Well, I Do Not Consider Myself A Rogerologist, But I Know Awful Lot About This Topic Huh

well, i do not consider myself a rogerologist, but i know awful lot about this topic huh

so, for starters, what you said about his father and how it affects his social behavior is incredibly true, but we can dig much deeper. roger has spent his entire life, essentially, since the late 60s, pretending not to be who he really is. what i'm talking about is the fact that he says about himself that he is sensitive and he is hurt by some of the actions of his bandmates, but on the other hand, he immediately tries to seem cool and behaves as if he does not care about other people's feelings and what they say to him. psychologically speaking, this is a defensive reaction for people like roger. so you understand, he is a man in the 70s and he needs to show himself as a man, but he never had an example of how a father or husband should behave? and it seems wrong to him that he is sensual, so at one moment he accepts it, and at another he sharply denies it. very roger thing to do haha.

and do you know how i realized that everything was incredibly bad with his fake mask? i read some excerpts from the book "In the Pink". that's really funny because this book is not so important from the perspective of some stories, as from the perspective of how roger's friends perceived him and what exactly nicholas writes about him. this is crazy. because in front of nicholas, roger acts like he doesn't care about anyone. he acts as if he doesn’t care about the opinions of his friends, as if his wife is his burden and she’s pulling him down and as if everyone around him is an asshole and he’s the only genius on planet earth. but he's not like that. and that's what he tried to say in "the final cut". he was so lost that he created the whole different personality for him and the funniest part he HATES this personality, but he believes that this is the only true way (still the god syndrome is also there, just in other moments).

and now can you imagine those hellish roller coaster his wives had to go through? this is the guy who was SCARED of any intimacy with a woman in the 60s and could not imagine it (he said in some interview), but tried to deal w it AND tried to remain a badass in the eyes of others. diabolical.

oh yeah yeah so we can go to the part why he is so scared of women. first, he studied at a school for boys, in their psychology, when they grow up in a society without women, women appear to them as some kind of alien creature. and school, after all, is a place where hormones and sexual desire begin to play out, and from this follows the need for something more familiar (i won’t talk about his homosexual dilemma here, but this is also a rather interesting topic of discussion). the only woman in his life is his mother and as far as i know, mary waters was made of steel. she literally held him and his brother by the scruff of the neck and was incredibly serious about justice. she was the head of the family. THIS is why roger NEEDS to be bossed around, because his mom always did that and in his eyes it was a woman's job to rule him and the family.

do you see now where empty spaces came from? roger in his teenage years was not only afraid of intimacy with a woman, but he thought that this implied complete submission, since women were scarier and emotionally stronger than him. that's why at the end of the clip she eats him. because he thinks he's weak. for him, women are predators and because it was ingrained in his head, he could never get rid of this thought. therefore, he has two moods: either he is an obedient husband, or he is frightened by the pressure from his wife and begins to rush and growl, swear and yell at her like a wounded animal. and of course his mask of a tough guy who disrespects women in front of his friends.

I put in my head that you're the main roger waters scholar so I always feel like I should come here with hypothesis to get your opinion. I read a comment somewhere saying that roger acts different if the interviewer is male or female. And since then I've been noticing that it actually seems true. He's usually much mellower with women and his usually acerbic humor is sillier. Have you ever notice a difference or have any thoughts on that?

Yes, I've noticed that difference too and found it interesting ("what do you mean interesting?"). I've heard him mention in interviews before that part of his therapy in the 80's was addressing his fear of women, which stuck out to me, because he usually seems so much more comfortable around them (although maybe it really is more of a recent development). What I think is happening here is that Roger's social anxiety displays itself in a different way around men vs. women. Going right to the roots of it, clearly he feels sensitive about the fact that he didn't grow up with a father figure, and I think he's internalized that in a way that makes him feel very defensive around other men. He feels the need to show dominance to make up for feeling like he doesn't know how to act, and it displays as him being, well, Roger. On the other hand, if "Mother" is any indication, he's a lot more used to acquiescing to women. He isn't as threatened when they tell him what to do, and he doesn't see their interactions as something he has to win. Snide remarks have been about him being overly influenced by his wives, which is informative if a bit biased. Obviously, neither his "fight" response with men or his "fawn" response with women is healthy, but it's probably why he lets his guard down more when women interview him.