In an observational study, The University of Texas at Austin gave a group piano majors a Shostakovich passage to learn and perform a day later. They found that the amount of time spent practicing the passage didn't have much bearing on mastery. What did distinguish the top performers was how they handled their mistakes. The best ones took pains to individually locate and correct errors, addressed them immediately when they arose, and strategically slowed the piece down to address problem areas.
Most of the cultural narrative around mental health right now revolves around gender, with scientists and social theorists trying to work out whether it’s men or women who are more distressed, and whose fault that might be. Precisely who is more fucked up, boys or girls, has never been conclusively decided, but the fact that we insist on trying to work it out reveals a truth: there is something about gender right now that is deeply troubling, on an intimate level that is rarely discussed. There is something about the experience of being a woman or being a man, or of trying to be a woman or trying to be a man in the twenty-first century that many people find profoundly distressing in a way that they find difficult to speak about even in those few spaces where they are allowed to.
The truth is that there is nothing ‘natural’ about what it means to be a man or a woman today. Gender identity is performed, and it is performed for profit, whether social, financial or personal. That performance is an adaptive strategy for dealing with overwhelmingly hostile territory. Now we need to adapt again. And that’s what feminism is: adaptation. Evolution.
Status is more ordinal than cardinal. (The common distinction in our language emphasizes that money is not status: ’arriviste’, ‘kip’, ‘nouveau riche’/‘new money’, ‘parvenu’, ‘social climber’, ‘upstart’, etc. One can try to buy status by donations to institutions frequented by the rich, but it will cost a bundle.)
Here Venkatesh Rao expounds upon James Carse’s concept of the “finite game”, loosely described as a type of worldview (but not a specific one) in which one’s purpose is shaped by some well-defined finitistic measure(s) of success — e.g. wealth, professional identity, or the strength of one’s friendship. Casting the universe as a finite game is natural to our way of thinking: in Rao’s words, “explicit finite games make the world a legible place.”
From within this worldview, one is “constantly focused on improving [one’s] position, capabilities and odds of winning. You are always evaluating strategies, and making up clever lines of attack or defense.” This culminates in the notion of score-keeping, the process of becoming invested in some measure of success.
It’s in the incommensurability of different finite games that Rao sees the opportunity for growth. People playing different games (i.e. “differently free” people) are impossible to perfectly predict within a mental model limited by the game you’re in. “When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur.” It’s in those moments that one gains the opportunity to reflect upon the box they live within from without.
Donna Trope explores the artifices of the beauty industry in Mask Layer. (source / CW: frontal nudity)
Thinking that all individuals pursue "selfish" interest is equivalent to assuming that all random variables have zero covariance.
The oft-contentious conflation of ‘trans’ with ‘trans*’ is a legacy of a deliberate strategic approach adopted by transgender activists during the 90s, writes Julia Serano. She explores this theme — the construction of political terms to serve particular pragmatic purposes — in her essay on the “cissexism” concept, exploring how the collective forgetting of such reasons often causes concepts (like the cis/trans distinction) to read (and ofttimes serve!) as counterproductive, problematic, dangerous.
Serano introduces ‘gender conventional’ / ‘gender unconventional’ / ‘gender transgressive’ as an alternative model of perceived social legitimacy, which one might simplistically summarise as having society celebrate/tolerate/condemn one’s gender expression, respectively. (She distinguishes the latter two as bending vs. breaking the “rules” of gender.)
Reading this essay I was particularly struck by her instrumentalist approach to language (as opposed to the deontological morasses that often characterise linguistic prescriptivism). Consider her caveat that “both [cis/trans and gender conventional/unconventional/transgressive] are simply models… limited in [their] explanatory powers... more useful in certain situations or contexts but not others”. This serves as an important reminder in contrast to both ‘linguistic realism’ (e.g. “the concept of ‘cissexism’ simply is; the distinction meaningfully exists in the territory, not just the map”) and the prescriptive notion that concepts should be evaluated based on the most harm they could possibly cause (e.g. “the concept of ‘cissexism’ potentially reifies the Other-ing of trans folk; therefore the term is problematic; therefore it should be avoided”).
While performing intelligence tests on rhesus monkeys, Harry Harlow noticed infant monkeys becoming emotionally attached to the cloth towels on the floors of their cages. What followed was a cruel scientific career, built upon experiments dancing at the very edge of how comfort and familial love are constructed in the simian brain.
“There is only the dark side of touch,” Lauren Slater writes of Harlow’s work, “...which is that mothers can kill us even as they hold us.”
Setup: Participants were rated on hostile sexism scores according to Glick et al.'s Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, a 22-question battery featuring statements (to be rated on a 6-point agree/disagree scale) such as:
Women are too easily offended.
Women seek special favours under [the] guise of equality.
Feminists are making reasonable demands.*
* Naturally, scores for some of these items were inverted.
(The statements shown test for hostile sexism; others testing for benevolent sexism include Women have a superior moral sensibility and so on.)
The inventory was administered in the students' classrooms. Two to four weeks later the same students were (seemingly unrelatedly) exposed to a number of short role-playing scenarios. Buried in the middle of those were one of the following:
Sexist humour condition: A vignette consisting of various characters exchanging mostly sexist jokes (How can you tell if a blonde's been
using the computer? There's White-Out on the screen!).
Neutral humour condition: A vignette consisting of various characters exchanging neutral jokes (What's the difference between a golfer and a skydiver? A golfer goes whack — Damn![...]).
Sexist statement condition: A vignette consisting of various characters exchanging sexist social commentary (I just think that a woman's place is in the
home and that it's a woman's role to do domestic duties
such as laundry for her man.).
(Pretest ratings indicated that the sexist jokes were considered just as funny as the neutral ones, and just as sexist as the sexist statements.)
Within the context of the role-play, the students were then asked how much of a fixed budget they would be willing to donate to a fictional women's organisation.
Result: In the sexist humour condition, students' hostile sexism levels predicted how little they would donate.
However, in the other two conditions, students' hostile sexism levels did not affect donation amounts.
So what does that mean?
According to the authors:
These findings cannot easily be explained as merely a
priming effect apart from the role of humor...
For people high in prejudice, humorous disparagement can create the perception of a shared norm
of tolerance of discrimination that may be used to guide
their own responses in the immediate context.
In other words, sexist humor can serve as a releaser of prejudice. People with internalised sexism don't necessarily always act upon it, but they're far more likely to when other people are joking and creating a safe environment for them to freely act upon those values.
(Omitted: discussion of the second experiment in the paper which addresses some methodological issues with the above experiment (e.g. imagined versus real social groups; imagined versus real money).
Also omitted: the usual discussion about how representative undergrad sociology students are of their society at large.)
IRL takeaways
Even if you think you are not particularly bigoted yourself, making jokes at the expense of a marginalised group is absolutely not a morally neutral action. (No, not just gender.)
(Obviously this assumes you believe that further marginalising marginalised groups is ceterus paribus bad. If you don't, that's a whole other discussion. Several whole other discussions.)
Jokes do not exist in a vacuum; they coexist with culture. Jokes are not just a byproduct of culture, they influence culture.
That thing they said in primary school about not making fun of other people? Still relevant.
References: Ford, Thomas E., et al. "More than “just a joke”: The prejudice-releasing function of sexist humor." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34.2 (2008): 159-170.
Glick, Peter, and Susan T. Fiske. "The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism." Journal of personality and social psychology 70.3 (1996): 491.
(Alternate title: Your fellow ideologues are idiots and there is nothing you can do.)
Ever gotten into a political discussion and then someone who agreed with you started calling your opponents names and playing buzzword non sequitur bingo and making your side look like jerks?
Yup. That's pretty much reality.
No matter what you believe or how reasonable you think your views are, there is some utter waste-of-a-first-world-life asshole out there who agrees with you.
I spent a lot of years self-identifying as not an atheist, just an agnostic, not because I believed in the supernatural to any significant degree, but because I wanted
to stay the fuck away from the assholes who currently represented the atheist label. You know the type. Richard Dawkins. Wannabe nihilist teens with unlimited access to black hair dye
and a painfully feigned understanding of Nietzsche.
Self-important private school intellectual hipsters saying I
knew there was no God the moment I found out Santa wasn't real.
Being a feminist in the public eye should not require remaining aloof about relationships... We don’t require this of men... President Barack Obama made a very similar claim about his spouse post-2008 election: I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years...Michelle Obama.
I first heard the term "hyperconsent" on a couch while my fingers ran along a new friend's collarbones.
It wasn't her place — her city, even — but she seemed perfectly at home on the couch cushions the same way that the weary are lying down at a long day's end.
The air was thick with the intermingling scents of
incense and goon, and the taste of the latter still weighed heavy on my tongue (we'd had just enough to stain our lips slightly red).
She and I spoke in hushed tones, trying not to disturb the flat's usual inhabitants, who'd excused themselves to bed not much earlier.
