherwise. ‘I love you. I can’t live without you. You are my everything.’ We lie in the arms of our lovers. The opposite of a lie? Saying what you like. Is lying a defence against desire? What is the lie of the land?

  Julian Barnes, the English novelist, in his A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, has this to say about lovers lying in bed:

  ‘Have you ever told so much truth as when you were first in love? Have you ever seen the world so clearly? Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. Lying in bed: listen to the undertow of warning in that phrase. Lying in bed, we tell the truth: it sounds like a paradoxical sentence from a first-year philosophy primer. But it’s more (and less) than that: a description of moral duty.’

  And Dorothy Parker, the American poet and satirist, writes:

  ‘By the time you say you’re his, Shivering and sighing And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying – Lady, make note of this: One of you is lying.’

  Lying versus Deceiving

  Lying is an action but lying can never describe the whole situation or scenario. Deception, by contrast, pertains to the dynamics of lying. In deception there is the liar and the lied to but more than this. Lying is commonly regarded as binary, but the presence of the unconscious complicates matters; deception is more general – there is more going on. A lie is something you tell – it covers up, camouflages. A deception is something you perform, in which you participate. Deception is bigger than the individuals involved. You can deceive someone without there being a truth to deceive about. The mechanics of the déjà vu phenomenon bring out the differences well. A déjà vu experience is one of a glitch in perception; it’s a trick being played out, enacted. I see a glass once; the mind, however, tricks me into thinking that I have seen it twice. That is deception, a ‘lie’, if you like, without a liar. But the mind hasn’t lied to you –that’s the thing; the ‘reality’ is that you have seen it twice. Deception uses the truth but not in the way a lie does. Deception is indebted to the truth whereas (in traditional terms) a lie uses truth only to support itself as a negation. Deception certainly doesn’t necessitate the presence of a (guilty) person/party. So if we say something like ‘men lie, women deceive’, we mean ‘deceive’ colloquially (as I do in this book), suggesting a certain sneakiness absent in ‘straight’-forward male lying because women are more complex creatures than men. With women’s lies there is always more happening. It is this ‘more’ (the plus factor) that is absent in the lying ways of (mere) men.

  Truth is intimately tied up with deception, as I have said, as is hypocrisy, which always includes deception. A hypocrite is a liar who doesn’t know he’s a liar. Deception and lies are not the opposite of truth; on the contrary, they are inscribed in the text of truth. Putting it another way, there is truth in deception. My writing here in this study, in search of truth, is ‘error taking flight in deception and recaptured by mistake’ (Lacan). If the unconscious is structured like a language (contested by non-Lacanians), truth is structured like a fiction.

  Now, before we see how exactly it is that men and women lie differently, we need to establish the differences, in general, between the sexes, and so I go, more tentatively than tenaciously, where angels fear to tread.

  Some Differences between Men and Women

  A caveat to begin with: when I say ‘men are such and such’ or ‘women are this and that’, please, dear reader, insert a mental ‘most’ before such sentences, as in ‘most men’ or ‘most women’, because there are exceptions. I’m speaking in generalities; finesse is for footnotes. Furthermore, sometimes one has to over hit the mark in order to hit the mark. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida once remarked, in philosophy, truth is hyperbole. What follows below and in the following section are my sometimes tongue-in-cheek observations – please don’t take them too literally – as well as my interpretations of Lacanian theory, on which I freely draw. It is one perspective, a point of view, not facts or the Truth. Feel free to accept or remorselessly reject the reflections offered. With this in mind, let’s just jump into this controversial and sometimes acrimonious debate (please, no hate mail/male). Here, as always, the reader is the jury and must judge on the reasonableness (or otherwise) of my contentions/convictions that have been partially formed by French psychoanalytical insights.

  ‘Men lie the most, women tell the biggest lies.’ ― Chris Rock

  Men and women are very different beings. Most men are obsessionals, while most women are hysterics (what is meant by this is conveyed below). Men are more straightforward, more blunt than women, while women are more manipulative than men. Men make friends easier than women, probably because most of them remain more superficial. Men are more loyal, but only because they are less overtly emotionally invested. Women are moodier. Their personalities change more (biologically); they also posses more depth than men (psychologically). Men are more constant, more consistent, more stubborn. Women are more complex creatures and, therefore, less predictable. One generally knows where one stands with a man (if one is a man); with women things aren’t so clear (if one is a man).

  Women need to be needed. Men are more able to be alone; they’re more independent. Some men are more in touch with their feminine side (the metrosexual with his ‘anima’ and ‘bromances’) than other males of the species, just as some women are more in touch with their masculine sides (their so-called ‘animus’). Women test men a lot of the time; they up the ante by pushing the boundaries just to see how far they can go and how much they can get away with. By so doing, they play a dangerous game. In this way, men may be more mistreated than women. Women can emasculate men while men may, as a result, become hen-pecked or cuckolded or turn into wife-beaters.

  Women have a higher EQ than men, while men have a higher IQ (though most of these intelligence tests are written and measured by men, it has to be said). Of course, in all what I am saying, one has to take into account age, class, economics, cultural considerations and recent significant shifts in social roles, and these few pages do not admit of such subtleties. I reiterate: I am painting in broad brushstrokes. And, needless to say, parenthood changes nearly everything, even if procreative sex is narcissistic.

  Men are plagued by thoughts in their mind. Women are plagued b
y pains in their bodies. Men engage in compulsive rituals, women in somatic symptoms. With regards to sex and sexuality, men react with guilt and aversion, women with disgust and revulsion. Often this is repressed. Unconsciously, neither sex really likes sex. Women seek to discover what the desire of the other person is in order to become that desired object. Women are looking for the Master, that is, someone imbued with knowledge, wealth, status or power. Both sexes ask the philosophical question: ‘What am I?’ However, women’s primary question is: ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ whereas men’s is: ‘Am I dead or alive?’ (to be explained below).

  ‘Don’t cry, I’m sorry to have deceived you so much, but that’s how life is.’ ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

  Men feel that they are only really alive when they are consciously thinking and should they lapse into fantasy or stop thinking, for example, during orgasm, men lose any conviction of being. Men believe they are Masters of their own fate; as beings who are whole and complete and in need of no Other to fill up their lack, which they deny having in the first place. Men fiercely refuse to see themselves as dependent on anyone other than themselves. That’s just part of their problem. They transform their partner into a mother figure, as a provider of maternal love. Men tend to create two classes of women: the Madonna and the whore – truthful prudes or lying sluts. They may have sex with the latter but they tend to marry the former. For men, all partners are pretty much the same. That’s why they get over failed relationships quicker than women. For women (women, not girls), there’s no such thing as an unwanted pregnancy; most women get pregnant on purpose.

  Women, in contrast to men, over-emphasise the other person, making themselves into the object of the other person’s desire so as to master it. I said above that women seek a Master, yes, they seek a Master (he who is unable not to know everything) to master (it’s always on their terms). Feminists are half-right and half-wrong. There is a war between the sexes but there is also a war between men and men and women and women. There’s no equality between men and women. Women don’t want to be equal to men – they want to be treated better than men. Deservedly so.

  The Other whom the woman desires is desired but when and how the woman sees fit. She orchestrates things in such a way as to ensure that the other person’s desire remains unsatisfied leaving her a permanent place as ‘object’. Woman’s desire is characterised by a desire for an unsatisfied desire and that’s why women are unhappier than men in matters of love. So much is invested in the Other without whom they feel they don’t exist (‘You are my all; you are my everything’). For women it’s a case of ‘too much being not enough’, whereas for men it’s a case of even a little being a lot. For this reason women are more jealous than men (jealousy is triadic) while men are more envious than women (envy is dyadic).

  Men’s desire is impossible rather than unsatisfied because they neutralise their partner so they don’t have to consider themselves dependent on her, on her desire for them in any way. Men desire what is unattainable. While having sex men tend to fantasise that they are with someone else, thereby negating the importance of the actual person they are with. The closer men get to fulfilling their desire the more the other person takes precedence over him, eclipsing him, and men can’t tolerate this. To avoid it, a typical male strategy is to fall in love with someone who is utterly and completely inaccessible, or to set standards for potential lovers that are so strict or stringent that no one can possibly live up to them. Men demand perfection, mainly from themselves (of course, perfection is not possible). Men have a common fantasy of being seduced by a woman without their active involvement (hence his predilection and penchant for masturbation).

  Women, by contrast, desire their male partner; they desire them as if they were them, as if they were men. Women often create love triangles centred on one man and indeed thrive on these. Women ask: ‘Who do you say I am?’ They are always trying to find out who they are but via the Other – ‘What about me? What am I like?’ Bette Midler said in a film: ‘Enough about me. What about you? What do you think about me?’ Women find men’s sexual satisfaction distasteful and try to avoid becoming the object on which men get off. They want to be the cause of men’s love not their lust. When having sex, women are inclined to imagine that some other man is in bed with her, that she is somewhere else or someone else, or that he is a different man. If men block out the woman present to make her absent, women are mentally somewhere else during sex. Women can’t find sexual satisfaction and love in the same relationship. So there is no such thing as harmonious sexual relations; they don’t work – not at the level of the drives, anyway. There is no sexual rapport but that’s a good thing. It means men and women will keep having sex under the erroneous assumption that they will become whole and lack nothing. Women, especially, want to become one with the other person but there is no such thing as unity at the level of love. Men and women are two not one. Fantasy sustains both sexes. Furthermore, there is no such person as Mr Right or the perfect partner; there are only ‘good enough others’, but that is never enough for women, hence their perpetual dissatisfaction in love relations. Men, for their part, are more defensive, more distant and, as a consequence, they get hurt less and ‘move on’ more easily, as I said. In this respect, men are more like cats, women more like dogs.

  Women tend to live in the past more than men – they view photographs and photograph albums more and look at pictures more; they ‘suffer from reminiscences’ (Freud) and associative memories. Men live more for the future. Men are attentive to their own needs. Women are more attentive to what the other person wants (though, it has to be said, via her). Men would really rather forget the Other. Women look (up) to the Other to fill their lack (‘I can only be happy with him’). Women’s desire is an insatiable appetite; women always want more. It is a ‘wanting more’ that is problematic for men because men just can’t (or won’t) give it. Psychologically, men and women appear to each other as a different species. ‘Men are from Mars; women are from Venus,’ as the saying goes.

  ‘“Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?” The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly. “Oh, my dear, it’s rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he’s in love with you.” “Didn’t you mean them?” “At the moment.”’ ― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

  When angry, women will hurl hysterical abuse at men: ‘Without me, you’d be nothing.’ They keep on challenging, defiant and demanding. Such is their feminine ferocity. Because women are alienated from their own desire (by prioritising the desire of the Other at the expense of their own which they subordinate) they often portray themselves as victims – sacrificial lambs – ready to sacrifice everything for their idealised Other. But ultimately she will come to resent the man who puts her in this position and her love can quickly change to hate. A woman scorned is as lethal as a tarantula (‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ as Shakespeare famously observed). Women are more cunning than men because (they believe) they have so much to lose, they will fight accordingly for what they want and feel is theirs by right (understandably).

  Women tend to lament that they haven’t been loved enough by the Other (be it the mother in childhood or the present partner who could do more for her). Women feel they haven’t received the full evidence of this love. Men tend to think they have been loved too much. Women tend to stage a show, to show themselves off to the Other whom they are intent on having. They offer themselves up to the gaze of the Other as ideal object of desire. They want to fascinate the Other and appear as brilliant and beautiful. But the more they do this the more men close down; it is all just too much. Women, so, are mistresses at not getting what they want. Women want to be permanently reassured. Men feel they simply can’t give women what they want and they relapse into their solitary world, exhausted, assuming that they even give a damn in the first place. Women vampirise men. For women, love is fusional cannibalism (‘I could just eat him up’). For men, love is lack. If
men are looking for their mothers in women, women are looking for their fathers in men.

  Women, in anger, throw fits of rage; their emotional outbursts experienced as being caused by the other person who is making them so unhappy (‘you made me like this; it’s your fault’). Men, when angry, tend to withdraw in silence. Women are architects, however, of their own misfortune. Women want the argument to clear the air; men want to flee such an unpleasantry and forget – hence their tendency to solitary escape: ‘I just need my space’ – words women hate to hear. Men are more moral (they do their duty) while women are more ethical (they act more from desire).

  ‘The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, “You’re very good at lying.” “Do I look like a liar?” “You look like you enjoy lying to women,” said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.’ ― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

  Women talk more than men. Women are more oral (needy and narcissistic) while men are more anal (retentive and rigid). Men keep things to themselves. Women are more demanding of others. Men feel they have a duty to endure everything. Men are more rivalrous and competitive (the trophy wife). They try constantly to take the place of the father but men are held captive to the mother. Men are more sarcastic than women; they are also more stubborn and more overtly controlling, and maintain more self-control than women. Men’s humour borders on derision. Men desire (self) control. They seldom get it with women. Theirs is the illusion of mastery. Men give very little away so they lose nothing. Men would prefer if women didn’t demand so much because in their demand is their desire.