[...] Moreover, it is quite possible that what is staged here is simultaneously one’s capacity to criticize oneself (and therefore to display one’s character) and one’s capacity to build intimacy by revealing to another one’s flaws and faults. In displaying their capacity to uphold an ideal of character, and to criticize their own self in the name of that ideal, these women and men stage a self that is not in need of what contemporaries would call “emotional support” or “validation.” This is a self that can perform its own self-evaluation, and which derives a sense of worth not from “being validated” by another but from being held accountable to moral standards and from being improved in order to reach these moral standards. Undoubtedly such rituals of self-depreciation invite ritual protests from the other side; but rather than requests for “validation,” they functioned as “tests” of the man’s resilience and commitment. Here again, it is not the woman’s “self” or need for validation that is at stake, but rather the man’s capacity to display and prove his steadfastness.