Think back about the non-fiction books where the lead female is not dramatically gorgeous. You are amazingly well read and have a good memory if you can come up with even a handful. Male leads, can indeed be ugly.
They usually need to be clever, brilliant, smart, compassionate, brave, funny, determined or even ‘destined for greatness.’ Truth is, the male lead can be stupid or stubborn and still pass on average looks. Good books tend to actually justify the characteristic, but quite a few popular books have merely repeated over and over how clever the character was, without any demonstration at all.
In fiction however, the longer the description of how amazing the girl looks, the more important the character is. Here is the rub, we as humans care quite a bit about female beauty. We just do. Characteristics such as compassionate, competent, loving, self sacrificing, understanding and even adaptability are all considered quite important secondary traits for the classic female character.
I don’t blame literature, or writers for this. I don’t blame consumers. Instead it is part and parcel of who we are. It is a characteristic of our species. I suspect that this would be much more obvious to a visiting alien. I suspect that there are a lot of things a true alien could see as obvious, that would take quite a bit of explaining for us to grasp. Kind of like the wheel in pre-Colombian South America. It existed in children’s toys, yet some fairly advanced cultures never even considered something that was in almost every village and town in Asia, Europe and Africa.
It is fairly clear to someone paying any sort of attention, that man is quite able to have amazing blind spots. The very fact that we use labels such as liberal and conservative, shows how willing we are to become blind. There are more complex systems of defining political position, but they too are pretty shallow. It is amazing how hard it is to explain an ethical issue to someone who profits even indirectly from the problem. Few folk can face the concept that they are hypocritical. Maybe, academically they can say they are hypocrites, but when pressed, few of them can name an example.
Yet when asked about those around us, we humans can see hypocrisy everywhere, except of course in our favorite political and religious leaders.
In some ways we are evolving a bit. Oddly the entire ‘politically correct’ issue is one where I think our blind spots are evolving. Here is a conservative issue, that is considered a liberal issue. It is something that does not have a flag bearer or leader, most of us resent it in some way, yet it is truly a grass roots standard. I personally think it shows an evolution of understanding, that is not yet understood. It is truly flawed, yet essential to polite society.
I think I can explain my feeble grasp of this concept to a few readers. Some words have inflections culturally built into them. Kind of like the word pustule is much more gross than the word pimple. I am of Scottish descent so I will use my background as an example.
If you say, “You are so Scottish,” to me, you may be implying that I am cheap, or poor, or more rarely a brilliant mechanic, frightening warrior, have an affection for single malt whiskey or kilt wearing chanter player. All too true.
If you say, “You are so @#*$& Scottish,” You will not offend me, but it is possible that you have now shared too much information.
Some words or phrases have the ‘@$^%^%&’ built into them. Some are over used and show issues. If a person goes on and on about Scotsmen, then it will be offensive. Largely because they are probably showing irrational classification and speculation that when taken apart demonstrate prejudice. If it goes beyond that, then they are branding all of the people of Scottish descent or nationality, of being in some way lower.
Except of course in our case, Mass hatred, fear or disdain is blind hatred, fear or disdain. Blind hatred, fear or disdain, is the entry requirement for joining the multiracial and multinational legion of blindly opinionated bigots.
Making the blond girl joke, may be funny, when a blond girl does it. Anyone else does it, well, it still may get a laugh, but now the joke teller and the appreciative audience either look blindly opinionated and prejudiced, or actually are blindly opinionated and prejudiced. If we keep talking about blonds, and blond hair to a blond girl, the chances are, we am going too far. If we keep talking about blonds and blond hair to our friends, again, we are probably showing some issues.
So what is politically correct? It is the rules your mother should have taught you. It is being polite in a world that is now larger than just your village or click group. It seems annoying for society to squeeze your arm and say, “SHHHHHHH!” as it drags you away from the awkward moment. But seriously, at the point where society has started to drag you off and swat you, get over it, you probably stepped well over the boundary of good manners and taste.
It is often easier to see an imbalance when it effects you, and harder to see when it effects others. It is easy to feel singled out and get upset, and think that everyone else is being rude, just like a spoiled child does, when dragged away from a gathering. Sometimes a parent does not do a good job of explaining the issue, or is overzealous in their fear that a child will embarrass them. Often the parent is every bit as embarrassing but only sees it when the child parrots them.
I feel these things too, for I have been and am still, that child and that parent.
Bob
A page Dedicated to My Writing
Thank you for this. Simple, eloquent, and very, very accurate.
Ah well Bob…. I should have commented on this the first time around…
“It is often easier to see an imbalance when it effects you, and harder to see when it effects others. It is easy to feel singled out and get upset, and think that everyone else is being rude, just like a spoiled child does, when dragged away from a gathering. Sometimes a parent does not do a good job of explaining the issue, or is overzealous in their fear that a child will embarrass them. Often the parent is every bit as embarrassing but only sees it when the child parrots them. I feel these things too, for I have been and am still, that child and that parent. Bob”
….but had commented on so many others then that my thought was to leave this one “clean”…
The highest compliment I can say about anything is… I can’t think of anyway to say that better…
Thanks to raven for bringing that back for us!!!!
And also…
Congrats on the new clean look of your site…… it’s a winner!!!
Skip
Thanks, Skip, and RavenM!
This article was fairly deeply buried in the dim ancient archives of Toolmaking Art, so I was quite delighted to see that someone had dug that far back.
I too am fairly please with the new look, so thanks again, Skip!
A malicious script mangled this blog fairly horribly so I had to export data from the databases that build it, and then sift and clean that data before rebuilding the thing. I have this wonderful Idea for how I want the blog, but I don’t really have time to implement it. So I came as close as I could manage easily without rewriting any code. The Atahualpa Theme on WordPress is amazingly configurable, so it allowed me to come up with a solution I could live with, without mangling any code. It did take a bit of graphic juggling to compromise, but things seem clearer as a result, so I am quite happy there.
HTML originated, not as a system for building web pages, installing banner ads and spreading spyware but as a method for illuminating text. The idea was that computers would allow more brilliant and useful text, with hyperlinks allowing the user to pursue footnotes, references and the like with ease. While this is not actually that far from what a web page often is, I was thinking of having a web page that more closely resembled an illuminated book. The format that has evolved for a book, is fairly robust adaptive form, and I think would give a very clean and adaptable feel. The difference would be subtle enough to not cause the user confusion, but the whole point would be to reduce the cacophony of competing bars and details that surround content these days, while giving graceful and easy access to all the same information by more gracefully embedded links. On a modern, wide, hires monitor, two pages side by side would give a lot of nice options while reducing the difficulty to reading that is created by too long a line of text.
Sadly I am too lazy to properly implement this theme, so if anyone likes the idea, take it and run with it. If you make a nice WordPress theme to implement it, let me know.
Since there are a few concentrators echoing links to my new articles in woodworking and tool related blogs, I have felt an odd sort of censorship. I don’t really want to automatically echo off content to the wrong communities, so I plan to either incorporate my philosophical musings into my crafting articles, or put them here in the comments. The goal of this blog is served by injecting just such philosophy, so while it’s content will be adjusted a bit based on audience numbers, it’s ideals will not be.
Human blinds pots are the source of a lot of my own paranoia. So often when you encounter someone’s dysfunction, you find that beyond just having a problem, their perceptions of that problem are also impaired.
Imagine that you have a friend that is honest, brave, loyal and compassionate. No great flaws, a real gem of a person, with a decent personality. The big downside to your relationship is that he comes to you regularly and complains that girls don’t like him and people seem distant as well. Even worse, when he does so, his breath and body odor make you nauseous.
So you break down and tell him, because you care and want to help him, and because you really can’t handle the stench, that if he wore cleaned clothing, brushed, flossed and bathed, he might have more luck. Of course this offends him and he complains that here he is trying to get by and trying to figure out why he has all these problems, and now you are insulting him.
My fear, is that I have just such horrible blind spots. How would I know? If my defense mechanisms are good enough to twist things around and protect me from facing these issues, then what chance do I have of ever figuring it out.
We have all, by now, seen where businesses with lot’s of employees are starting to go downhill. Often the sad truth is that they no longer have a functional business model, but the owners can not face the facts. So instead of looking at their amazing resources and coming up with a rational business plan, they mangle in more and more odd management manipulations. These odd decisions pretty much never do anything for the bottom line, and nothing for customer faith or support. For the employees, who have no say, no power and no safety net, the only thing they can do, is turn on each other like sharks.
Looking at this from a distance, it is crazy and an environment set to bring out the worst in men, at every level. Human blindness may even be poised to make our world unlivable. I am quite sure that when the last large tree on Easter Island was cut down, the ruthless financial wizard reaping wealth and prestige from this last bit of wood was patting himself on the back for his brilliance. Sad thing for the isolated island community and it’s future generations, that the society was led by their blind spots to allow someone with even worse blind spots to deplete their resources so.
Bob
And on a lighter note….
you said:
“My fear, is that I have just such horrible blind spots. How would I know? If my defense mechanisms are good enough to twist things around and protect me from facing these issues, then what chance do I have of ever figuring it out.”
Well Bob, you always have me to pull you up short….
And on a serious note…
If humans – including you and me – did not have the capability to be self-interested, then we would all be the same to the same ideal, whatever that is, very boring indeed…..
Skip