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Jul. 20th, 2017 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Note to self when you feel irritated and frustrated with life or anything, stay off the internet.
2. I've been thinking about something that I read in The Mary Sue, which also skips back to a discussion in a friends FB. It's about identifying as a gender. Or a better way of saying it -- identifying a character as "male" or "female", and that being an identifying characteristic that cannot be changed. I'm struggling to wrap my head around it. Because I wonder sometimes what traits we consider to be typically male or female.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine actually handled gender identity in an interesting manner. One of their aliens Jadzia Dax was symbiot. The symbiot jumped from body to body, merging with a new one and becoming reborn. The Captain of the Space Station, Benjamin Sisko had issues with Jadzia at first, because he'd known Dax as male in Dax's prior incarnation.
It's difficult to handle. Particularly when we are socialized to put a great deal of importance on gender roles. Everything in our culture impresses this upon us. It's ingrained in us as babies. Even down to clothing. My niece stated once that she was happy she was born a girl because she could wear skirts and dresses. Which struck me as interesting because I've met men who wore dresses in NYC. Even went contra-dancing with one of them. I wore pants, he was wearing a skirt. Her statement even more amusing when I consider that my brother refused to tell anyone the gender of his child prior to her birth, so they would not get her gender specific items. He wanted blue, not just pink or vice versa.
At work, I once discussed Mad Men with a male coworker, who felt Elizabeth Moss' character was too masculine. That she clearly wanted to wear the pants. And wasn't willing to be female. And wanted to be a man. (I had to take three steps back, swallow hard, and remember he's not aware he's being sexist here. And he's not sexist in other ways.)
Remember being on a fanboard when it was announced that Starbuck in BattleStar Galatica reboot was being recast as a woman. Fans of the previous series went nuts. Dirk Benedict who'd portrayed the role was deeply offended. (Sort of makes me rather proud of Colin Baker who portrayed Doctor Who and adores the idea of a female Who, of course Who is a bit different...in some respects, but still.).
One woman on the board went ballistic. She felt it was an insult. How dare they! The more people complained about it, and they did through the entire course of the series, the more excited the writers became. Starbuck was interesting to me, because in some respects Katee Sackoff played the character more masculine than Benedict, more tough. She was high adrenaline. A Boxer. Took Apollo down in the ring. An ace pilot. Smoked those cigars with glee. Took no prisoners. A complete subversion of gender stereotypes. The writers through the recast challenged viewers and their own concept of gender. And identity. It was a brilliant move, but also a risky one.
Years ago, I wrote a Fanged Four fic with various members of a board. And a fight broke out while writing the fic. One of the writers had come up with the idea of having Angel and Spike dress up as women to infilterate a dance hall and fool a villain. But at least two people in the group, it was a collaborative writing effort, got really upset about the idea of "Angel" wearing a dress. They felt it demeaned the character somehow or was OTT. We compromised, most of the Spike fans had no problems with Spike wearing a dress. And I agreed to write the Spike in dress sequences along with the two other people.
And...I will always remember a fascinating discussion I had once with my brother and father regarding male writers. My brother despises Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, he hates machismo and he's never really been a fan of James Bond. He said...that he feels it's limiting, that men are being pressured into falling into some sort of ideal -- the idea of a macho man, alpha, strong, and sort of cruel. My father, a fan of these writers and characters, was bewildered and felt too many books were geared towards women not men. He also had the odd view that women were more nuturing, caring, natural gardners, caregivers, and domestic, while men were more protective, less good with kids, and more pragmatic. My brother and I sort of threw that theory out the window. Since we are sort of the opposite or a hodge podge of both. We, my brother and I, both strongly believe that gender is immaterial and a spectrum. That it doesn't matter. When I mentioned once to him that women navel gaze more than men and are more into emotion and analyzing it, he blew my theory out of the water by telling one of his male friends did this sort of thing all the frigging time.
I'm talking about all this... because several things, not just one, have happened that brought it to the surface. The book I'm reading at the moment is driving me nuts, it's a fantasy novel and it is so...boilerplate on gender. Reinforcing stereotypes. Makes me miss Captive Prince. One of the reasons a lot of women like male/male romances is that a lot of gender stereotypes get exploded, also you don't have to deal with the ingrained sexism that is in the female/male romances. Did you know that a lot of reviewers on Amazon and Good Reads actually capitalize the word "Hero" and lowercase the word "heroine", with H/h? It blew my mind when I first noticed it. I started responding, please stop this, then gave up.
And of course the election from hell...resulting in the President from hell. I guess you could say the Europeans are more advanced in that respect. Except the Europeans don't elect candidates necessarily so much as parties. And it is the party that elects the candidate. So just that district elected Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May. I wonder if the entire country had to vote for them, if the result would have been the same? (Not sure about Germany.) And to be fair, Hillary did get the popular vote. But it's disconcerting that a lot of people chose to vote for a man who had not one but several allegations of sexual harrassment and sexual violence against him, various civil suits, and said derogatory things about women over a woman who apparently had no clue how to use email. Yet, they tell me they aren't sexist or misogynistic. And they aren't. Not in their day to day pursuits.
So why? Why chose to believe the horror stories about Hillary over Trump? Was it about gender? Hard to say...it appears to be. They say it wasn't. Yet. Same deal with Bernie vs. Hillary. They say it's not, and maybe not, yet...so many of the ads screamed it. Hillary was too masculine, too hard, not friendly enough, didn't wear the right clothing.
And now, the ruckus over Doctor Who. In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter. Doctor Who in a perfect world would have been black, blue, a woman, an man, old, young, and something in between. In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter that Barack Obama is black, or that Hillary is female. But alas, we don't live in a perfect world. We live a flawed one. From an objective pov, such as my mother's or various others...this seems rather silly. Just as getting upset over making James Bond female or casting a female version of Bond might. (Which they did, by the way.) But not as James Bond. Not that they can. James Bond is after all human and he doesn't regenerate. And the movies don't necessarily follow a serialized format. I don't why they couldn't cast a female Bond, anymore than they couldn't cast a female Starbuck or female Wolverine. Or, Spike or Angel female. I'd actually like to see someone reboot Angel the Series but with a gender flip. Less so, Buffy, because been there done that.
(There was a British show a while back about a boy who was chosen to fight monsters...) And to be fair, the whole point of Buffy was to challenge a gender trope. (To give you a little back story on Buffy? Whedon studied film in school, and almost all horror films killed the Buffy character off, she was staked, slayed, and often in an alley. With the guy being the hero. Also up to Buffy, all vampire stories had the girl killed, and they guy be the vampire slayer. In short, we've had 100 years of Buster the Vampire Slayer. Whedon was flipping the trope. If you recast Buffy with a guy, it wouldn't be interesting. Actually that's why Supernatural isn't very interesting ...because been there, done that. It doesn't challenge any established tropes. It doesn't do anything interesting. At the end of the day, it's mindless tv. Which is okay. I like mindless tv. But it's not great. Buffy was great because it changed television. And it did it by challenging established gender tropes and archetypes.)
I think the problem with challenging these tropes in culture is two-fold. One, people have a tendency to watch things with their genitalia or as masturbation fodder. I know, I know, insane, but there it is. They won't admit it. But if someone is posting pictures of a hot character...
Two...there's this thing about archetypes and that's psychological. Role models. Needing a strong male hero to fantasize about or love or look up to. And...whether we want to admit it or not, a need to reinforce traditional views and comforting categories that we were taught.
I don't this is speculation for the most part. Because I like flipping the gender roles. I get off on it. I'm doing it myself to an extent, in my writing. I like subvert established tropes. And it irritates me when artists don't. Like with the book I'm reading now. For me, art is more interesting when they aren't playing it safe. It's hard for me to understand why you want it to be safe?
Or maybe I do...I do watch and read things for comfort. Although they aren't necessarily conventional.
Again, I don't know. I don't know why the guy on my friend's FB page can't handle a female Doctor Who. He's rational is that Who is from his perspective identified as male. That the proof of that is how he loved, that he loved in a heterosexual male way. As if there is such a thing. Maybe there is?
I don't know there was never any sex on Doctor Who. It was implied but rather coyly. My friend was as bewildered by this as I was. He suggested that she'd be upset if Wonder Woman was cast as a male.
But that already happened, with Wonder Man. The US has less problems with this sort of thing in its cultural experiments than the Brits apparently. We do it all the time. So part of my bewilderment may be that I'm used to it. Example? Starbuck.
And I don't know why Hillary couldn't become President. Or why we insist on reinforcing these things.
I don't understand my own views on it. But I think we need to ask the questions. Ask why. I don't think it is something as simple as misogyny or sexism ...I think it is more about how we link gender and identity in our heads, giving gender perhaps more importance then we should? Another way of looking at it...a lot of people I've met online...I've no idea from their names what gender they are. I guess. But I've been wrong. They've guessed about me and been wrong. Although I always thought shadowkat was rather obvious. I remember one individual being pissed that we felt the need to out their gender. They preferred to be genderless online. To be without a gender. I think it was interesting that I felt the need to identify it.
2. I've been thinking about something that I read in The Mary Sue, which also skips back to a discussion in a friends FB. It's about identifying as a gender. Or a better way of saying it -- identifying a character as "male" or "female", and that being an identifying characteristic that cannot be changed. I'm struggling to wrap my head around it. Because I wonder sometimes what traits we consider to be typically male or female.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine actually handled gender identity in an interesting manner. One of their aliens Jadzia Dax was symbiot. The symbiot jumped from body to body, merging with a new one and becoming reborn. The Captain of the Space Station, Benjamin Sisko had issues with Jadzia at first, because he'd known Dax as male in Dax's prior incarnation.
Jadzia Dax is a joined Trill. Though she appears to be a young woman, Jadzia lives in symbiosis with a wise and long-lived creature, known as a symbiont, named Dax. The two share a single, conscious mind, and her personality is a blending of the characteristics of both the host and the symbiont. As such, Jadzia has access to all the skills and memories of the symbiont's seven previous hosts. Jadzia holds academic degrees in exobiology, zoology, astrophysics and exoarchaeology, all of which she earned before being joined with the symbiont Dax. (DS9 Season 1 Episode Dax)
Jadzia Dax is the station's chief science officer, and is close friends with commander Benjamin Sisko and Bajoran first officer Kira Nerys. Later in the series, she becomes involved with the Klingon character Worf, and they marry during the sixth season of the show. Her character is killed by Gul Dukat during the sixth-season finale (due to Terry Farrell's desire to pursue a role on the then upcoming TV show Becker with Ted Danson). The character of Dax re-emerges in the seventh-season premiere in the form of Ezri Dax.
It's difficult to handle. Particularly when we are socialized to put a great deal of importance on gender roles. Everything in our culture impresses this upon us. It's ingrained in us as babies. Even down to clothing. My niece stated once that she was happy she was born a girl because she could wear skirts and dresses. Which struck me as interesting because I've met men who wore dresses in NYC. Even went contra-dancing with one of them. I wore pants, he was wearing a skirt. Her statement even more amusing when I consider that my brother refused to tell anyone the gender of his child prior to her birth, so they would not get her gender specific items. He wanted blue, not just pink or vice versa.
At work, I once discussed Mad Men with a male coworker, who felt Elizabeth Moss' character was too masculine. That she clearly wanted to wear the pants. And wasn't willing to be female. And wanted to be a man. (I had to take three steps back, swallow hard, and remember he's not aware he's being sexist here. And he's not sexist in other ways.)
Remember being on a fanboard when it was announced that Starbuck in BattleStar Galatica reboot was being recast as a woman. Fans of the previous series went nuts. Dirk Benedict who'd portrayed the role was deeply offended. (Sort of makes me rather proud of Colin Baker who portrayed Doctor Who and adores the idea of a female Who, of course Who is a bit different...in some respects, but still.).
One woman on the board went ballistic. She felt it was an insult. How dare they! The more people complained about it, and they did through the entire course of the series, the more excited the writers became. Starbuck was interesting to me, because in some respects Katee Sackoff played the character more masculine than Benedict, more tough. She was high adrenaline. A Boxer. Took Apollo down in the ring. An ace pilot. Smoked those cigars with glee. Took no prisoners. A complete subversion of gender stereotypes. The writers through the recast challenged viewers and their own concept of gender. And identity. It was a brilliant move, but also a risky one.
Years ago, I wrote a Fanged Four fic with various members of a board. And a fight broke out while writing the fic. One of the writers had come up with the idea of having Angel and Spike dress up as women to infilterate a dance hall and fool a villain. But at least two people in the group, it was a collaborative writing effort, got really upset about the idea of "Angel" wearing a dress. They felt it demeaned the character somehow or was OTT. We compromised, most of the Spike fans had no problems with Spike wearing a dress. And I agreed to write the Spike in dress sequences along with the two other people.
And...I will always remember a fascinating discussion I had once with my brother and father regarding male writers. My brother despises Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, he hates machismo and he's never really been a fan of James Bond. He said...that he feels it's limiting, that men are being pressured into falling into some sort of ideal -- the idea of a macho man, alpha, strong, and sort of cruel. My father, a fan of these writers and characters, was bewildered and felt too many books were geared towards women not men. He also had the odd view that women were more nuturing, caring, natural gardners, caregivers, and domestic, while men were more protective, less good with kids, and more pragmatic. My brother and I sort of threw that theory out the window. Since we are sort of the opposite or a hodge podge of both. We, my brother and I, both strongly believe that gender is immaterial and a spectrum. That it doesn't matter. When I mentioned once to him that women navel gaze more than men and are more into emotion and analyzing it, he blew my theory out of the water by telling one of his male friends did this sort of thing all the frigging time.
I'm talking about all this... because several things, not just one, have happened that brought it to the surface. The book I'm reading at the moment is driving me nuts, it's a fantasy novel and it is so...boilerplate on gender. Reinforcing stereotypes. Makes me miss Captive Prince. One of the reasons a lot of women like male/male romances is that a lot of gender stereotypes get exploded, also you don't have to deal with the ingrained sexism that is in the female/male romances. Did you know that a lot of reviewers on Amazon and Good Reads actually capitalize the word "Hero" and lowercase the word "heroine", with H/h? It blew my mind when I first noticed it. I started responding, please stop this, then gave up.
And of course the election from hell...resulting in the President from hell. I guess you could say the Europeans are more advanced in that respect. Except the Europeans don't elect candidates necessarily so much as parties. And it is the party that elects the candidate. So just that district elected Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May. I wonder if the entire country had to vote for them, if the result would have been the same? (Not sure about Germany.) And to be fair, Hillary did get the popular vote. But it's disconcerting that a lot of people chose to vote for a man who had not one but several allegations of sexual harrassment and sexual violence against him, various civil suits, and said derogatory things about women over a woman who apparently had no clue how to use email. Yet, they tell me they aren't sexist or misogynistic. And they aren't. Not in their day to day pursuits.
So why? Why chose to believe the horror stories about Hillary over Trump? Was it about gender? Hard to say...it appears to be. They say it wasn't. Yet. Same deal with Bernie vs. Hillary. They say it's not, and maybe not, yet...so many of the ads screamed it. Hillary was too masculine, too hard, not friendly enough, didn't wear the right clothing.
And now, the ruckus over Doctor Who. In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter. Doctor Who in a perfect world would have been black, blue, a woman, an man, old, young, and something in between. In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter that Barack Obama is black, or that Hillary is female. But alas, we don't live in a perfect world. We live a flawed one. From an objective pov, such as my mother's or various others...this seems rather silly. Just as getting upset over making James Bond female or casting a female version of Bond might. (Which they did, by the way.) But not as James Bond. Not that they can. James Bond is after all human and he doesn't regenerate. And the movies don't necessarily follow a serialized format. I don't why they couldn't cast a female Bond, anymore than they couldn't cast a female Starbuck or female Wolverine. Or, Spike or Angel female. I'd actually like to see someone reboot Angel the Series but with a gender flip. Less so, Buffy, because been there done that.
(There was a British show a while back about a boy who was chosen to fight monsters...) And to be fair, the whole point of Buffy was to challenge a gender trope. (To give you a little back story on Buffy? Whedon studied film in school, and almost all horror films killed the Buffy character off, she was staked, slayed, and often in an alley. With the guy being the hero. Also up to Buffy, all vampire stories had the girl killed, and they guy be the vampire slayer. In short, we've had 100 years of Buster the Vampire Slayer. Whedon was flipping the trope. If you recast Buffy with a guy, it wouldn't be interesting. Actually that's why Supernatural isn't very interesting ...because been there, done that. It doesn't challenge any established tropes. It doesn't do anything interesting. At the end of the day, it's mindless tv. Which is okay. I like mindless tv. But it's not great. Buffy was great because it changed television. And it did it by challenging established gender tropes and archetypes.)
I think the problem with challenging these tropes in culture is two-fold. One, people have a tendency to watch things with their genitalia or as masturbation fodder. I know, I know, insane, but there it is. They won't admit it. But if someone is posting pictures of a hot character...
Two...there's this thing about archetypes and that's psychological. Role models. Needing a strong male hero to fantasize about or love or look up to. And...whether we want to admit it or not, a need to reinforce traditional views and comforting categories that we were taught.
I don't this is speculation for the most part. Because I like flipping the gender roles. I get off on it. I'm doing it myself to an extent, in my writing. I like subvert established tropes. And it irritates me when artists don't. Like with the book I'm reading now. For me, art is more interesting when they aren't playing it safe. It's hard for me to understand why you want it to be safe?
Or maybe I do...I do watch and read things for comfort. Although they aren't necessarily conventional.
Again, I don't know. I don't know why the guy on my friend's FB page can't handle a female Doctor Who. He's rational is that Who is from his perspective identified as male. That the proof of that is how he loved, that he loved in a heterosexual male way. As if there is such a thing. Maybe there is?
I don't know there was never any sex on Doctor Who. It was implied but rather coyly. My friend was as bewildered by this as I was. He suggested that she'd be upset if Wonder Woman was cast as a male.
But that already happened, with Wonder Man. The US has less problems with this sort of thing in its cultural experiments than the Brits apparently. We do it all the time. So part of my bewilderment may be that I'm used to it. Example? Starbuck.
And I don't know why Hillary couldn't become President. Or why we insist on reinforcing these things.
I don't understand my own views on it. But I think we need to ask the questions. Ask why. I don't think it is something as simple as misogyny or sexism ...I think it is more about how we link gender and identity in our heads, giving gender perhaps more importance then we should? Another way of looking at it...a lot of people I've met online...I've no idea from their names what gender they are. I guess. But I've been wrong. They've guessed about me and been wrong. Although I always thought shadowkat was rather obvious. I remember one individual being pissed that we felt the need to out their gender. They preferred to be genderless online. To be without a gender. I think it was interesting that I felt the need to identify it.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 06:08 pm (UTC)Yes, in this instance.
Science is never set in stone. Science is about waiting until the current theorem is disproved by a newer one. All you can ever say about science is 'given our current state of knowledge'. And of course I myself might not be up to date :D
That is the fuzzy edges of the sets. That is why I call them fuzzy - they don't have clear boundary edges that we can demarcate and say 'male stops here and female stops here' there is a whole swirly cloud of anomalous people around the edge.
Let me try a different analogy. Think of it in watercolour. Imagine you have a really wet paper and drop two blobs of paint in, red and blue, each blob about an inch apart. There is a strong red 'male' area and a strong blue 'female' area, and you can define those and say 'that is the red blob and that is the blue blob' and you can say that even though there are also pale 'fuzzy' edges to each blob where the colour has thinned and run out, and also a mixed swirly purple area where the two colours intermingle and cross. But even with all those lovely mixy complex bits, you can still see clearly that red and blue do exist.
There are ways that the scientific method allows for this. Basically the sample size needs to be big enough so the 'noise' of inaccurately typed people becomes irrelevant.
Ah, at this point you move from science into story-telling theory. And with story-telling it is not what can be tested but how people think about the world and what people expect. And that is very individual to each viewer/reader.
Have you perhaps read my post about the elephant and the rider? That summarises my current thinking about why we are seeing the reactions we are currently seeing.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-22 12:43 am (UTC)Yes and no. I think that the problem a lot of people have with stories is they don't hear the story being told. Instead they project themselves onto it. And relate the story back to themselves, (i.e how does this relate to me, how is this about me, how does this further me...) and well, the story disappears. It can happen in conversations as well, like this one for example..but I give another example that might work better...?
I tell you about my trip to Paris. You immediately respond by telling me about your trip to Paris or maybe somewhere else. Before long ...my trip is no longer on the table. It's gone. OR I tell you about my mother in the hospital, and you start telling me about yours...instead of asking about my mother. (I made this mistake recently online. It's so frigging easy to do.)
From a storytelling perspective -- The Buffy writers for example, decide to tell a story about female empowerment and a woman's coming of age story in high school. But the adult viewers only see hot vampire Spike, who they like better than Buffy and identify more with. Or hot vamp Angle. And want Buffy and Spike's adventures or Buffy and Angels. Or maybe they are Willow and Tara fans and see this is an expression of what it was like when they came out as gay. It's no longer Buffy's tale they are watching..it's theirs through Willow.
It happens a lot with long-running fictional serials..where a reader or viewer will start superimposing their own story onto the story. And when the story doesn't go the way they want it to, they get upset and have a really negative response. I saw it happen with Buffy, with Angel, with a daytime soap I'm watching, with Lost, with BSG. The writers went in a direction that did not fit the "story" in the viewer's head. A story that resonated for them on a deep level.
Sometimes it's a character and not a story at all. A character they are shipping hard. Or a relationship -- that they are shipping hard. They don't care about the story, or the themes. All they care about is that their fictional boyfriend or girlfriend be okay, live a happy life, and preferably sail off into the sunset with someone they like and identify with. The story, the world, the narrative, the writer's intent, the metaphors are secondary to this. And you can't argue with them about it. They are "fans" of that character which resides in their heads. They adore him or her or him/her or him/him or her/her. If the writers do anything to destroy this character or ship as they see it, as they fantasize and love it, watch out. It is akin to killing someone they adore, or taking away something that makes them happy. I remember how Willow and Tara fans reacted to Tara's death (which from an objective story and narrative perspective, was clear and I saw coming a mile away. But try telling that to the fans? They'd rip me to shreds for even suggesting it. And they ripped the writers to shreds.) Because from these fans pov, the story they were watching was a lesbian love story about two women, not a metaphorical tale about a young gal coming of age by slaying her personal demons. And they liked their story better.
Shipping characters and relationships is natural, it builds devotion to a series. Most people aren't really fans of television series or story, they are fans of a specific character or ship within it, or maybe a subplot within it. And they all see the characters and ships differently. There's very little consensus.
Another example? Spike. Some people like myself shipped Spike as the writers wrote him, as an ambiguous character, who had an interesting character arc...who also shipped him with Buffy and with Angel for those reasons. Others shipped him with say Xander, others with Buffy, but as a poor woobie character, who'd never attempt to hurt her, they rewrote the character in their heads and in fanfic. Each one saw that character differently. Some could handle him putting on a dress. Some really couldn't. Again based on how they personally related to this character. Some hated him, because he reminded them of their ex-boyfriend who was abusive. I had one guy call me on the phone and tell me at length how the character of Spike reminded him of his abusive boyfriend and it gave him PTSD just watching the character. I didn't agree with his analysis, too many gaps and Spike isn't human and Buffy is well, super strong. But I could see why he saw it that way.
Have you perhaps read my post about the elephant and the rider? That summarises my current thinking about why we are seeing the reactions we are currently seeing.
I just did. Interesting...
It reminds me of the heart/mind correlation. I've done a lot of studying on heart and mind. Co-wrote a play about it actually. The elephant represent the heart and the rider -- the mind. And one overtakes the other, there is imbalance.
Or using your analogy...if there's no rider and the elephant is let loose, it will stomp around and damage everything in its path. But if the rider has no elephant...it well...has no grounding or basis, and is just floating aimlessly.
It's more complicated than that though, I think. I think we have to be careful not to allow our emotions to override our reason and vice versa, or communication breaks down or, we go down a path...that could be destructive.
Example: the people who devoutly believe the earth is flat. That's the elephant talking. They want the earth to be flat, so it is. But it's not. No amount of wanting will make it so.
Or..the Trump supporters who refuse to watch the news, consider it all fake, refuse to see Trump for what he is, and hold fast to their beliefs, regardless of who or what they hurt including themselves. I have a co-worker, devout Trump believer, homophobic, obsese -- she's five foot five and over 350 pounds. She can barely move. Is allergic to everything.
And miserable. And refuses to question anything. There's no rider. The elephant has taken over.
I can commiserate, because it wasn't so long ago that my elephant took over. Or my emotions took control.
In Buddhism, they call it negative thought patters or not emotion, but thought. A pattern of thought or a type of thought that takes over. Like a tape that replays in our heads. Over and over and over. Or better yet, an ear worm song that we can't get rid of. And if we let it, this thought pattern controls us, we don't control it. It makes us do things. It makes us furious. It makes us want to rant and rave and scream. The Buddhists believe these thoughts can be controlled, that you can through meditation and practice, let them go and calm your mind. Let them float away...like leaves on a stream or puffy clouds. I think this is true. That we can do this. I've done it. Let go of the thoughts...cleared my mind, and my emotions are clear too.
Under Buddhism, it's not the elephant that is the problem, but the rider. The rider or the mind which is dictating to the body how to feel. Is revving it up. Often stimulated by alcohol, sugar, caffeine, or something...If you can reach a state of nirvana or perfect calm, in which you let go of the ego or the thoughts, the mind, and just be...with no thoughts, you will achieve a state of bliss and pure consciousness.
I find...that when I step outside of myself, away from it, it becomes clearer somehow. When I let go of the thought pattern.
Don't know if any of that made sense?
But I do agree that we can't tell someone else what they are thinking or feeling. And it is a mistake to label them. My friend Carol complimented the DW and sci-fi fandom for not falling into name-calling and insulting each other like they did with Gamergate. That people were being civil. Far more so than they'd been elsewhere. And I think that's important, because I think it's important to discuss these things, even if it is really hard to do so -- because of all those big elephants or in the Buddhist view, mental noise getting in the way.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-22 09:57 am (UTC)I agree, but I don't see it as a problem, more of an advantage. I see a story or a conversation as a ball - you toss the ball to me and I play it the way I see fit, then toss it back to you. I might focus on the whole thing or just one fragment of what you have said. I might still be thinking about the other stuff, or be in agreement, or it might be a topic I don't want to touch in my present mood, or it might be something I know little about and have nothing useful to say.
Obviously this is bad if in the back and forth I miss the fact your mother is ill and in hospital and you would like some support (she isn't is she?) but otherwise I can't see the harm. If you want to go back a step and refocus the attention on some older point you can always do that, your trip to Paris is not irretrievably lost.
Also I have a butterfly mind and a non-standard way of looking at the world - it is often hard for me to focus on what other people think is the key topic.
(Oh and yesterday someone gave me caffeine. At the best of times if my brain has gone from A-D I may forget that steps B and C may not be obvious to everyone who isn't me, with caffeine in my system the problem more resembles A-Z.)
Wouldn't it have been very dull if that was all we could take from the story? They certainly couldn't have got seven seasons of my interest about a girl coming of age. Good art has to be multilayered, and we take different things from it at different times. You seem to be close to saying you think the writers' vision is the right way to view a show and any viewer who strays too far from that is somehow watching it wrong? Maybe I have missed your point.
Yes, agreed. But you surely aren't saying that is a problem, are you?
Haidt used that in his initial work but his full theory is slightly more elaborate. Cognition and emotion are not separate. hence he developed the elephant and rider analogy.
It is true. Almost every aspect of our instinctive and automatic systems can be changed and adapted over time by rational and conscious processes. We can't do it when the elephant is in full flight, but we can learn techniques in the calmer times that make the elephant less likely to spook at things. The rider and elephant work together, the elephant has a rider because the rider is useful to the elephant. Long term planning and skill learning are amongst those useful functions - and learning not to be upset by things is a skill.
Yes. Haidt's early work The Happiness Hypothesis was all about looking at traditional roots to happiness in a worldwide sample of cultures. I haven't read it yet but from references he makes in his other work I am sure Buddhism was one of those he studied. In fact you also get a lot of these ideas in early Western thought, it is just that the Enlightenment made such a change we have lost touch with much of our own traditional mind and medicine techniques. (The similarities between Occidental medieval cultural ideas and Oriental ones often amaze and amuse me.)
I think everyone is aware there is the potential for one nightmare of a fanwar if people don't tread carefully. And with so much nastiness in the real world does anyone have the emotional energy for that nowadays? I look back at the big ship wars in Buffy and it was all set against a background of a much simpler and calmer world, we could afford to go hammer and tongs in our hobbies because not much opinion battling was going on in the real world for most of us.
Mind you, it isn't over yet. Things could still get nasty. They may already be nasty in some places. One reason I have been so tense about this is because I feel I'm walking on eggshells.
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Date: 2017-07-22 02:12 pm (UTC)While I think I've had too much sugar again...and my system is rebelling. I see all the signs. Not helped by various other chemical and otherwise irritants...resulting in headaches, heat flushes, nervous irritation, and a feeling of being imbalanced somehow.
So I can identify.
Also written and oral communication is limiting. I can't tell if I'm being clear or not. I clearly wasn't in my response. So may have to come back later to clarify.
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Date: 2017-07-22 02:55 pm (UTC)Look on the bright side - could be hormones. I'm sure Jeff will explain all about them to you if you don't understand what I mean ;)
Most of it seemed clear to me, the bit that didn't I asked for clarification.
I hope you can wash the sugar, paint etc out of your system and refind equilibrium soon :)
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Date: 2017-07-22 12:58 am (UTC)Okay that makes a lot more sense, thank you. I agree. I see gender as a spectrum as well. Although..I'm not sure it should be given as much definitive weight as we are socialized to give it. But considering...one gender continues to enslave and imprison the other in various countries around the world...bit hard not to.
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Date: 2017-07-22 10:03 am (UTC)I think a society could develop which had less definitive weight on gender. But I think our society does give that weight at the moment, and it isn't possible to separate out something we might consider as 'real' gender from 'cultural + biological' gender in any meaningful way, so the weight our society gives is the weight that gender has.
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Date: 2017-07-22 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-22 03:03 pm (UTC)Stories can be used for two purposes in these situations. The first is to show the world as it is, and say 'this stinks'. The other is to show the world as it could be, and say 'this is better'. Sadly, stories very seldom show the road map for how to get from the stinky world to the better world.
Some of the tension we are now seeing and a lot of what we will see in the next few months will be between people who expect Doctor Who to be saying 'this stinks' and people who expect Doctor Who to cut straight to 'this is better'. I have no idea which the writers will go for, but whichever it is there will be disappointment from those who anticipated the opposite. There will be misunderstandings. There will be claims they are doing it wrong. Tempers will get frayed all over again.