No Laughing Matter

There are two things that I will never joke at someone's expense about. (There are generally more than two, but these two are nolle prosequi material.)

1. A person's name. Even Drumpf. (Perhaps especially Drumpf; after all, it's not like you need to go excavating the ancestral past to find criticisms of that guy.)

No matter how unique you think your humour is, I guarantee you: the person has heard that joke before. Dozens of times. Maybe they even still give you a pity-laugh to stifle the sound of their eyes rolling.

2. What Bertie Wooster would call a person's "outer crust." Unless it's something foreign, like crumbs or something (which, you'll note, people never mention, and just leave you to discover it hours later in the mirror. Thanks.), you can rest assured that a person is much more intimately aware of what is on display than you are. There's simply no tact or sense in pointing out someone's unibrow, mole, acne, tendency to turn deep vermilion when embarrassed or just after the dreaded 20-minute-run PE class, birthmarks... the list goes on. I include tattoos in this, if the comment comes from a total stranger who would otherwise comment on the weather. For everything on this list, they know about it. They know you can see it. No need to verbalize.

There's something private about a person's body—even the visible parts—that merits respect.

Meme-mongering

My last post's rant against the viral goddess-attitude opened up a tangent that I wanted to to explore a bit more: memes.

The ephemera-oriented humanities scholar in me is fascinated by memes. They rapidly disseminate culture, they evolve quickly as they do so, and they very soon become subjects of their own discussion. They're a very relevant medium (among many others) by which we write and read culture, and for that reason alone I have always felt that it should go without saying for the literary humanities approach to encompass this kind of cultural artifact.

First, a digression is necessary to set up a bit of backstory:

Year Zero

Quite a few years ago, I had a significant passion for the then-current Nine Inch Nails Year Zero ARG that was taking shape through the combined efforts of people all over the world. The multimedia, immersive, global, self-creating nature of it was exactly the kind of thing I felt compelled to focus on in my graduate work (though that was still a few years down the road), and it felt like an exciting new direction that the humanities' literary branch (best known by restrictive terms like 'Literature' or 'English') could follow. Later, when I started to dabble in the literary-theoretical side of the more ephemeral and digital textual experiences that today's human culture is rich with, this ARG inspired the strongest scholarly passion inside me that I've ever experienced.

It was particularly captivating to my twenty-something self, highly susceptible to resentment-mongering and eager to protest against the political injustices of the oughties. Participating in the ARG was more than interacting with a textual experience: it was being part of a real movement with real objectives for achieving a better world. It became a cause that both grew and spread its message in the methodology of our time: virally. The catchphrase of the movement was "Art is Resistance," inspiring people to realize their voices could be heard, and that these voices could be powerful.

Year Zero: Art is Resistance

The indignance seemed to be about the voice and opinion of "the people" being ignored, and the movement was for taking back power, taking back the democratic voice. But the hype became more about the hype than the message, or more about the idea of a message than any actual message substance. People saw the phrase "Art is Resistance" as an epiphany-in-itself, as some great truth unlocked and now known. But the phrase was meant to inspire action, not serve as an action on its own. "You have a voice: use it, be heard." Okay... great? What's the actual message? The struggle was for the voice, but there was no message in the voice. It was a movement without awareness of its own meaning, a rallying cry without any semantic logic.

Malevolent Virus

Art is Resistance is essentially an example of a well-meaning meme with ambitions of positive social impact, that had limited success due to the very nature of memes as shallow signifiers whose meaning (if any) becomes stripped away in viral transmission.

The bitchess meme, though, has the thinnest of well-intentioned(?) disguises. Its unselfconscious fight-injustice-with-injustice approach merely replaces the perceived problem with a rephrasing/redirecting of that same problem. It's another arena where one group is elevated through degrading another—the old privilege quandary. Again, if we worked toward a society that measured the value of things objectively rather than relationally, far fewer people would be irrevocably damaged.

It's easy for causes to go viral these days thanks to the internet. But in practice, the things that are most viral become memes that are unencumbered by any real substance. Just take any meme, suppress the automatic omg-so-true response, and strip it down to its essence.

Saying that hard-to-handle women know their worth, for example, is pretty much like saying "You have worth; claim it, be respected."

And the ones demanding loyalty: "You deserve blind and unquestioning loyalty. You can do no wrong, and whatever attitudes and ideals you hold [which, incidentally, are irrelevant for some reason], all people everywhere should espouse them."

It's like a TL;DR without the TL even being offered.

The whole concept of "deserving" in these memes (which isn't explicit in the two examples I've used but certainly appears abundantly enough) is a non-sequitur. Memes have a universal appeal, but the idea of deserving is a context-dependent concept specific to the individual.  You deserve this implies that Somebody is malevolently trying to prevent you from having it. That's just not the case. There is no such thing as a unilateral interaction. Where there are humans, there are always multiple perspectives and sides.

Memes are like a virus: they replicate themselves, spread quickly, and can be more resilient than facts. Don't be that person.

Translation: Men's feelings mean nothing, women are infallible,
and the onus of making things work is purely the man's responsibility.

The Goddess's Contempt

One of the cultural tropes that inspires the most outrage inside me is the idea of the Woman as Goddess. It outrages me for two main reasons: 1) It elevates the woman to a superhuman, magical, do-no-wrong status, and 2) It strips "mortal" men and women of their rights to have human emotions and attitudes that (subjectively) negatively impact the goddess.

"I'm arbitrary and whimsical, but it's ok because #entitled#divinerightofbitchess"

The goddess's attitude is: He who does not worship Me is against Me. Everything in the universe is subservient to her magical inner world. Her opinion of others defines their objective worth, and her good opinion is a magnanimous gift that people should be grateful to obtain and desperate to keep. People who do not accord her whims the divine respect they demand find themselves the object of contempt—and the goddess is keen to make her contempt publicly and conspicuously known.

Where do I even start?

Why do I hate the idea of womanhood as something magical and idolized?

Because it is a practice of contempt, of inequality. It's a poisoned attitude, no matter how well-intentioned. It reflects the hierarchical attitude of everything-on-a-spectrum that I've written about before, and the ultimate arrogance of placing oneself at the top of that hierarchy.

"golden rulez r 4 other ppl"

This contemptuous attitude is the kind of garbage that infests online spaces. It's often met with reactions like "OMG SO TRUE," and gets interpreted as some profound epiphany. Bad enough that it exists in the first place, but the way that it's upheld as some pillar of magical truth is despicable and damaging.

It's also a hypocritical attitude, a practice of double-standards. The entitled woman can "cut people off without hesitation, no explanation, and no warning." People in her world are required to be perfect, and if they show any imperfection they have lost her good opinion irrevocably. But if she were to be in the wrong, you can be sure that she would expect to be accepted flaws and all; she would demand another chance again and again, and "anything less [would be] bullshit".

(but not anybody else's worth)

It is the most beautiful thing in the world to realize and embrace that you are human, and to live in a world connected by all kinds of people, treating one another with the equality that is fundamental to the very idea of being human. Why would you want to transcend that, and thereby break it? What is it about humanity that makes you think you're above it? What is it about yourself that makes you think your emotions and needs are more precious and valuable than those of others? What makes you deserve second chances while others don't even deserve explanation? When did the word "bitchess" become a word to own and flaunt as though it were a royal title? When did memes become the authority on acceptable social conduct, and why do we attribute so much meaning to them when they're often the thoughtless ramblings of a self-centered mind?

It's a sociopathic attitude. Setting yourself above others is an act of violence and ugliness, and extreme mistreatment of the people you emotionally affect through your contempt.

I've mentioned the ill-fated Roman triumvirate before, but it's relevant again. The triumvirate consisted of three men: one who could tolerate being paralleled, but not surpassed; one who could only tolerate being supreme and therefore unparalleled; and a third who was content to be average. The triumvirate crumbled because of the first two members' incompatible views; if it were a logical puzzle, it would have no solution.

That's what the goddess/bitchess attitude is: illogical. Incompatible in a society worth living in. Monopolizing all value, worth, and validity. Contemptuous, toxic, and emotionally abusive.

Privilege

The following story recently cropped up on my Facebook feed (see the full comic):

The Pencilsword: On a plate

I do appreciate the point that the comic makes, but there are two problems that I think are important (enough to compel me to blog about it).

Firstly, it's a work of art with an agenda to express and inspire a particular emotion/reaction. It has a clear protagonist, and focuses on detailing her life experience to the exclusion of the other life experiences in the story.  This isn't to say that the message is unimportant—but it's not the whole story. The 'antagonist' is, quite frankly, monstrous; his own humanity and feelings have been removed from him. The comic is highlighting a particular inequality between the two characters, but relies on equivocation/elision to do so. The situation it depicts does not objectively exist in the real world; there is no such thing as an antagonist, and there is no such thing as an uncomplicated or single-faceted human. Manufacturing one certainly strengthens the artist's argument, but it also strengthens a culture of comparison and disrespect for the Other. And, it's the kind of artificial tug-at-your-empathy story that feels morally right, and as such becomes cultural currency that informs how we feel it's appropriate to treat others.

Secondly, the comic's side-by-side comparative depiction goes against every anti-inequality fiber inside me, and upsets me on a fundamental level. The insinuation is that people's feelings matter in comparison to other people's feelings (or are irrelevant/unimportant by the same token). That some people's lives, troubles, triumphs, experiences, paths, and feelings are more precious and worthy than those of others. Why can't they matter in their own right, on their own merit? Why create antagonism and resentment? And why, for god's sake, are the antagonist's feelings and hard work illegitimate? (And don't make the mistake of believing the one-dimensional portrayal of his life as perfect and free of hardship.) It's nothing short of a fallacy.

Privilege is an ugly thing when it comes into focus. Nobody likes a privileged person if they flaunt that privilege gracelessly. But how often do we even realize how visible our privileges are to others?

White privilege. Thin privilege. Pretty privilege. Rich privilege. Gender privilege. Maternal privilege. Age privilege. Social privilege. Popular privilege. Academic privilege. Athletic privilege. Opportunity privilege. Language privilege. Emotional privilege. Peace privilege. Religious privilege. Connection privilege. Relationship privilege. Health privilege. Geographic privilege. Occupation privilege. Privileges we don't even think of as privileges unless we don't have them.

Nobody has a monopoly on privilege, or on hardship, or on virtue. There's not some limited reservoir of compassion, where it's necessary to divert the flow of compassion away from one person in order to receive a portion for yourself.  Compassion can only come by recognizing how very similar we are to each other, and how every struggle is real in its own right. Carving out victims and antagonists is destructive rather than productive.

Holding a person's privileges against them is akin to the thin-bashing that undermined Dove's Real Beauty movement, which manufactured its own curvy-love legitimacy by belittling skinny women as unattractive. Isn't this the nature of bullying? To gain your own sense of worth through diminishing someone else's? To measure something via comparison and establishing a hierarchy or spectrum?

The truth is, we all have some kind of privilege, and privilege by its very nature sits in our blind spot when we possess it. It's easy to see other people's privileges, and difficult to recognize our own, or its impact on our lives. We resent people who have certain things—things we want—"handed to them on a silver platter." But we don't acknowledge the things we ourselves have had handed to us, and these can take many forms (see my examples of privileges above, which excludes the ones I'm blind to myself). None of us is an island, and we are all who we are through the actions and help of other people: family, friends, strangers, predecessors, ancestors, passersby.

We all exist in our own bubbles of world-view and experience that begin to grow from the moment we're born. A lot goes into the bubble, and it informs the way we relate to the world outside for the rest of our lives. It's hard to see outside the bubble, and harder to see that other people have bubbles of their own—but they're there nonetheless. Like everyone else, I'm woefully inadequate in this respect. But human experience is one of few true passions in my life, and reading the world as if it were a textual artifact is the most important thing I gained from my brief years in academia.

What's the solution? You can change your own reactions, but you can't really change other people. It's demoralizing to cling to ideas of emotional equality when the world loves to pick sides. Ask yourself: what are my privileges? Those are the areas where you should be particularly compassionate towards others. Toward the people you resent: realize that they are human at the core, that they are just like you, that they have fears and troubles and dreams and triumphs, and that those are just as beautiful and mysterious as your own. Don't measure yourself against others; and don't measure others against yourself. Yes, recognize privilege and talk about how it affects others; but don't deny the humanity inside every person.

Dear Title

In my line of work, I get a lot of generic info-seeking emails from people around the globe. Most of them start off with the type of comical greeting that is likely perpetuated due to its not being worth the effort of correcting:

• Hello Dear
• Dear Sir
• Respected Doctor
• Most revered Professor

Salutations like these arise from the disconnect between different cultures, and carry about as much sincerity as your average "how are you." Given the choice, I forego titles altogether, though "Miss" will do in a pinch. But the one rampant appellation that bothers me is "Ms." I even hate the very sound of it, Mizz, like some lazy-tongued utterance that inevitably devours the following syllable like a frankenmoniker.

When I was growing up, "Ms" was reserved for matronly women like widows and divorcées. It was an almost pitiable label that spawned gossipy glances and hushed speculations. Although times have changed, it still seems to me to define a woman in terms of one specific prior relationship, and I would be happy to see the title diminish into the past along with the assumptions and values it represents. These days, it seems to be applied indiscriminately to any woman whose marital status is uncertain.

Sure, courtesy is admirable, and objective titles like "Dr" are another matter entirely. But in today's world where gender no longer defines worth, it seems to me that titles like Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Ms have no place. I would argue that there's much more value in stripping language of this kind of superfluity that has nothing productive to offer, in removing the rigid constructs that create division.

Titles tied to gender and relationships serve only to call attention to non-issues, and bring those non-issues into areas of life—like workplaces—where they have no place. They promote particular treatment of a person, affect interactions, and (intentionally or otherwise) establish hierarchies.

Book vs. Movie: The Eternal Struggle

This is something I've touched on before, but I wanted to devote a bit more time to rounding out my thoughts on media elitism. It also lets me foray into non-issues unrelated to relationship status, which is something I had intended for this blog right from the start.

The other day I met a book-loving friend for coffee, and conversation turned to what we were currently reading. I spent many years following my graduate degree in an anti-reading stupor, largely fueled by my graduate work on the multimedia experiences that I strongly feel constitute a modern sense of "reading." It's all about the way we consume stories and culture, after all, and the frustrating focus on beating dead books served only to alienate me from the medium. But I've recently rekindled (heh heh) my reading through the acquisition of an eReader, and happened to have cracked open The Road the morning of our coffee meeting.

"I saw the movie... I'm not so sure about the book yet," I began.

"Oh, the book is way better. The movie was pretty bad."

"Huh," I replied. "I consider movies and books to be separate textual experiences, separate textual artifacts. I really liked the movie." It was my polite way of saying that I discounted his opinion.

"Oh, well put,"—trying to recover his credibility here—"I think I just don't get film."

But the conversation continued to other "failed" movie adaptations of books. I listened as he expounded on how specific adaptations were not well done, all related in a tone of complete objectivity. I didn't bother to argue; in fact, I didn't bother to say anything, just let him ramble on while I tried to keep most of the smirk out of my smile. Yes. You do not "get" film. Your mistake is in trying to do so.

On the one hand, this is the type of unattractive attitude that reinforces my single lifestyle—but that's not what this is about. This is about that frustratingly nonsensical spectrum of enjoyability that people place things upon. The need to compare, to create a hierarchy, to weigh apples and oranges against each other and determine which is better. It is all pure illogic; that is the only objectivity that can be determined.

I love film as a medium because it plays on many senses to tell a story. A good soundtrack can manipulate my emotions like nothing else, to name just one aspect. And it does all this in a convenient allotment of time. Seeing a movie in the theatre adds the fantastic dimension of being part of a collective readership, a shared experience. What's not to love?

Let's take an example that my book-loving friend might understand. Say there's a book written in another language, and translated to English. A literal translation is not going to be enjoyable; the story has to be retold using different language conventions. In this example, we're only translating from words to other words. What can you possibly expect for a translation from written page to silver screen?

I'm not saying that movies are better, or that books are less multidimensional. I'm saying it's not a matter for comparison, and each should be considered on its own merit.

Creating Inequality

One of the things that bothers me most about single life is how accommodating you are expected to be. People don't seem to think your time is worth as much as theirs; they think that they can throw you a pittance of their time when and if they feel like it, and you should be grateful.

And you are. You're so starved for quality contact that you start to give less respect to your own time as well. You value your enjoyable moments with good friends so much that you gather the tiniest scraps of them eagerly. You keep your schedule open like a doctor on call, ready to drop your own solitary activities the moment someone can spare you a moment.

And it's not just time. You get shuffled around on flights so that couples who didn't bother to check in until the last minute can sit together. You fit yourself awkwardly at the corner of the pub table because you aren't attached to someone specific. You're served much more solemnly by waiters who cheerfully make nearby groups' experiences more enjoyable. And frustratingly, people handle you with patronizing protectiveness in a tacit assumption that you can't take care of yourself.

You feel obliged to defer to everyone around you: couples, seniors, single mothers, children. Unless you're career-driven, you probably defer to anyone you interpret as being professionally above you.

But at some point (after years of this treatment and observation of human nature), you realize that treatment is largely a matter of image. You can command more respect than society deems appropriate for your class. The catch is that you have to give up a piece of your identity to do so, but identity is evolutionary and fluid—and the happy truth is that you can stick up for your lifestyle these days.