School is back in and everyone is wearing the new clothes they got for Christmas, using their new electronics or driving their new cars. And it’s good for all of us to enjoy our new things, but we all have to be careful to own our things and not allow our things to own us.
What I’m getting at here is security. Not security in the sense of car alarms, combination locks or the guys in the club with shaved heads and tight black T-shirts. But security in the sense of how you feel about yourself and what you think you’re worth.
Philosophical issues like these can seem rather ambiguous when they’re being contemplated, so allow me to simplify the issue: do you own gold teeth? Do you wish you owned gold teeth? If your answer to either of these questions is “yes,” then you might have self-esteem problems.
The phenomenon of the “grill” is a perfect example of insecurity running out of control. And it’s ironic that the people who need something as extravagant and utterly useless as gold teeth to make themselves feel valuable usually present themselves as being the most confident among us.
This overcompensation of confidence, this swagger, is often a dead giveaway that so-and-so doesn’t feel good enough about himself to face society without these symbols of wealth or prominence. They believe, whether subconsciously or not, that they don’t have what it takes to be accepted by others, so they turn to something artificial that they know our society embraces, i.e. material possessions, to fill in the holes in their confidence.
Further simplified, Paul Wall doesn’t like himself very much.
For those of you who don’t know, Paul Wall is a lame rapper from Houston, Texas. He’s not good at rhyming, and his subject matter is completely one-dimensional. But he has a hit song out right now that’s all about gold teeth, or platinum, or diamond, or you can fill in your own material of choice.
The fact that Paul Wall talks about nothing but the things he has and how much money he makes seems to suggest that he doesn’t have much else in his life to be proud of. He might have a degree from Duke in electrical engineering and be an avid reader of historical biographies. He may speak fluent Italian and be a skilled carpenter. He may give generously to several different charities and volunteer as a receptionist for a suicide hotline. But we’ll never know any of that because all he talks about, and all people seem to want to hear about, is how many karats of diamonds he has stuck to his teeth.
I realize that wealth and greed are problems that have been around as long as mankind, but when did it become necessary in this country to have jewelry on every body part capable of bearing jewelry just to be a worthwhile person?
I’m picking on Paul Wall simply because he’s the latest person to emphasize this unhealthy need for money. Obviously, there has been no shortage of people lately to point our fingers at and say, “They are the ones poisoning our minds with this ‘look-what-I’ve-got’ mentality.”
If people would just shut out the outside world for a moment and carefully think about what makes them truly valuable, they would see that it’s not money.
Mos Def, a rapper from New York, said on one of his albums, “People get better when they start to understand that they are valuable. And they’re not valuable because they’ve got a whole lot of money or because somebody thinks they’re sexy. But they’re valuable because they’ve been created by God.”
And there it is. If we’re going to take our cues from a rap song we can at least be more discerning about which songs we take seriously and which songs we dismiss as absurd.
But insecurity goes deeper than just flossing our possessions.
Consider the man who feels as though he has to have sex with as many women as possible to feel good about himself, and this is about to get thick, so follow me.
Sticking with our “grills” theme, society prompts us to want the biggest, best, flashiest, etc. And if we have to have the nicest everything in order to be valuable, that means we need the best available spouse, mate or partner. That way, when people see us with our significant others, they’ll judge us partially based on the people we’re with. Think of your arm as your teeth and your boyfriend or girlfriend as your grill.
Men value physical attractiveness, partially due to instinct but more due to society telling us what we want, so we need the most fly chick available to show everyone else that we’re worthy of taking up space on this planet. Women value physical attractiveness as well, but they also focus on financial security, so a woman feels the need to have a man who is attractive and financially stable.
The problem for men is that we can’t all pull the hottest girl in town. And even if we could, what about the hottest girl in the state or the country? Some of us will never be satisfied until we have the most beautiful woman in the world to validate us.
Because we can’t all date the most beautiful woman in the world, we’ll make up for what we don’t have in quality by focusing on quantity. And our insecurities will never let us believe that we’ve been with enough women to secure our spot in the Men’s Hall of Fame, so we continue this pattern until we grow up and learn to feel good about who we are inside. We finally stop focusing on physical beauty and begin to focus on emotional and intellectual stimuli.
The case for insecure women is they don’t often feel as though they’re good enough to keep a man interested in them, so they offer sex too quickly as an incentive to keep him around. In this way insecure men and insecure women perpetuate each other’s unhealthy sexual habits.
If men stopped demanding sexual conquest, women wouldn’t feel obligated to provide it. And if women stopped providing sex, men would be forced to stop looking for the sexiest girl and start looking for the sweetest or the smartest to fulfill their egos.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “A man who bucks the pattern of sexual domination is probably just bitter because he hasn’t been very successful at it.” But that’s like saying everyone who scoffs at wearing gold teeth is just hating because they don’t have enough money to buy some.
The fact of the matter in either case is how far an individual is willing to go to achieve these ends. A man who wants a “grill” but can’t afford it can choose to steal or sell drugs to get one. Just like a man who wants sex with as many women as possible can lie and manipulate to get what he wants.
Everyone on the planet is insecure to an extent. All I’m saying is we can’t afford to become slaves to our insecurities, or they’ll eventually be all we have.